Moriarty

By Anthony Horowitz, 2015

This is a pastiche on 19^th-century detective novel writing with post-modern embellishments. It didn’t work for me, but I can see how it would be popular with other readers. The author Anthony Horowitz is well known as a television writer, and this book is written with scenes that would translate well to TV.

This is a plot-driven story with lots of dramatic events. Although it’s written in a pseudo-19^th-century style, the plotting is more brisk and the events more grim than a 19^th-century writer would use. We have mysterious and bloody deaths, extraordinary escapes from peril, cryptic characters and a rather thick narrator. Being a Holmesian story, there is astounding and improbable deductive reasoning drawn from minute, often ambiguous, clues.

Investigating the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes in Switzerland, Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard encounters the story’s narrator, Frederick Chase, who tells Jones that he is a Pinkerton detective pursuing a criminal mastermind from America. Naturally, they join forces to pursue various clues related to Holmes’ death and to a crime wave taking place in London.

I had hoped that the combination of American knowledge and technique with Holmesian observation and reasoning would take the story beyond the cozy English style. However, aside from introducing some new characters and a ruthlessness that the Londoners find ungenteel, Horowitz makes little of the American connection. He does introduce an interesting historical American character and set some scenes in the American consulate, which adds a jurisdictional complication for the Scotland Yard detective. I suspect that the fact that the narrator is American is intended to ensure that American book-buyers (and television producers) will be interested in an English crime mystery. (Of course, many Americans love British settings and characters, but it seems that a large portion of the American market prefers to see themselves reflected in their entertainment.)

There’s little interest in any of the characters themselves, though. By the end, the narrator explains that his role is more complex than at first presented, but he doesn’t change at all. Nor do the other characters, although we do find out how Inspector Athelney Jones was inspired by an encounter with Sherlock Holmes. The only female character of note is Jones’ wife, a smart woman who expresses her deep concern for Jones’ obsession with Holmes. Essentially all the characters are white men. Possibly this is realistic given the Victorian setting, but will a contemporary TV producer allow it to go into production without more female characters or characters of colour?

I have enjoyed reading Sherlock Holmes stories, and last year enjoyed a collection of Arsene Lupin stories that spoof Holmes while using similar 19^th-century conventions. The Moriarty novel updates the style with brisker pacing, new characters and more extreme scenes. Coming from an experienced writer, I felt that this would be an effective new approach. But too much of it felt contrived and over-done. It wasn’t truly 19^th century, and as a result I never bought into the characters or the situation. I think that if I want to read 19^th-century detective novels, I’ll stick to the originals.

Kingdom of the Blind

By Louise Penny, 2018

Some things about this novel are well done, but if Louise Penny were not someone whose writing is recommended by people I respect, I might not have read further than the first chapter.

To give Penny her due, this is a well crafted, suspenseful novel that holds a reader’s interest and moves propulsively from one plot point to another. New events and storylines introduce different angles that engage a reader’s intrigue. The details of the police procedures seem plausible. And Penny doesn’t gloss over the psychological impacts of a life trying to understand murders and crime. (If anything, she overdoes the psychology, musing on the implications of each line of dialogue. In a Henry James novel, I like this slow-paced, considered story-telling, but it does slow down the suspense of a story driven by events.)

The detailed description of rural Quebec life in the depths of winter is engaging. The cold, the challenges of driving in snow, the camaraderie of the village friends are nice details. I might have been aware of these lifestyle details in a vague sense, but Penny shows it in a way that goes beyond the romanticized postcard view. She makes sure that, while admiring the beauty and the human warmth, a reader also sees how it can be miserable and life-threatening.

But in spite of Penny’s strengths, I found the writing annoying and contrived. Some things I didn’t like: Penny’s portentous language seems intended to set a suspenseful tone but it becomes tiresome. The repeated structure of half-sentences feels like an overworked device to create a fast-moving pace, a beginner technique from a suspense-writing class. The frequent authorial asides don’t add to the characters or the plot; they often seem obvious and unnecessary. Many of the characters are clumsy stereotypes (the prickly poet, the charming gay couple, the understanding partner), with no depth. And throwing in the odd French expression to remind us that we are in Quebec feels patronizing rather than authentic.

Some of the language I found extreme and oversimplified. The repeated references to fentanyl as a gateway to hellish and fatal existence, while grounded in reality, doesn’t reflect the fact that the fatal issue is the contamination of the drug, not the drug use itself. It plays into drug-war rhetoric to describe fentanyl as a categorical evil, as Penny does here. And her formulaic references to “junkies, trannies and whores” doesn’t help when it reduces drug users to empty stereotypes. This language makes Penny sound like a moralistic anti-drug preacher.

Also, I did find both of the storylines a bit ridiculous. The set up of the mysterious will seems so implausible that I kept asking myself why these supposedly rational people would go along with it. The second storyline of the drugs on the street and the strategy to recover them seem equally implausible. While I’m sure there is a lot of backbiting and bureaucracy in the Quebec police forces, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t work to recover the drugs if the threat were as serious as Penny describes it.

With all of this, the tidy wrap up feels constructed and contrived. The bad guys are taken out, society is safe, warm feelings return to the village. Ho hum.

I know that many people like Penny’s writing, and I see from other comments that this may not be her best writing. My response to the book is, of course, idiosyncratic. If I had to find a book to read in an airport with a tiny selection, I might well pick up another of her novels, but she is not to my taste, and I won’t be searching for another.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief

By Maurice Leblanc, 1907 (translation, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos) 

I picked this up while travelling in Porto, looking for something that would be engaging and not too demanding, in a compact portable format. It was perfect.

The stories are relatively short, but long enough to develop a complex plot and raise questions about the morality of thieves and gentlemen. The language in this original translation is in the dated formal style of the past century, like Conan Doyle, which fits the text.

Set in the bourgeois society of late 19^th century France, the stories involve clever mysteries like a Sherlock Holmes story, with the twist of being told from the point of view of the master criminal. Like Holmes, they frequently point to the ineptness of the police forces, but Leblanc adds the issues involving people of wealth, power and class. Leblanc makes a point of parody with “Holmlock Shears,” especially in the story “Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late.”

What’s interesting in these stories is not so much the mystery, but the social circumstances they reveal. Lupin’s motivation seems to arise from the suggestion that he is the son of a mistreated woman and uses theft in order to humiliate the rich who caused his mother’s downfall. He often identifies with the working classes, while taking advantage of his privilege as a wealthy bourgeois. He enjoys showing up the patronizing police. And he shows a strong sense of justice in wanting to help or protect other bourgeois who have been robbed or threatened. While a sense of justice is featured in the Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, Holmes more often treats his cases as an intellectual puzzle, and, in my recollection, seems to have little awareness for London’s working class.

Arsène Lupin is a dedicated and principled vigilante, especially in defending the honour of women. Leblanc shows him as a human with a nervous heart in the presence of the woman he has fallen for, a curious twist of the psychology of the master thief. In one story, he gives back the items that he has stolen in order that the woman will not think he is a thief. Did Sherlock Holmes ever show affection toward women, aside perhaps from his landlady and the more modern stories that try to correct an evident misogyny?

Lupin toys with a complex moral balance. In one story, he sets a trap for a murderer, which results in Lupin keeping a gem that the murderer stole, executing a tricky moral trade to his benefit. He is a thief, but he steals from people who are worse than he is.

Lupin also uses a distinctive strategy to increase his fame and add to the embarrassment of his victims – he advertises! While Holmes has his Dr Watson, and there seems to be a knowledgeable narrator in Lupin’s stories, Lupin takes the initiative of buying newspaper notices to draw attention to his capers and his victims. Since he’s not looking for a clientele like Holmes, this can only be to show off his superiority and his accomplishments – and occasionally to misdirect attention. As a self-made man, he puts considerable time and effort into creating himself and building his public persona and fame. This desire for attention perhaps also comes from his sense of overcoming an unjust life and challenging the bourgeois morality that surrounds him.

It’s some time since I’ve read Conan Doyle and I certainly have not read all of his stories, so I hope I’m not mischaracterizing his hero. I enjoy reading the Holmes stories, but Leblanc’s “gentleman-thief” stories add some additional layers that make them a bit more satisfying. Overall, this was excellent holiday reading – engaging, convenient and thoughtful.