Sherlock Holmes
pastiches seem to arrive in bunches every generation—and the recent
ones move the original caped crusader in ever-stranger directions. So
it comes as a relief to read Rob Ryan's take on the genre, which is
at once a throw-back and so perfectly fitting it's a wonder no one
considered it before.
It's 1914 and Dr. John
Watson has returned to the army, re-commissioned as a major in the
medical corps, and sent to the front in Belgium. He has had a falling
out with Holmes, and despite his age, the veteran of the Afghan
campaign is back in a very different sort of war. As I said, this
makes perfect sense; despite his age, Watson's concept of duty, and
his need to feel useful on his own, without Holmes, makes it more
than believable, and his service to the crown would get him his
commission.
Ryan does a nice job of
getting Watson's tone right, and even the voice of Holmes he hears
when he tries to think a problem through. Watson discovers there is a
serial killer operating in the British trenches, and though he isn't
believed immediately, and the concept itself is anathema to the
officers above him, his investigations are as dogged as you'd expect,
and more dangerous given the context of the front. Ryan's
descriptions of the trenches are vivid and horrifying—appropriate
at this time of year, in the centenary of the Great War and with
Armistice Day approaching—as is his straightforward portrayal of
the rigid class system in effect not just among the fighting men, but
also in the hospital wards. This impedes not only the tactics of
modern war, but Watson's ability to treat its victims, as well as
track down the killer. There's a neat contrast drawn as well with his
portrait of a German sniper, through whom Ryan manages to draw out
some of the moral complexities of modern war. With poison gas
floating across no-man's land, there is an eerie echo of the
present-day's WMDs just as much as Watson's Afghan service echoed in
the modern TV update of Holmes.
But what makes Dead
Man's Land work as a Holmes pastiche is the way Ryan's mystery turns
out to be so true to Doyle's style. Because for all the brilliance of
the Holmes-Watson partnership, and the great villainy of Moriarty,
Doyle was working very much in the puzzle side of the mystery world.
It's interesting that the British Crime Writers Association named
Agatha Christie the greatest crime writer, and one of her stories the
greatest as well, because she follows so closely in the Holmesian
tradition, of characters not being who they are, and of issues of
primogeniture, inheritance, and family status being so important.
In Ryan's story, Holmes
does respond to his friend's call for help, and the mystery is solved
by the two together, but not before a no-man's land finale that puts
War Horse to shame. For die-hard Holmes' fans, this will be a
satisfying climax, and for other readers, Ryan's mix of the
traditional and the new is like the war itself, grim, modern, and
endlessly fascinating.
Dead Man's Land by
Robert Ryan
Simon & Shuster,
£7.99, ISBN 9781849839570
note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
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