'The Moor' Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #4 by Laurie R. King

From the BLURB:

In the eerie wasteland of Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes summons his devoted wife and partner, Mary Russell, from her studies at Oxford to aid the investigation of a death and some disturbing phenomena of a decidedly supernatural origin.

Through the mists of the moor there have been sightings of a spectral coach made of bones carrying a woman long-ago accused of murdering her husband--and of a hound with a single glowing eye. Returning to the scene of one of his most celebrated cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Russell investigate a mystery darker and more unforgiving than the moors themselves.

‘The Moor’ is the fourth book in historical mystery series ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ by Laurie R. King, first published in 1998.

For a little while there in 2014 I was seriously into King’s ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’. Having just discovered the series I tore through The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary in a matter of weeks and gave five-stars to all. And then I got to fourth book The Moor and reading it was slow-going … I couldn’t get into the story, which sees Mary and her now-husband Sherlock Holmes revisiting one of Watson’s famous tales (really Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s) The Hound of the Baskervilles. The mystery of this fourth book just wasn’t clicking for me, possibly because it felt like there was an over-reliance on the Conan Doyle original to ground the plot, whereas in the first few books of the series I’d been thoroughly enjoying the originality and Holmes’ determination to break away from his famous detective past.

I also found it hard to get into a reading groove with this book, because it lacked the chemistry between Mary and Holmes that I’d been so enjoying in the first three. Book one felt like a very platonic relationship between the two, in which they were both finding their footing with one another – but by book two it was clear there was more going on between them than just mentor/mentee, and as they became equal partners in investigations, you could really read the spark of romance between them. By book three they were very recently married, and it was fascinating reading them adjust. Book four actually has Mary and Holmes separated for a fair bit of the investigation into a ghostly carriage roaming the Moors, which worked to highlight that Mary is very much still her own woman and capable of functioning without her new husband, but means we’re not getting as much of that witty banter and cunning back-and-forth between them.

But since I started reading and then put aside ‘The Moor’, Laurie R King has released two more ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ books – ‘Dreaming Spies’ and ‘The Murder of Mary Russell’ – the 14^th book in particular has been causing quite a buzz in the fandom community that has not gone unnoticed by me (the blurb promises, the series will “never be the same after this bombshell”). Thus, I’ve pushed myself to finish ‘The Moor’ so I can get back on track with this series with aims of getting to books #13 and #14. It was a slog, but I’m glad that on the other side of ‘The Moor’ is book number five, ‘O Jerusalem’ which I have on good authority is a favourite instalment for lots of ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ fans.

So I slogged through ‘The Moor’ – and eventually I must admit the very thing that was annoying me (an over-reliance on referencing Conan Doyle’s Baskervilles) became – if not endearing, – then certainly intriguing. Laurie R. King takes the opportunity of placing Sherlock Holmes in close proximity to, quite possibly, his most famous case as a way to examine how much he hates and rejects the fame and infamy that Watson’s stories have brought him. And it provides at least one nice opportunity for Mary Russell to come to Holmes’s defence;

‘My husband does not really enjoy talking about his old cases, Mr Ketteridge. It makes him uncomfortable.’ 

Most men, and certainly forceful men like Ketteridge, tend to overlook women unless they be unattached and attractive. I usually allow this because I often find it either amusing or convenient to be invisible.
 

On that level I appreciated ‘The Moor’ within the series and in expanding the universe of Mary Russell and Holmes. This book ended up feeling like burying the past, where in the beginning I had resented King’s bringing it too much to the fore;

 ‘Gould?’ Holmes laughed. ‘He’s the most gullible of the lot, full of the most awful balderdash. He’ll tell you how a neighbour’s horse panicked one night at the precise spot where a man would be killed some hours later, how another man carried on a conversation with his wife who was dying ten miles away, how – Revelations, visitations, spooks, you name it – he’s worse than Concan Doyle, with his fairies and his spiritualism.’

But I still found this mystery too slow going, and the sluggish pace (which seems in keeping with the ethos of locals Russell and Holmes find themselves in the company of) rather infuriating, and not conducive to a steady read. I also didn’t love that Russell and Holmes split up to investigate separately for a fairly good chunk of this story. All in all, this is not my favourite instalment but I have my suspicions (even just looking at Goodreads ratings!) that quite a few don’t love this particular addition to the series, and soldiered on as I now have to get to the other side and better instalments of ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’.

2/5

‘A Letter of Mary’ Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #3 by Laurie R. King

From the BLURB:

It is 1923. Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the retired Sherlock Holmes, are enjoying the summer together on their Sussex estate when they are visited by an old friend, Miss Dorothy Ruskin, an archeologist just returned from Palestine. She leaves in their protection an ancient manuscript which seems to hint at the possibility that Mary Magdalene was an apostle - an artifact certain to stir up a storm of biblical proportions in the Christian establishment.

When Ruskin is suddenly killed in a tragic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer. This next installment is brimming with political intrigue, theological arcana, and brilliant Holmesian deductions.

Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes are happily ensconced in their Sussex countryside home. Well, maybe ‘happily’ isn’t quite the right word. Mary has graduated from Oxford and is writing a theological book, while Holmes prowls their little house like a bad-tempered cat. Some days he inhales the London papers, others he’s a bit too calculated in his refusal to keep updated on the goings on of his old city. Mary knows he’s hungry for a new case, but she’s reluctant to admit her own itch for a bit of adventure…

Then adventure – and danger – come looking for them in the form of Dorothy Ruskin, an old friend Russell and Holmes met during a trip to Palestine. Miss Ruskin is visiting family in England, leaving behind her archeological expedition and making a detour to the Holmes residence to show Mary in particular, something that might change the face of Christianity forever.

Ruskin has a papyrus scroll that was gifted to her, and she believes it’s a letter from Mary Magdalene that suggests she was an apostle of Jesus Christ.

This is quite an explosive find – and Ruskin is keen for Mary to study the papyrus and do with it what she will. But before Mary can make any decisions, news reaches her that Miss Ruskin has been killed while in London, in a hit and run car accident.

Mary and Holmes know Ruskin’s sudden death is linked to the scroll she left in Mary’s care – which has now placed them in the firing line of whoever wants to keep Mary Magdalene’s letter a secret.

‘A Letter of Mary’ is the third book in Laurie R. King’s ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ mystery series.

When I began this book I expected a bit of upheaval in Russell and Holmes’s relationship. After all, when ‘A Letter of Mary’ begins, Mary Russell is twenty-three and Holmes sixty-two-years-old, and they’re recently married. I wasn’t so much surprised by their becoming husband and wife (it’s mentioned in the blurb of all the other books, and there were hints right from book one as an older Mary was narrating) but I was curious to know if there would be a new dynamic between them, now that their relationship had become an intimate one. I’m happy to report that – aside from making Mycroft occasionally blush with the knowledge of their marriage bed – not much has changed between Russell and Holmes. Since about the age of nineteen, she has been his equal and that they’re now married has just seen them become even more of a unit.

Under his guidance I harnessed my angry intelligence. I found a direction for my life, and I came to terms with my past. When I was eighteen, we worked together on a series of cases, which culminated with finding ourselves the target of one of the cleverest, most deadly criminals he had ever faced. After that case, I was an apprentice no longer – I was, at the age of nineteen, a full partner.

There are still some adjustments to married life for the both of them too, which provides a new emotional layer to the story. King is now showing us these two evolving as partners in their detective work, and as a united, married front. This also allows for some tender moments from Holmes, who’s not exactly the most easily affectionate of characters:

‘I wish I had been there. I find it difficult to work with second-hand information, even when it comes from you.’ 

‘So why didn’t you go?’ I said irritably. 

‘I am not criticizing, Russell. There is nothing wrong with the way you gather information – far from it, in fact. It is only that I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half of a creature with two brains and four eyes. A superior creature to a single detective, no doubt, but it takes some getting used to.’

I will say that the whodunit in this book didn’t quite fascinate me as much as those in books one and two. I should point out at this point that Laurie R. King has included theological aspects in all of the books so far – mostly pivoting around the idea of faith. This is probably because Laurie R. King herself admits a fascination with theology that she’s also given to the character of Mary who is also very proud of her Jewish background. But the discussions have never been so prominent as in ‘A Letter of Mary’, which explores shaking the very foundations of Christianity with a theological feminist investigation. Look, it’s interesting in one regard but a bit too faith-heavy for my liking.

In another way I really enjoyed this book because it majority takes place in London, with Russell doing some under-cover work and really getting stuck into the meat of the investigation and flying solo. I also really enjoyed when Mary was given a glimpse of Sherlock’s old life before retirement, and just how much of an impact he had on Scotland Yard:

‘… Some of the men laugh at him, make jokes about his pipe smoking and violin and all, but they’re laughing at all those stories Dr Watson wrote, and they don’t like to admit that their training in footprints and the laboratory’s analysis of bloodstains and tobacco ashes comes straight from the work of Sherlock Holmes. Even fingerprints – he was the first in the country to use them in a case. Miss Russell, when he says there was murder and a burglary was connected with it, then I for one believe him.’

Speaking of Laurie R. King looking at the impact of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock on her new Sherlock, I read this book at the same time that a huge decision was being made around the copyright of Sherlock Holmes, the character. From the Guardian: “A US court has ruled that Sherlock Holmes – along with 46 stories and four novels he’s appeared in – is in the public domain, reaffirming the expiration of the copyright once owned by the estate of Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle.” The federal suit was brought in early 2013 by author and scholar Leslie Klinger. The suit became necessary after the Doyle estate attempted to extract a license fee for a new book he was co-editing with Laurie R. King. That was really interesting to have in the back of my mind, because I just kept thinking how respectful King is of Conan Doyle’s creation, often paying tribute to his past stories and old cases and ensuring that any Sherlock Holmes fan would find a lot to love in her spin-off series with Mary Russell.

5/5

‘A Monstrous Regiment of Women’ Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #2 by Laurie R. King

From the BLURB:

It is 1921 and Mary Russell - Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice, now an Oxford graduate with a degree in theology - is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last, with a passion for divinity and detective work, her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective.

Russell's attentions turn to the New Temple of God and its leader, Margery Childe, a charismatic suffragette and a mystic, whose draw on the young theology scholar is irresistible. But when four bluestockings from the Temple turn up dead shortly after changing their wills, could sins of a capital nature be afoot? Holmes and Russell investigate, as their partnership takes a surprising turn...

Laurie R. King, ‘editor’ of the Mary Russell memoirs (which she received, curiously and mysteriously, via a trunk of unknown origins) has seen the first of Mary’s manuscripts published. After the publication of ‘The Beekeeper's Apprentice’, King received what she believes to be correspondence from Ms. Russell in the form of a postcard. Investigations into the mysterious author of these memoirs is still ongoing, and King puts a call out for any help in locating her whereabouts.

Meanwhile, in this – the second memoir of Mary Russell’s – ‘A Monstrous Regiment of Women’ was first published in 1995, the second book in ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ mystery series.

It’s 1921 and Mary Russell is turning 21 and coming into her inheritance – the considerable business holdings of her late father and real estate of her late mother’s will now officially, legally be Mary’s and out of her dreadful guardian Aunt’s hands. At the same time as she is becoming independently wealthy, and graduating from Oxford with honours in theology and chemistry, Mary’s relationship with the ten-years retired detective Sherlock Holmes is becoming increasingly confusing. That she is his apprentice and he her mentor is never under any doubt – but Mary wonders if she is leaning towards a more amorous relationship with Holmes.

During this confusing time Mary bumps into an old Oxford friend, Veronica Beaconsfield who reaches out to Mary for help. Her ex-fiancé, one Miles Fitzwarren has come home from the Great War a broken, shell-shocked young man with a drug addiction to heroin that Veronica ‘Ronnie’ hopes Mary can have some suggestions for remedy and recuperation.

Ronnie also introduces Mary to her latest ‘do good’ work, for the New Temple of God and its charismatic leader, Margery Childe. In the wake of WWI and the nation’s “surplus women” who find their usefulness during the war effort no longer required, Childe is campaigning for a different suffragette, starting with the Catholic Church’s exclusion of women. The Temple also does considerable good working in providing education services to women, and providing shelters for battered women and children.

Margery Childe is quite a force, verging on a cult leader for all her charisma. But something doesn’t quite sit right with Mary, and when female members of the Temple start dying, she takes up her own investigation independent of Holmes…

This is the second ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ book, and while it doesn’t have quite the same panache and punch as the first (which is also considerably longer than this second instalment) Laurie R. King did manage to have me on the edge of my seat by the end of the book – anticipating both the action, and emotional pay-off that Russell and Holmes go through.

 I had met Sherlock Holmes at a time when adolescence and the devastating circumstances of my orphaning had left me with an exterior toughness and an interior that was malleable to the personality of anyone willing to listen to me and take me seriously. Had Holmes been a cat burglar or forger, no doubt I should have come into adulthood learning to walk parapets at night or concocting arcane inks.

It is worth noting that in this book, Russell finds herself on her own for the majority of the plot. She and Holmes are at an awkward and critical junction in their relationship – there’s a spark between them, that runs far deeper than mentor-apprentice, but neither seem willing to budge and risk their valuable friendship for what could be disastrous intimacy. So Holmes is out of the picture for the majority of this book, and it’s perhaps not quite as enthralling for his lack…

But King makes up for it with her witty, dry prose and a whodunit that’s frightening and captivating. I particularly liked her wry sense of humour of Russell’s description of the leader Margery Childe:

She was a feminist and she had a sense of humour, an appealing combination that was regrettably rare … 

This being set in 1921, there’s also a running-gag about Holmes’s biographer (Arthur Conan-Doyle) embarrassing himself (and Holmes, by extension) with an article he wrote around the Cottingley Fairies affair. This is hilarious, and just one example of how King so beautifully blends myth, history and reality so seamlessly into this story of a fictional character’s real-life counterpart living out a fictitious continued existence beyond his retirement/finale.

I also really liked this book for the emotional pay-off. Mary Russell goes through a lot over the course of this investigation, and by book’s end I could definitely mark out a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in her character. That’s also true of her relationship with Holmes:

 For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

This was a great book for marrying high-stakes action with the emotional build-up of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes as more than just partner detectives. I am now more invested than ever in this fabulous series, and I can’t wait to see where Russell and Holmes venture next!

5/5

'The Beekeeper's Apprentice' Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #1 by Laurie R. King

From the BLURB:

1915. The great detective Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honey bees when a young woman literally stumbles into him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes – and match him wit for wit.

Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a fitting partner for the Victorian detective. In their first case together, they must track down a kidnapped American senator’s daughter and confront a truly cunning adversary – a bomber who has set trip-wires for the sleuths and who will stop at nothing to end their partnership.

Author Laurie R. King has been sent a most curious trunk. Inside there are bits and bobs of various wealth and randomness. But most curious of all are the manuscripts within – a running memoir, if you will – featuring one of literature’s most famous characters as if he were once a living, breathing real person. King does not know who sent her the trunk, and if anyone should know more about the author Mary Russell she would welcome any information. But in the meantime here are Russell’s stories, just as she wrote them (albeit, with grammar and spelling corrected).

Mary Russell’s first book is ‘The Beekeeper's Apprentice: or, 'On the Segregation of the Queen’, published in 1994 and first in the ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ mystery series, which currently has 12 books with a 13^th due for 2015 release.

‘The Beekeeper's Apprentice’ covers Mary Russell’s first meeting of Sherlock Holmes, on the Sussex Downs in 1915 when she is fifteen and Holmes 54-years-old, and all but retired from his days as London’s greatest detective. Of course Mary figures out who he is, after all he has become somewhat renowned since Watson’s stories appeared in ‘The Strand’ (as written by Conan Doyle), but Mary quickly discovers that the Holmes of the stories is quite different from the sickly man she meets on the Downs … indeed, over time and through these memoirs, we will discover that Holmes’s story did not end with Watson and Doyle’s retellings, and much has been misinterpreted or forgotten over time.

Now the process has become complete: Watson’s stories, those feeble evocations of the compelling personality we both knew, have taken on a life of their own, and the living creature of Sherlock Holmes has become ethereal, dreamy. Fictional.

In ‘The Beekeeper's Apprentice’, Mary details her apprenticeship under Holmes at a time when she desperately needed family. Her mother, father and younger brother had died in a tragic car accident a year before, and Mary had come to Sussex to live with her only guardian left, a horrid aunt whose name does not bear repeating. When she meets Holmes she gains in him a teacher and father-figure (though this will be complicated and dispelled in good time), she also gains a mother in Mrs Hudson and dear friend in ‘Uncle’ John Watson.

So accomplished is Mary (a proud, self-proclaimed feminist and land girl during the war) that Holmes does indeed see her as his equal and budding apprentice, and draws her into a complicated case concerning the kidnapped daughter of an American diplomat.

‘You don’t sound pleased.’ 

He slammed down a pipette, which of course shattered. 

‘How could I be pleased? Half of Wales has trudged the hillside into mud, the trail is a week old, there are no prints, nobody saw anyone, the parents are hysterical, and since nobody has any idea of what to do, they decide to humour the woman and bring in old Holmes. Old Holmes the miracle worker.’ He stared sourly at his fingers as I fastened plaster to it.
‘Reading that drivel of Watson’s, a person would never know I’d had any real failures, the kind that grind away and keep one from sleeping. Russell, I know these cases, I know the feel of how they begin, and this has all the marks. It stinks of failure, and I don’t want to be anywhere near Wales when they find that child’s body.’

I completely stumbled across the ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ mystery series, but now that I’ve gotten stuck into it I really don’t know how I ever missed them. This series has been around since 1994, to high critical acclaim and quite a fandom. But I had never heard of them before I went searching for reading recommendations for a new ‘cosy’ mystery series.

Laurie R. King has indeed written a very clever and entirely original tribute to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Artfully positioned as the mere conduit to Mary Russell’s message (the story of King receiving a trunk with Mary’s memoirs is particularly sweet) she presents Mary Russell as Sherlock Holmes’s continued story – perhaps a truer story than Watson’s saccharine ‘Strand’ entries – and reveals a man with a far darker psyche and complex history than literary classics would have us believe.

But don’t be fooled – while Holmes does feature heavily, the real pivot-point is Mary herself. A true product of changing times, she is a proud feminist and half-Jewish student of Oxford who is studying theology and chemistry (one, to Sherlock’s great distaste). Already a sharp mind when she meets him, working with Sherlock hones her already considerable skills and helps turn her into the formidable force she way always destined to be.

After just one chapter of ‘The Beekeeper’s Apprentice’ I was excited to have found a new, long-running series to get stuck into. Indeed, I am over-the-moon at the prospect of 12 books (with a 13^th due in 2015) for me to hoe through. Even more so, since – and it’s impossible not to know this, when the fandom is so strong – Mary does become Holmes’s wife (this is hinted at throughout, as Mary is writing her memoirs from quite a distance in the future, when she is 80 odd years old and reflecting on their life together). At first I thought this would be a jarring realisation, when we meet Mary at age 15 through to 17 in this first book and when she and Holmes have such a platonic, mentoring relationship … but it becomes clear that these two are so well-suited, nobody else could have possibly been a match for Holmes. I look forward to reading the development of their romantic relationship and beyond (though I do say ‘romantic’ lightly, as Mary Russell is a discreet lady from a certain era and will no doubt refrain from delving into overtly personal details).

This is also a fabulous series for Conan Doyle-aficionados (which I cannot claim to be). You’ll find that King refers to many of Holmes’s greatest adventures (with new perspectives in the telling) and famous characters from history and Conan Doyle’s literature do feature. I also have no doubt that King has quite captured the spirit of Conan Doyle’s original work, even while twisting it cleverly and remarkably toward a far more feminist, modernist bent.

I have fallen in love with this series and while I’m slightly peeved that I didn’t discover it sooner, I’m now quite chuffed that I have such a large backlist to get acquainted with.

5/5