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victorian221bA Study in Sable • A Scandal in Battersea • The Bartered Brides
Mercedes Lackey (published by DAW Books)
The first thing to know about Mercedes Lackey's contributions to the world of Sherlockian pastiche is that these are not really Sherlock Holmes stories as such -- that is, Holmes himself is a secondary (or even tertiary) character, with Dr. Watson and his wife (specifically, Mary Morstan Watson) taking stronger secondary roles. The true leads are Nan Killian and Sarah Lyon-White, two orphaned young women who have lately come into their powers as a psychic and a spirit medium (yes, really) respectively, and are now living more or less independently under the auspices of a White Lodge of wizards based in London. Their origins and several prior adventures are chronicled in earlier volumes of Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series, of which this Holmesian sequence is now a major subset. It isn't especially necessary to have read the non-Holmesian installments to jump in at this point in the larger series, but new readers should be cautioned that this is definitely a fantasy universe -- both young women have talking birds as companions, and among their allies is no less than Shakespeare's "Puck", here played as a sort of British analog to Coyote or Raven, the trickster/Changer/guardian figures of many Native American cultures.
Second, these are not strictly even detective stories as such, at least not primarily of the whodunit school -- rather, these follow the mode in which we as readers alternate following our heroes as they pursue investigations and our villains as they plot and carry out their diabolical plans, leading up to a final confrontation in which (because these are Elemental Masters books) there is a dramatic magical battle of some kind. (Do not, repeat do not, attempt to diagram an Elemental Masters novel according to any conventional standards of How Plots Work. You will end up staring at your page or monitor screen and wondering how Lackey gets away with it. Trust me on this.)
And yet....
Lackey gives us a truly fascinating portrayal of the Watsons -- specifically, she makes both John and Mary highly trained Elemental Masters (he's Water, she's Fire), and sets them up as mentors to the series' main leads. Fans of competent!Watson (and competent!Mary) will find much to like here, and no small amusement in Sherlock Holmes' ongoing mild annoyance at living in a world where magic works, however little he likes having to admit it. At the same time, the portrayal of Holmes himself is respectful and pretty much canon-consistent, if a trifle distant by fanfictional standards -- this last not surprising, since one thing we get very little of here is Holmes' own narrative point of view.
And The Bartered Brides -- set specifically in the period immediately following Holmes' reported demise at Reichenbach -- pulls several extremely inventive twists on key canonical matters. There's the scheme to resurrect Moriarty from the dead (perfectly possible in Lackey's magical landscape), the formation of an alliance between our heroines' sponsors' White Lodge and a certain Mycroft Holmes (not a wizard, but totally willing to make use of wizardly resources), and a startling but wholly reasonable workaround to the problem of Watson's multiple wives.
Verdict?
Lackey is perhaps best known for writing ultra-competent protagonists whom some readers find entirely too good to be true, and these books do fit that pattern. OTOH, Sherlock Holmes himself is something of the prototypical Mary Sue (Marty Stu?), so that's not necessarily a drawback here. At the same time, the single weakest aspect of the Elemental Masters series is that its villains tend to be one-note stick figures, and that's a bit more of a difficulty in this cluster. On the plus side, though, the overall worldbuilding -- both in general and with specific respect to the Holmesian elements -- is solidly developed, and there is a great deal of room here for fanfic writers to explore should they choose to do so.
On the whole, I give these a cautious recommendation. There will be readers who can't get past Lackey's particular narrative and storytelling tics, and that's OK...but for what they are, I like these books and am looking forward to the next installment.
Mercedes Lackey (published by DAW Books)
The first thing to know about Mercedes Lackey's contributions to the world of Sherlockian pastiche is that these are not really Sherlock Holmes stories as such -- that is, Holmes himself is a secondary (or even tertiary) character, with Dr. Watson and his wife (specifically, Mary Morstan Watson) taking stronger secondary roles. The true leads are Nan Killian and Sarah Lyon-White, two orphaned young women who have lately come into their powers as a psychic and a spirit medium (yes, really) respectively, and are now living more or less independently under the auspices of a White Lodge of wizards based in London. Their origins and several prior adventures are chronicled in earlier volumes of Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series, of which this Holmesian sequence is now a major subset. It isn't especially necessary to have read the non-Holmesian installments to jump in at this point in the larger series, but new readers should be cautioned that this is definitely a fantasy universe -- both young women have talking birds as companions, and among their allies is no less than Shakespeare's "Puck", here played as a sort of British analog to Coyote or Raven, the trickster/Changer/guardian figures of many Native American cultures.
Second, these are not strictly even detective stories as such, at least not primarily of the whodunit school -- rather, these follow the mode in which we as readers alternate following our heroes as they pursue investigations and our villains as they plot and carry out their diabolical plans, leading up to a final confrontation in which (because these are Elemental Masters books) there is a dramatic magical battle of some kind. (Do not, repeat do not, attempt to diagram an Elemental Masters novel according to any conventional standards of How Plots Work. You will end up staring at your page or monitor screen and wondering how Lackey gets away with it. Trust me on this.)
And yet....
Lackey gives us a truly fascinating portrayal of the Watsons -- specifically, she makes both John and Mary highly trained Elemental Masters (he's Water, she's Fire), and sets them up as mentors to the series' main leads. Fans of competent!Watson (and competent!Mary) will find much to like here, and no small amusement in Sherlock Holmes' ongoing mild annoyance at living in a world where magic works, however little he likes having to admit it. At the same time, the portrayal of Holmes himself is respectful and pretty much canon-consistent, if a trifle distant by fanfictional standards -- this last not surprising, since one thing we get very little of here is Holmes' own narrative point of view.
And The Bartered Brides -- set specifically in the period immediately following Holmes' reported demise at Reichenbach -- pulls several extremely inventive twists on key canonical matters. There's the scheme to resurrect Moriarty from the dead (perfectly possible in Lackey's magical landscape), the formation of an alliance between our heroines' sponsors' White Lodge and a certain Mycroft Holmes (not a wizard, but totally willing to make use of wizardly resources), and a startling but wholly reasonable workaround to the problem of Watson's multiple wives.
Verdict?
Lackey is perhaps best known for writing ultra-competent protagonists whom some readers find entirely too good to be true, and these books do fit that pattern. OTOH, Sherlock Holmes himself is something of the prototypical Mary Sue (Marty Stu?), so that's not necessarily a drawback here. At the same time, the single weakest aspect of the Elemental Masters series is that its villains tend to be one-note stick figures, and that's a bit more of a difficulty in this cluster. On the plus side, though, the overall worldbuilding -- both in general and with specific respect to the Holmesian elements -- is solidly developed, and there is a great deal of room here for fanfic writers to explore should they choose to do so.
On the whole, I give these a cautious recommendation. There will be readers who can't get past Lackey's particular narrative and storytelling tics, and that's OK...but for what they are, I like these books and am looking forward to the next installment.
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Date: 2019-04-01 03:14 pm (UTC)