What the arch-Sherlockian Christopher Morley once wrote about the Sherlock Holmes stories – that we take as much pleasure in the intimate details as we do in the plots – is true of the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King as well. Russell’s dreadful aunt, her Old Testament studies, her myopia, the elderly Jewish couple who make her dresses, her pleasure in the freedom of men’s garments, the beauty of her long blond hair are somehow as absorbing in the telling, and more lasting in the memory, than whether the villain turned out to be Professor Moriarty’s daughter or some wily sheik.
The latest installment of the saga, then, is pure joy, because it is all Mary – just plain Russell to her husband, Sherlock Holmes.
King has brought her home to San Francisco, where she will do battle with the demons whose very existence she has denied since 1914, when her father’s Maxwell plunged over a cliff in California.
The year is 1924. Russell and Holmes are sailing east from India, where King … sorry, Mycroft
Holmes had sent them to search for Kipling’s Kim. They intend to spend a week or so in the Bay Area tidying up her father’s business affairs before taking the trains and ships that will eventually bring them home to their Sussex cottage.
Or so says Russell. Holmes, we later learn, is skeptical about her motives and fearful for her life and sanity.
“Five years ago,” writes King, “he had sat in a dark cabin on a boat heading to Palestine, listening to the details of her family’s death, hearing of the guilt that had been bleeding her like an invisible wound. Ever since that night, he had waited for Russell to question those things that she believed to be true. … It had been on the very end of his tongue a score of times to push matters into the open.” Now they are very much in the open: She has barely set foot in San Francisco when someone takes a shot at her.
Although King resorts to the third-person narrative for two long sections of “Locked Rooms,” in general it is Russell who “writes” these books, King having adopted the same packets-of-old-manuscripts device that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used.
Therefore, we know she survives this adventure too. Beyond that, anything goes: If Holmes is worried enough to set his agents watching her, then so am I. Neither Holmes nor Russell is at all certain what is to be found in those locked rooms, or even if they exist outside Russell’s subconscious.
King does locale well, whether it’s the Palestine of “O Jerusalem” or the South Downs where Holmes tends his bees. But here she is on home ground, and for the reader who, like King herself, lives in what we may call the San Francisco area, familiarity breeds enjoyment.
Can the great detective visit Prohibition-era San Francisco and not encounter Dashiell Hammett? Of course not. Hammett has left the Pinkerton Agency, except for occasional odd jobs, and is struggling to support his small family by selling stories to Black Mask and other pulp magazines. His hair hasn’t turned white yet, though it soon will; and the tuberculosis that Hammett assumed would kill him (mysteriously, it did not – he lived another 40 years) has left him gaunt and pale.
The interplay between Holmes and Hammett is fascinating.
“You’re that Holmes, aren’t you? The detective.”
“I am, yes.”
“I always thought …”
“That I was a fictional character?”
“That maybe there’d been some … exaggerations.”
This cleverly inverts a passage in “The Game,” where Russell is surprised to learn that Kipling’s character, Kim, is not really fictional either. And it establishes a kind of wary respect between the two men.
King is very skillful here, contrasting the voice of Holmes the Edwardian gentleman – and no one, not even Conan Doyle, has ever done a better Holmes than King does – with that of a Hammett who sounds remarkably like Hammett’s own character, the Continental Op. And she has larded her story with small tributes – here a newspaper snippet about a murder by bird statue, there a bit of dialogue between Holmes and a Chinese savant that neatly parodies Hammett’s “Dead Yellow Women.”
“Locked Rooms” is not a perfect novel. King resorts to a long-buried letter from Russell’s father to explain things, a hoary device I wish she had managed to avoid. But it is an awfully good novel, its prose clean, its psychology true, its characters memorable.
Since the audacious and brilliant “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,” eight books ago, the series can now be seen to have been moving in a long and intricate arc toward just this crisis. That’s quite an accomplishment. What’s next?
…
Locked Rooms
By Laurie R. King
Bantam, 416 pages, $24
