The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, Orion Books, November 2011.

Review by Alex. Kane ©Copyright

Sherlock Holmes is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment. The new Robert Downey Jnr film, ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’ (sequel to the 2009 hit) opens in December. The BBC’s ‘Sherlock,’ with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, is back for a new run early next year. And now the first Holmes novel to carry the official seal of approval from the Conan Doyle Estate has been published.

Anthony Horowitz is a brave man. Holmes is so easy to get wrong and so many novelists and screenwriters have got him wrong since the first parodies, tributes and blatant rip-offs rolled off the press almost a century ago. Holmes has been taken everywhere from the Titanic to the deck of the Starship Enterprise and he has been pitted against almost everyone from Jack the Ripper to Hitler, including Tarzan, Dracula and Frankenstein.

But in The House of Silk Horowitz has kept Holmes firmly in his own time and place. This is pitch perfect Holmes. As Horowitz said to me during an interview: “My only job with Doyle was to live within his world. I started with Watson and Holmes and that extraordinary narrative voice. And I had Mrs. Hudson,  Lestrade, Moriarty, Mycroft, the Diogenes Club and Baker Street. All I had to do was join the dots in a different way and to remember with every page and word I wrote that Doyle is a better writer than me. Therefore, don’t try and improve upon him. Come up with a different plot, but don’t try and reanalyse that friendship between Holmes and Watson. Accept what it is.”

Everything you would expect to read in an authentic Doyle story is here, opening with a wonderful display of Holmes’s ability to make huge logical and inferential leaps by “a simple matter of observation and deduction.” It’s a very bold opening gambit—and most authors make the trick far too convoluted to be convincing—yet Horowitz pulls it off in such a brilliantly uncomplicated fashion that he has you safely escorted to 1890 and the comfort of 221B Baker Street before you have fully realised it.

There are some nice touches along the way. Watson, older and more reflective, offers a kindlier verdict of Lestrade than we have been used to: and the cameos from both Moriarty and Mycroft suggest aspects of their character that were bypassed in earlier stories. Yet none of this strays from Doyle or from Watson himself. This is exactly how that older, more reflective Watson would write. Time is not on his side and he knows it.

Some Holmesian purists may be uncomfortable with one particular aspect of the story, but Horowitz, using Watson’s voice, has provided the context for what he admits are events which were simply “too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print” 120 years ago. Those who think that Horowitz is being too ‘modern’ with this theme should look up the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889.

This book works at every level (no mean achievement when you remember that it’s more than twice the length of Doyle’s four Holmes novels) because it is utterly faithful to the original. The plot is the easy part, though. Its real strength is that it keeps the friendship between Holmes and Watson exactly as Doyle intended: no new insights or Freudian reinterpretations. This is Holmes and Watson as they were and as they should be. Horowitz deserves shelf space beside the original.