Friday, August 19, 2011

A review from the author of The Sherlockian

The Teenage Sherlock Holmes

 
By the time we’re 14, most of us have few accomplishments to our name: passing algebra, playing goalie on a soccer team, stealing a first kiss, if we’re lucky. That about covers it.
Meanwhile, in “Death Cloud,” by Andrew Lane, Sherlock Holmes has managed, at the age of 14, to quell a possible outbreak of bubonic plague, duel a French baron and win the affections of a rambunctious American girl.
What an overachiever.
When the Sherlock Holmes character first appeared, in 1887, he was 33, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle left few clues about his childhood, family or personal history. We know, from the four novels and 56 short stories that Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes, that his hero had an older brother named Mycroft, that his mother was of French descent, that he went to “University” — Oxford? Cambridge? — and . . . well, that’s about it. Here, Lane supplies Holmes’s missing teenage years. And what adventuresome years they were.
“Death Cloud” begins with Holmes feeling lonely and unpopular at the Deepdene School for Boys. With his father in an India-bound military regiment and his mother vaguely “unwell,” Holmes is sent to spend the summer with a cruel aunt and uncle whom he has never met. While staying at the family’s country manor, Holmes comes across a mystery: Two victims of what appears to be the bubonic plague are discovered after witnesses report seeing a terrifying “cloud of smoke” pass over their bodies. With the aid of his tutor, Amyus Crowe, and his sole friend, an urchin named Matty, Holmes is off to investigate his very first case, showing how the precocious teenager becomes the legendary Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most influential consulting detective. Lane’s command of what will one day become Holmes’s signature methods is remarkable, and the lessons Holmes learns here are ones any admirer of his later adventures will recognize: “If you haven’t got enough facts to come to a conclusion, then you go out and get more facts,” he is instructed at one point. “The collection of proper information depends primarily on the proper phrasing of the question,” he learns at another. We see Holmes bare-knuckle box, analyze handwriting and develop a fascination with bees — all skills that will later become important in his career.
Lane is attempting a curious feat: to update and adapt Sherlock Holmes for a new generation, much the way Guy Ritchie has done with a swashbuckling Sherlock on screen. But kids have been reading the original Holmes stories with delight since the 1880s. Indeed, Conan Doyle frequently bemoaned his fate at being considered a writer of mere “boys’ books” — he’d meant to write for adults and was chagrined to find his stories frequently reviewed among the teenage adventures of the day. However, while Conan Doyle was suspicious of his younger fans, Lane courts them (and the publisher has put a brazenly Bieber-like figure on the cover in case we miss the point). There is something ironic then in this novel’s claim to being “the first teen series endorsed by the Conan Doyle estate,” and in any case, the Conan Doyle estate no longer controls the copyright to Sherlock Holmes as strictly as it once did. Yet, in the end, the novel strives to rescue Holmes from the prejudices of his creator, and thereby expand the pool of Holmes devotees. For that we can all be grateful.

Graham Moore’s first novel, “The Sherlockian,” was published in December.

The book reviewed is;

DEATH CLOUD

By Andrew Lane
311 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Young adult; ages 12 and up)

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