Wither Baker Street?

If I remember right, my first reading of Sherlock Holmes occurred in the summer after my first year of college. I’ve read and re-read several incarnations of the detective’s exploits over the years and have also enjoyed nearly all of the filmed versions I’ve seen. If we aren’t currently experiencing a Sherlock Holmes revival, we’re at least experiencing the proof that he never really goes out of style. Authors as diverse as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (writing with Anna Waterhouse) and Anthony Horowitz have created their own versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in recent years, approaching the characters from various angles that add something new to the material while remaining faithful to the original in spirit.

I came across Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s Mycroft Holmes two years ago and recently read the follow-up novel, Mycroft and Sherlock. The authors make Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft, the main character, with the emerging detective (introduced as a teenager in this series) playing a co-starring role; there are also endearing new characters, such as Mycroft’s friend Cyrus Douglas, a merchant and philanthropist. While still within familiar territory, these stories reveal new aspects of Sherlock’s character by not only portraying him as a younger and more vulnerable brother but also by depicting him in relationships with characters other than Dr. Watson. The third novel in this series, Mycroft and Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage, will be released this fall and is already on my reading list.

Bonnie MacBird’s novels, Unquiet Spirits and Art in the Blood, are close in atmosphere and tone to the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Unquiet Spirits, in particular, with its Scottish setting, well-developed characters, and bizarre set of plot circumstances, is an impressive and uncanny evocation of the Holmesian universe; Art in the Blood weaves a series of disparate plot threads together in a tale of murder and a stolen artifact that stretches from London to Paris and the Northwest of Britain. I’m looking forward to reading Miss MacBird’s third novel in the series, The Devil’s Due, which is due to be released later this year.

Theodora Goss’s “Monstrous Gentlewomen” novels, while focused on a set of female characters, include Holmes and Watson as friends of the Athena Club. With their light-hearted tone (despite some underlying seriousness), her books go the furthest in placing a new twist on the characters of the two men, depicting both as more romantic characters than they are in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals. In Miss Goss’s hands, the well-intentioned protection offered by Holmes and Watson to a group of young females clashes with the determination of the young women to fend for themselves, sometimes to comic effect. And I don’t know how to break this to you, lest you think the universe is playing tricks on us with synchronicity (maybe it is), but Miss Goss also is releasing a third novel in her series this fall, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. My reading list is growing—maybe yours is, too.

And then there is Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, which has Holmes and Watson investigating a mysterious and terrifying series of events to uncover the scandalous truth behind the titular house, whose true nature is concealed until nearly the end. I read this book almost two years ago, when I had just arrived in L.A. and had neither a dime to my name or a library card, so that I had to keep returning to the library to read it. In fact, I started reading it in one L.A. County Library and ended up finishing it in the library of another town. Though steeped in sadness (a widowed Dr. Watson is recalling the events of an earlier time when Holmes was still alive), the book is a page turner. Like the other Sherlock Holmes authors named here, Mr. Horowitz has created a series; his Moriarty was published in 2014.

So what is the import, Dr. Watson, of all this Holmesiness? Why are all these great minds thinking in the same direction? I think it’s quite simply the appeal of a great archetypal character. No matter the circumstances, Holmes always keeps his head and always gets his man. In a world of confusion, pain, sorrow, and injustice, his powers of deduction inevitably lead him to the truth in the end. He is a person in whom you can place confidence—no considerations make him waver from his search for facts. His world is not so very different from ours, so it’s no wonder that Conan Doyle’s readers have refused to let the great detective die, even in the 21st century. We could all use someone like that in our lives.