Fri 5 Apr 2013
LAURIE R. KING – The Moor. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1998; Bantam, paperback, 1999.
In her fourth Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel, King brings the couple to the scene of one of Holmes’ most celebrated cases, Baskerville Hall. An American adventurer has bought the Baskerville property but, surprisingly, is on the verge of selling it and moving on.
Russell and Holmes, who are visiting Sabine Baring-Gould, an old friend of Holmes, find the situation at Baskerville Hall somewhat troubling, but their principal concern is to find the killer responsible for two murders and track down the source of reported sightings of a ghostly carriage accompanied by the legendary Hound.
Much of the novel deals with Russell’s growing affection for the Moor, and the portrayal of the region and its inhabitants is the principal strength of the novel. The resolution of the various plot lines is accomplished in a few action-packed pages, which I suspect I will not long remember. The wanderings of Russell about the often desolate but still beautiful Moor really have more drama than the Baskerville goings-on and make me want to revisit Conan Doyle’s novel to see if his descriptions of the Moor are as evocative and powerful as King’s.
I found this to be the most engrossing Russell adventure since The Beekeeper’s Assistant, with the portrayal of the noted author and antiquarian Baring-Gould more telling than the rather bland characterization of Holmes.
April 5th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Catching up with the present day, there are now 12 books in this series. GARMENT OF SHADOWS appears to be the most recent one, published last year. The reviews have been up and down, but I simply can’t imagine why I haven’t read any of them. What on earth is wrong with me?
April 5th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
Maybe the single word ‘pastiche’ gets you creepy-crawley all over, Steve .
The Doc
April 5th, 2013 at 4:38 pm
I’ve never been able to bring myself to touch one of her books, because what I have read about her Sherlock Holmes, it goes beyond pastiche. Hooking up a retired Holmes with a fifteen-year-old girl in (self-described) costume romances is just as bad as pitching him against the Martian invaders from H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
The “after 1914, Holmes is mine” also annoyed me. In reality it was just another career being hitched to a franchise that has become the literary equivalent of the Elvis cult. It’s great for her that she escaped being labeled as a Sherlockian curiosity, for now, and that she garnered an audience of her own, but I prefer to stay clear from this kind of butchering of the Great Detective.
That, and I don’t understand that attitude, even if it was said in jest. If I would write a locked room mystery using one of John Dickson Carr’s detectives, which I would never do, I would never dare to publish it without crediting him as co-author – because it’s his creation and the admiration I have for him as a mystery writer.
Yes, I’m one of those snobbish purists, in case you hadn’t noticed. 😉
April 5th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, and wrote Stories about him. Full Stop .
The Doc
April 5th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
How about taking homes into the future and have him involved in Watergate?
April 5th, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Right now I’m reading Robert B Parker’s LULLABY, as transcribed by Ace Atkins. So far I’m enjoying it, but I’m only on page 170 (of 381) and something more interesting had better happen soon. So far it reads like Parker, but nothing has happened so far that you can’t trace back to something similar in the original series, which if it’s one you enjoy, why not start back at the beginning and read them all over again.
April 5th, 2013 at 10:07 pm
I thought Atkins took a bit to get Hawk to sound like Bob Parker’s Hawk. But Atkin’s Martin Quick was inauthentic.
Otherwise I thought Atkins’ effort wasn’t any worse than Parker’s lesser Spensers. And for me, even lesser Spenser is a joy.
April 5th, 2013 at 11:08 pm
First of all, my sincere apologies to all Robert Parker fans for what I’m about to say. When I first started reading Parker in the 1970’s I was overjoyed. Here was a crime writer who compared favorably to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
At least I thought this for about the first half dozen or so novels. But as Parker started to crank out the series novels I noticed that I found his girlfriend Susan to be extremely annoying and Hawk to be very unbelievable and too violent. I found that I unfortunately could no longer read Parker because the novels and characters no longer entertained me or seemed true at all.
April 6th, 2013 at 12:04 am
Well, yes, both Susan and Hawk are too good to be true. Otherwise no offense taken, Walker!
April 6th, 2013 at 5:29 am
I would have a difficult time reading anything where Holmes is teamed up with someone outside of Watson. But that’s me. Plot sounds good and I’ve heard this writer is superb. Just not my cup of tea.
April 6th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
I’ve never been tempted to try the series myself, but Walter’s fascinating review might get me started….
April 7th, 2013 at 7:35 pm
Sorry to disagree with all of you nay-sayers, but I’ve read and enjoyed several of her Mary Russell books. On occasion I teach a course about Sherlock Holmes and once assigned one of Laurie King’s other novels, _The Whole Art of Detection_ (not a Mary Russell) in which a man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes is the murder victim. The class really enjoyed it.