fullybooked2017

In 2021 I reviewed an earlier contribution to the Sherlockian canon by Bonnie MacBird (left) – The Three Locks – and you can read what I thought by clicking the link. Her latest contribution is unashamedly aimed at the Christmas market, but it is worth reading. It begins with that reliable staple –  the box of hitherto unseen papers and notebooks written by John Watson MD. The cynic in me thinks that the good doctor would have had no time to help his great friend with his investigations, as his every waking hour would have been consumed in filling boxes with notebooks, in the expectation that they would be discovered in an auction – or someone’s attic – a century later.

Be that as it may, we are in London in December 1890, and it is snowing (obviously). Watson persuades Holmes to accompany him for lunch, but after they have consumed their roast beef sandwiches and cider, they are forced to intervene when a masked man attempts to abduct a child from his mother. Holmes pursues the villain, while Watson tends to the woman and her frightened child.

Watson eventually catches up with what is happening, while Holmes, perspicacious as ever, soon realises that  the attempted kidnap is related to the boy’s own history as the object of a transaction by an adoption agency. The search for the boy’s real father occupies most of the narrative. I have mentioned before the significant inbuilt challenge facing modern recreators of Holmes – that the majority of the original tales were very short stories, thus posing the problem of how to fill the three hundred pages or so of a modern novel. MacBird opts for the eminently reasonable solution of having a parallel mystery – that of a wealthy (but not particularly sensitive) man of property whose youngest son – something of an aesthete – has gone missing, along with his manservant. Holmes, with the help of a redoubtable Cockney reprobate called Hephzibah, locates the manservant in an expensive apartment, where he has been seen with an alluring young woman. Holmes solves this particular conundrum in a rather 2023 fashion and . . . well, perhaps you can guess, but I won’t spoil the fun.

The illustrations by Frank Cho are delightful, and the whole book is beautifully produced, with elaborate illuminated capital letters at the beginning of each chapter. Some might argue that drawings ask that readers bypass their own visual impressions suggested by the text, but I think this is specious. Generations of readers of the original stories will have had their imaginations shaped by external sources – for example the wonderful Strand Magazine drawings of Sidney Paget – while, for me, the face of Holmes will never be anything other than that of Jeremy Brett.

Some unkind people will moan and roll their eyes at what they consider yet another milking of the Holmes legacy. “Isn’t the teat already dry,” they ask? No, it is not. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe has engendered many imitators, and some of them are very good, but Arthur Conan Doyle created a legend. ACD was mortal, and lived to a decent age, but he bequeathed a character that is for all time. As long as there are writers as skilful and observant as Bonnie MacBird to keep the Holmes flame alight, I will be warming myself in its glow. What Child Is This is published by Harper Collins and is available now.