CRIME: The House of SilkBy Anthony Horowitz Orion, 294pp. £13.99
MAYBE IT’S INEVITABLE when you create an icon. No sooner had Arthur Conan Doyle thrown Sherlock Holmes into the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 than other authors began writing their own stories about the world’s most celebrated consulting detective. Even Conan Doyle’s decision to resurrect his hero a decade later didn’t stop the tide of unofficial Sherlockiana. Since then, everyone from Stephen Fry and Kingsley Amis to Neil Gaiman and Stephen King has written Holmes homages and pastiches. As Conan Doyle himself discovered, once you create a character that captures the public imagination to such an astonishing extent, you no longer really own him.
But although so many have written and published novels about Holmes, Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silkis the first one to be endorsed by Conan Doyle's estate. It begins, like many of the great detectives adventures, with the arrival of a troubled client at 221B Baker Street. In this case, Holmes's services are sought by an art dealer named Edmund Carstairs. Carstairs believes his life has been in danger since some paintings he was selling were stolen by a notorious Boston gang, led by the rather implausibly named Irish twins Rourke and Keelan O'Donoghue.
An attempt to capture the gang led to the death of all but Keelan, and now Carstairs is convinced the gangster has followed him back to London, bent on revenge. Holmes is intrigued, and he enlists the help of the street children known as the Baker Street Irregulars in the investigation. But when one of the boys goes missing, Holmes and Watson find themselves embarking on another, seemingly unrelated mystery, centred on a mysterious and terrifyingly powerful organisation known as the House of Silk.
Horowitz is the creator of several hit television crime dramas and the hugely successful Alex Rider novels for children, and he knows how to tell an engaging adventure story. Just as importantly, he has been a big Conan Doyle fan since his teens, and he understands what readers want from a Holmes novel.
The best updates or reinventions know that it’s best not to arrogantly discard everything loved by fans of the original. Steven Moffat’s modern-day BBC drama Sherlock felt fresh and original, with knowledge of and affection for the originals evident in everything from the modern Watson’s recent return from Afghanistan to the appearance of Moriarty.
Horowitz, too, knows that when it comes to a fictional world as beloved and iconic as that of Arthur Conan Doyle, you have a certain amount of freedom but some elements are vital. And so in The House of Silkwe get Holmes and Watson plunging into the "thick and yellow" pea-souper fog; we get the Irregulars; we get a glance at the 7 per cent solution of cocaine; we get, to my delight, a wonderful visit to Holmes's brother Mycroft, which sees the Holmes brothers trading elegant quips in a game of intellectual one-upmanship.
Watson also has a delicious encounter with a charismatic and unnamed mathematician whose “work on the Binomial Theorem is studied in most of the universities of Europe. I am also what you would doubtless term a criminal, although I would like to think that I have made a science out of crime.”
It’s all very satisfying for a Holmes fan, not least because Horowitz captures Conan Doyle’s style perfectly, right down to Watson’s habit of referring to his friend by his full name when singing his praises.
Of course, there’s always the danger that such fidelity to the original elements will result in a mere pastiche. But Horowitz manages to expand some of the characters in an interesting way that is also consistent with the canon. When Holmes finds himself in serious trouble, support comes from several unexpected sources, including the ferrety police officer Lestrade. No love is lost between Lestrade and Holmes in the originals, but there’s more than a hint of mutual dependency, and the idea that Lestrade would help Holmes if the latter were treated unfairly is convincing (as is Lestrade’s confession to Watson that Holmes always intimidated him so much it made him work less efficiently in the latter’s presence). And Horowitz’s depiction of Moriarty expands on the often-discussed idea that Holmes and his criminal nemesis have more in common than the former would like to admit.
It’s not perfect, of course. Some aspects of the Irish characters are jarringly unconvincing. (I guessed one of the final twists because of this.) And the mystery isn’t as complex as it could be. But you could say the same for plenty of the originals. The greatest pleasure of a Sherlock Holmes story isn’t really finding out whodunnit or even whydunnit: it’s seeing Holmes use his mighty brain to figure it all out.
Throw in some creepy villains, plenty of drama and a thrilling chase, and you’ve got a perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter’s night, as the fog presses against the Baker Street windows and the game is, once again, afoot.
Anna Carey's debut novel, The Real Rebecca, was voted Irish children's book of the year (senior category) at the 2011 Irish Book Awards
