Well, this was a pleasant surprise. A late entry into our Countdown to Hallowe’en this year (it’s actually published a fortnight later), this (surprisingly) was a book I found difficult to put down.
I must admit that, at first, I was rather skeptical. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was a character I first read when I was little, and have reread many times since. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is a staple reread for Halloween and indeed through the year. So a combination of the two was, to put it mildly, a little off-putting, too bizarre to be credible.
Nevertheless, determined to avoid my own prejudices, I started to read. I was soon sucked in and kept those pages turning. The central conceit is this – this is one of a set of previously unpublished manuscripts purported to be written by Doctor John Watson, ‘the’ Doctor Watson of the Conan Doyle tales. The framing story is that this was sent to James Lovegrove in 2014 as part of the property of recently deceased Henry Prothero Lovecraft, of whom James is a distant relative.
In it Dr Watson stated that these three manuscripts are the real unexpurgated stories of Sherlock Holmes. Whilst the general public followed Holmes’ stories, as told in novels and in magazines like The Strand, the ones here show his real purpose whilst also doing the detective work. They have been left unpublished because the truth they hold is just too scary, too wild for the general public of the 1880’s to understand.
That is an intriguing idea, if perhaps a little difficult to swallow. But James’ telling of the situation is so well done that it reads in the same form and style of the original, and I was quickly taken in by it.
In this first case, Sherlock and Watson pick up the case of four similarly grotesque murders in the Shadwell district of Victorian London, where residents have talked of a strange cloud of smoke that has appeared, smothering and killing people. Holmes is convinced that the events are connected to Valentine Stamford, an ex-colleague of Watson’s, and the book begins to try and discover whether this is the case. As we keep reading, we find that the smoke has a much more malign purpose and that it is the mere beginnings of a much bigger conspiracy, one that covers cosmic distances…
So: what is it that works here? Well, it is clear from the off that James has done his homework. (I am sure that his previous writing of more traditional Sherlock Holmes stories has helped here.) I was pleased by how much the tone of this book evokes the Victorian period and Conan Doyle’s style very well, and so, even when things go deliberately odd, there is still a grounding in the typically sensible and rational world usually inhabited by Holmes and Watson. In wonderfully meta-moments there are references to the original Conan Doyle stories with Watson here pointing out how things are different in this weirder ‘reality’.
Of Lovecraft’s world, again the research impresses. We find that Watson’s injury in Afghanistan did not occur how we thought in the original stories, but from something darker – and in an ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ style, quite thrilling. Lovegrove’s ability to fill in that Lovecraftian idea of cosmic horror through brief, yet telling, details, fills the plot and makes the weird seem horribly and logically real.
Of the main characters, it is Watson that surprises me most, as the one most typically wanting to go and bash heads together whilst the coolly logical Holmes goes about his sleuthing. It works, though, and despite the two only knowing each other for a month over the time of this novel, there is a seemingly genuine respect noticeable between the two. This is important, as it continues the reason we like, as readers, the original Holmes and Watson.
On the negative side, there are minor occasional lapses of logic (the mention of ‘bolt cutters’ seems rather anachronistic, for example) and at least one point where things seem to happen rather conveniently, but on the whole, I was pleasantly surprised how well this one worked.
It’s been a while since I’ve had such a difficult time putting down a book as much as this one. I am now looking forward to the next book, due in 2017, with great interest.
Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows
By James Lovegrove
Published by Titan UK, November 2016
442 pages
ISBN: 978-1783295937
