'House of Silk,' 'On Conan Doyle'

THE HOUSE OF SILK, by Anthony Horowitz. Mulholland Books / Little, Brown, 294 pp., $27.99.

ON CONAN DOYLE, by Michael Dirda. Princeton University Press, 210 pp., $19.95.

To what extent should we celebrate the latest gift from Dr. John Watson, who has bequeathed the world "one last portrait of Mr. Sherlock Holmes," one so "shocking" that it could only be told now, 100 years after it was written?

Well, I wouldn't uncork your best burgundy for the release of "The House of Silk," but maybe a $10 merlot. We are not, after all, having Watson channeled by the venerable Arthur Conan Doyle himself but by Anthony Horowitz, the writer behind "Foyle's War," a World War II-era TV detective series.

This is the first novel authorized by the Conan Doyle Estate, a designation that carries more baggage than honor, implying that "The House of Silk" is more authentic than the hundreds -- thousands? -- of other attempts to keep Holmes puffing away. It isn't.

There have been admirable attempts at resurrecting Holmes, among them "The Seven Percent Solution" and the new British TV contemporization, "Sherlock."

"The House of Silk" isn't in that category, and another recent book, Michael Dirda's mostly superb minibiography, "On Conan Doyle," helps explain why. Conan Doyle's prose in the Holmes tales is remarkable. Straightforward at first glance, it has a poetry all its own -- a poetry of sly rhythms, Socratic conversation, sophisticated urbanity and unexpected dangers. It's also the poetry of an author split between liberal reform impulses and imperialistic, war-loving conservatism. No one could breathe that air in today's world.

This leaves writers like Horowitz in a no-win situation. To copy Conan Doyle's prose would be pretentious; to avoid it, as Horowitz does, throws out much of what makes Holmes Holmes.

Still, the demand for more Holmes stories seems almost as intense today as when Conan Doyle had to "undo" the detective's death in the Reichenbach Falls. Horowitz, too, makes the mistake of killing off Holmes in the early pages of "The House of Silk." Orson Welles once said that Sherlock Holmes never lived but will also never die. Killing him off kills off the magic from the get-go.

Watson then recalls that story he couldn't tell earlier, of a Holmes investigation into the death of one of the Baker Street Irregulars and the appearance of a member of a notorious Boston Irish gang in London. Holmes' investigation into the two cases is enjoyable enough, particularly in the first half of the book. Horowitz has done his homework and knows how to keep Holmes two or three steps ahead of Watson and the reader. He also has a nice touch with Conan Doyle's Dickensian way of naming subsidiary characters, such as Tobias Finch and Edmund Carstairs.

As the story winds on, though, Horowitz loses track of Conan Doyle's strengths. The meeting of the two investigations seems too arbitrary, and when Holmes explains how he figured it out, there's no sense that Horowitz had given enough of those clues to the reader.

Michael Dirda's dissections of how Conan Doyle achieves such satisfying results in almost every story is the chief selling point of his fine little biography, along with capturing his own boyhood love of Conan Doyle. He argues too strenuously for Conan Doyle's other fiction, at one point invoking Chaucer, Rabelais and Tolstoy in discussing "The White Company."

That book is an enjoyable "boy's tale," as "The Lost World" is good sci-fi and some of Conan Doyle ghost stories are effectively eerie. But the Holmes stories are the only ones to transcend genre writing.

Dirda quotes Conan Doyle as saying that the Holmes stories weren't as good as his other work because there was nothing ennobling about them. How little did he know. Today it's Conan Doyle's ideas about chivalry, war, imperialism and spiritualism that are dated and far from ennobling. But Holmes is still a resonant voice of reason in a world that seems increasingly difficult to figure out. Holmes grounded Conan Doyle and curbed his excesses, too. As the flood of new Holmes stories proves, Sherlock was the author's ticket to literary immortality.

Sherlock strikes again

A STUDY IN SHERLOCK

(Bantam) A collection of stories "inspired by the Holmes canon," from contemporary writers such as Neil Gaiman, Laura Lippman and Lee Child.

SUCCESS SECRETS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

(Perigee) David Acord sees Holmes as a role model for the 21st century in this book of self-help advice.

THE SHERLOCKIAN

(Twelve) Graham Moore's novel, set in the present, involves a long-lost Conan Doyle diary and a double murder mystery.

-- TOM BEER

EXCERPT

"On Conan Doyle" by Michael Dirda

"The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1902), by Arthur Conan Doyle, was the first "grown-up" book I ever read -- and it changed my life. Back in the late 1950s my fifth-grade class belonged to an elementary school book club. Each month our teacher would pass out a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. I remember buying Jim Kjelgaard's "Big Red" and a thriller called "Treasure at First Base," as well as Geoffrey Household's "Mystery of the Spanish Cave." (Years later, I would race through Household's famous "Rogue Male," about the English hunter who tries to assassinate Hitler and who instead finds himself relentlessly tracked and pursued.) Lying on my bed at home, I lingered for hours over these newsprint catalogs, carefully making my final selections.

I had to. Each month my mother would allow me to purchase no more than four of the twenty-five- and thirty-five-cent paperbacks. Not even constant wheedling and abject supplication could shake her resolve. "What do you think we are, made of money? What's wrong with the library?"

After Mr. Jackson sent in the class's order, several weeks would pass and I would almost, but not quite, forget which books I had ordered. Then in the middle of some dull afternoon, probably given over to the arcane mysteries of addition and subtraction, a teacher's aide would open the classroom door and silently drop off a big, heavily taped parcel. Whispers would ripple up and down the rows and everyone would grow restive, hoping that the goodies would be distributed that very minute. Sometimes we would be made to wait an entire day, especially if the package had been delivered close to the three o'clock bell when school let out.

Romantic poets regularly sigh over their childhood memories of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. But what are daisies and rainbows compared to four sleek and shiny paperbacks? After more than thirty years as a literary journalist, I have seen and reviewed new books aplenty. Ah, but then, then, at my wooden school desk, etched with generations of student initials, I would methodically appraise each volume's artwork, read and reread its back cover, carefully investigate the delicate line of glue at the top edge of the perfect-bound spines. Afterwards, I would glance around, sometimes with barely suppressed envy, to survey the gleaming treasures on the desks nearby. Certainly no rare first editions have ever been so carefully handled and cherished as those apparently ordinary book-club paperbacks.

To this day I can more or less recall the newsletter's capsule summary that compelled me to buy "The Hound of the Baskervilles" -- as if that ominous title alone weren't enough! Beneath a small reproduction of the paperback's cover -- depicting a shadowy Something with fiery eyes crouching on a moonlit crag -- blazed the thrilling words: "What was it that emerged from the moor at night to spread terror and violent death?" What else, of course, but a monstrous hound from the bowels of Hell? When I opened my very own copy of the book, the beast was further described on the inside display page:

"A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smoldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog."

Eager as I was to start immediately on this almost irresistible treat, I staunchly determined to put off reading the book until I could do so under just the right conditions. At the very least, I required a dark and stormy night, and the utter absence of distracting sisters and parents. Finally, there came a Saturday in early November when my mother and father announced that they would be visiting relatives that evening -- and "the girls" would be going along. Yes, I might stay at home alone to read. The afternoon soon grew a dull metallic gray, threatening rain.

With a dollar clutched in my fist, I pedaled my red Roadmaster bike to Whalen's drugstore, where I quickly picked out two or three candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, and a cold bottle of Orange Crush. After my family had driven off in our new 1958 Ford, I dragged a blanket from my bed, spread it on the reclining chair next to the living room's brass floor lamp, carefully arranged my provisions near to hand, turned off all the other lights in the house, and crawled expectantly under the covers with my paperback of "The Hound" -- just as the heavens began to boom with thunder and the rain to thump against the curtained windows.

In the louring darkness I turned page after page, more than a little scared, gradually learning the origin of the dreaded curse of the Baskervilles. At the end of the book's second chapter, you may recall, the tension escalates unbearably. Holmes and Watson have just been told how Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead, apparently running away from the safety of his own house. Their informant Dr. Mortimer pauses, then adds, hesitantly, that near the body he had spotted footprints on the damp ground. A man's or a woman's? eagerly inquires the great detective, to which question he receives the most thrilling answer in all of twentieth-century literature: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" I shivered with fearful pleasure, scrunched further down under my thick blanket, and took another bite of my Baby Ruth candy bar, as happy as I will ever be.

Excerpted from "On Conan Doyle," published by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2012 by Michael Dirda. Reprinted by permission. To read additional passages or learn more about this book, please visit press.princeton.edu