Book Review: The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz (2011)

Anthony Horowitz is a British author best known for a series of adventure stories he wrote about Alex Rider, a teenage British agent who is a sort of junior James Bond. My teenage boys liked the Alex Rider books, and read all of them. When I saw that Horowitz had written a new Sherlock Holmes novel, I decided to read it to see if it was appropriate for the boys. As I will explain below, it was not. But I wouldn't recommend it to grown-ups, either.

I can see why Horowitz is so successful at teen fiction. He is a skilled craftsman; this story moves along quickly and easily -- I read the whole thing in a few hours, and I was never bored. Unfortunately, he and I have very different notions about what it means to write a book using someone else's characters.

To me, the man who sets out to write a new story featuring an established character -- whether its Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or any other similar figure -- should approach his task with humility because he plans to make money off of someone else's intellectual property. In this case, for example, Arthur Conan Doyle did all the hard work -- he invented the characters and grew an audience for them. All Horowitz has to do is come up with a story that will tap into that audience. Under these circumstances, I think he owes it to Doyle -- and the audience -- to make sure his work is consistent with Doyle's.

This Horowitz has failed to do. The Holmes stories plainly offend his modern sense of the politically correct, and so we are forced to sit through agonizing passages where Dr. Watson (allegedly writing at the end of his life) regrets that he didn't spend more time writing about London's poor, or about the fate of criminals after they were captured, or about all of Inspector Lestrade's good qualities. No one who is familiar with the Doyle stories can really believe these passages were written by Doctor Watson at all -- they read as if they had been awkwardly inserted into his manuscript by a suffragette niece.

Horowitz also apparently cannot accept the Victorian world of Good and Evil created by Doyle. Like a true post-modernist, Horowitz is always seeking to add nuance. For example, like everyone who does a Holmes pastiche, he drags in Mycroft Holmes (Sherlock's smarter older brother) and Dr. Moriarty (Holmes's legendary nemesis). (Doyle wrote about Mycroft or Moriarty very rarely -- which helps to explain their lasting power -- but no one else can resist using them.) Horowitz presents Mycroft, who was virtually omniscient in the Doyle stories, as someone terrified by dark forces within the British government. And Moriarty -- Doyle's symbol of pure evil -- is shown by Horowitz to be interested in helping Holmes because he is repelled by certain acts that offend his morals.

Horowitz may believe that his rendering of Mycroft and Moriarty makes these two characters seem more human. But Doyle, a much more talented writer of genre fiction, could have told him that the detective story is a form of melodrama, and that realism is the death of melodrama. No one can actually make characters like Mycroft or Moriarty seem like real people -- the whole point of their existence is that they are supermen. Even worse, Horowitz makes some of detective fiction's most thrilling characters seem boring and ineffectual. We are told that both Mycroft and Moriarty want to help someone get out of prison -- but that neither of them is capable of doing so. This is ludicrous. In Doyle's handling, Mycroft virtually runs the British government, and Moriarty is the master of European crime. Either of them should be able to spring a man from prison without leaving his drawing room. In short, Horowitz has not made his characters more interesting by seeking to humanize them -- instead, he has deprived them of the magic that made them compelling.

Horowitz does somewhat better with Holmes himself. Most modern writers can handle Holmes -- with his artistic and libertarian temperament, he is more at home in our world than a true Victorian like Watson. And Horowitz's Holmes is the only character from the Doyle stories who is truly recognizable here. But even poor Holmes suffers some absurd indignities -- he is overpowered and drugged by his enemies, he is framed for murder and arrested, and he is forced to apologize to the reader for his treatment of the Baker Street Irregulars. Once again, Horowitz has missed the point. We don't read Holmes for his flaws -- we have lots of other stories about flawed characters. We read Holmes to celebrate his triumphs, and to wonder as he pulls together a hopelessly tangled thread of consequences into a deadly noose for the criminal.

And this brings me to my last set of complaints. The Holmes stories are meant to be adventures -- you start with a weird and inexplicable set of facts, and marvel as Holmes explains them to us. The surprise is a big part of the fun. But I don't think anyone will be surprised by Horowitz's story, which basically combines two plots of the quality you could see on a CBS crime show any night of the week. Even these plots are not handled very well -- they are full of holes that even the most eager reader will find difficult to ignore. I couldn't even pass the book along to my boys -- the heart of Horowitz's story involves a sexual element that (in the opinion of this parent) makes The House of Silk improper for the teenage boys who should be Horowitz's (and Holmes's) natural audience.

Horowitz obviously spent a lot of time working through the Holmes canon in preparation for this story -- he makes his version of Watson repeatedly refer to canonical stories in a way the real Watson never would. But in retrospect, I think he should have spent more time studying the BBC's modern interpretation of Sherlock. The BBC set its version in the modern day, but its writers understood that Holmes is a tortured genius, that Lestrade is in over his head, that Mycroft is omniscient (and possibly omnipotent), that Moriarty is never troubled by scruples, and that Watson is an Army man motivated by patriotism and honor, not a maudlin whiner. Most importantly, they understood that Sherlock Holmes stories are supposed to be entertainments, not excuses for modern writers to bemoan the shortcomings of the Victorian world. Holmes fans would be well advised to watch the BBC shows again, and to avoid Horowitz's effort.

Not recommended, either for teenage boys or their parents.