Victorian 221b

I have been reading a number of pastiches lately, several of which feature female Holmes relatives, and it seems a good moment to make some quick comparisons and contrasts.

Colleen Gleason's The Clockwork Scarab is the first of five YA novels featuring MIna (never "Avermina") Holmes and Evalina Stoker.  Mina is Sherlock's niece and Mycroft's daughter (!); she gets along better with Sherlock, and has inherited and honed the family deductive acumen.  Evalina is Bram Stoker's daughter, here given a family lineage and minor superpowers essentially replicating those of television's Buffy.  "Here" is an alternate steampunk England in which electricity has been found too dangerous to use and thus outlawed as an energy source, and Mina and Evalina subsequently find themselves invited to work for a covert royally chartered investigative service overseen by Irene Adler (!!) out of an office in the British Museum (!!!), and drawn into the schemes of the Ankh, a mysterious figure determined to resurrect the goddess Sekhmet and thereby establish dominion over England (at least).

The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth is the third in a series by Leonard Goldberg featuring Joanna, Sherlock Holmes' daughter via Irene Adler (never seen and virtually unmentioned in this volume).  Holmes himself has been deceased for some years, and by now Joanna is the widow of a Dr. Blalock, the mother of his precocious son (here visiting from Eton), and the wife of Dr. John Watson Jr. (!).  Watson Sr. is still living, Joanna and her family reside at 221b, and the group's present case involves a brilliant cryptanalyst kidnapped by German agents, from whom they are tasked to find and rescue him.

The Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer postulates a younger sister for Sherlock and Mycroft, raised at home by her mother until said mother disappears just as Enola turns fourteen.  Over the course of six slim chapter books (Amazon calls this series YA, but these are shorter and pitched at a younger readership than the Gleason series), Enola runs away from her country home, establishes herself in London, solves several moderately complex mysteries -- including the kidnapping of Dr. Watson -- and effectively runs rings around both Sherlock's and Mycroft's attempts to find her and pack her off to boarding school...a fate which Springer and her heroine persuasively argue would have been almost literally worse than death.

****

I bounced hard off of the Enola Holmes books on the first pass, some years ago -- as I recall, I thought the tone a bit too sermon-like, the pacing slow, and Enola too clever to be believable.  On a second, much more recent encounter, I almost completely changed my mind.  There's definitely an educational agenda here, but it's one that's both worthwhile and more effectively presented than I gave it credit for the first time around.  [It may well also be true that the series was published a few years ahead of its time; Enola's brand of feminism is far less strident now than it may have seemed then.]  And Springer does a superb job of developing her characters -- not excluding Mycroft and Sherlock, who are very much their canonical selves and not (as often happens in alternative Holmesiana) reduced in intellect to allow the author's protagonist to shine more brightly.

By rights, I ought to have bounced off the Gleason series, which is very much alt-Holmesiana and fashionably steam-powered.  But Gleason makes no apologies for the novelty, the world-building is sketched very lightly but logically, and the plotting is admirably brisk.  Not even the introduction of a time-traveling teen from non-steampunk 2016 (!!!!) seriously derails the overall credibility.  This is more action-adventure than deductive exercise (though Mina does pretty well at the latter art), but it's fun in the right ways, and the two leads are excellent foils for one another.

I did bounce off the Goldberg novel, which I cannot recommend (and I am faintly astonished that this series has survived and evidently prospered).  Goldberg is not a bad prose-mimic -- or perhaps he's too skilled a mimic for his own good.  But there is no extrapolation here at all; this is a plain Holmes case through and through, and Goldberg does the absolute minimum in terms of changing the template, to the extent that it complicates the narration considerably.  Joanna is always "Joanna", never "Holmes", and in making Watson's son (and fellow doctor) narrator, Goldberg forces far too many references to "my father" and other circumlocutions in order for readers to keep all the characters straight. Worse still, Joanna's son is also named "Johnny" despite not being a Watson, and to make matters even stranger, Joanna herself is the namesake of one Joanna Blalock, series protagonist in an unrelated series of modern medical thrillers also written by Goldberg. Almost everyone talks in the same general voice, there's much too much conversation and not enough deduction, and aspects of the central mystery take Joanna herself much too long to solve.  This is cardboard Holmes -- and would have been better used as the basis for a straight Holmes pastiche rather than a next-generation yarn.

A 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.