MYSTERY: HERO WORSHIP
The Sherlockian by Graham Moore
“The Sherlockian” ($24.99) opens with a man plotting murder near Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. It’s 1893, and Arthur Conan Doyle is determined to rid himself of the man plaguing his life: Sherlock Holmes. But the main action of Moore’s first novel takes place eight years later; it has to do with “the last great mystery of Arthur Conan Doyle,” a missing journal covering the months just before he unexpectedly resurrected Holmes after sending his creation plummeting to his death over those falls.
Flash forward to 2010: A man who claims to have found that lost journal is killed at the annual Sherlock Holmes convention of the Baker Street Irregulars. The word “Elementary” is scrawled in blood at the scene. Who plans a murder like this? “Someone who’s read way too many mysteries,” an observer notes. The newest Irregular, Harold White, who wore his deerstalker to his college graduation and his first job interview, is determined to crack the case. A pretty reporter volunteers as Harold’s Watson. (Moore, the son of Susan Sher, Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, based “The Sherlockian” on the death of Holmes scholar Richard Lancelyn Green, who was found strangled in 2004 after claiming to have located papers missing from Conan Doyle’s estate.)
The novel jumps between Harold’s investigation and one in 1901, when Conan Doyle tries to solve the murder of a young woman with a three-headed crow tattooed on her leg. Bram Stoker, unable to interest the masses in “some bloodsucking count from the Continent,” gets drafted as his reluctant Watson. The wrap-up is too abrupt, and the answer to the Edwardian mystery is deflating. But Moore’s affection for the genre and his good-natured self-awareness ground what might otherwise have been a preposterous setup.
