Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Thefts of Christmas - Tim Major ***

By Brian Clegg

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes on the lookout for a Christmas mystery, this seemed an ideal purchase – and it’s not bad. But it’s not great either. There have been some excellent modern Holmes ventures – think, for example, of Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk, and even more so his brilliant Moriarty. And on the whole Tim Major makes a reasonable effort of fitting with the characters as we know them – but there are two issues with the way the book’s written.

To give it some context, this is a story featuring Irene Adler (who the TV show Sherlock demonstrated well was ideal for taking Holmes in something of a new direction), who is setting Holmes a series of puzzles, starting with an odd sounding vocal performance which he studies at some length as sheet music. All the puzzles, it appears, are to be thefts with no theft – perhaps the cleverest these involves a stolen painting that never existed. And there is some entertainment as Holmes and Watson attempt to get a grip on these, while also trying to reconcile an apparent murder with Adler’s supposedly light-hearted intentions. But there also some problems here.

Major’s writing style drifts too far from Doyle’s – this is particularly apparent in the behaviour of Mrs Hudson, who seems to have lost her wits (and sometimes uses wording more suited to the version in the current-day TV show). And Holmes is both ridiculously incommunicative and given to strange behaviour. Of course, the original could be intentionally obscure, but this Holmes is downright obstructive to Watson. As for the ‘twelve thefts’, while a few of these are clear, many of them are vague references that we never really are sure have anything to do with the plot, in a book that ends in a way that Doyle would not have countenanced.

I got through the book, and enjoyed it in part, but the author neither had Doyle’s style nor his ability to weave a plot without ending up with a messy tangle of threads.

You can buy Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Thefts of Christmas from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.