The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I tried to read The House of Silk last summer. It took me a week to get through 70 pages, but then I gave up. I just wasn’t in the mood. I’m more in a reading mood lately, and this time I polished off the whole novel in a single day. I am definitely in a reading mood now. Also, the book’s very readable.
My last several reviews have contained some form of the phrase “a friend loaned this to me,” and I’m almost done with that stack of book. Honestly, this is not the sort of pick I’d pick out for myself. Does a Sherlock Holmes novel not written by Conan Doyle amount to, essentially, fan fiction? Not that fan fiction is, in and of itself, bad. But certainly there’s something about Doyle’s style that only Doyle can do, yes? So why read Anthony Horowitz’s version?
Because it’s all about character, isn’t it. And I think that when most folks think of Sherlock Holmes, they go with not Doyle but the cartoonified Basil Rathbone version from the late 1930s. On top of that, they may layer the very modern Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Robert Downey Jr’s version. Maybe they’ll even throw in TV’s House, or memories of Encyclopedia Brown.
The point is, Doyle’s Sherlock is not the only Sherlock, and what Horowitz does is take the Holmes trope and write a mystery around it. And that’s pretty much it. He takes advantage of the Holmes legacy and mentions Moriarty and the Red-Headed League and the Baskervilles and the 7-Percent Solution and all that stuff, but really, at the end of the day, The House of Silk is just a mystery novel set in 1890‘s London.
Perhaps that’s underwhelming. Oh well. Like a sci-fi novel that has lots of fun techno-gadgets to play with, Horowitz has the Sherlock observation/deduction tricks to play with, which he does, so that the novel is fun to read, entertaining in that sense. But deep, evocative, thought-provoking? No, not really.
Stereotypical Victorian era London, with snooty aristocrats, ragamuffin street children, pea-soup fog, dens of ill repute, etc etc. All with a modern take on moral outrage to keep the modern reader sufficiently horrified by the novel’s end. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll enjoy The House of Silk. If not, give it back to the friend who loaned it to you and return to your Camus.