A young boy who came to Douglas’s school for apprentices dies of the deliberately administered overdose of an unknown drug, leading our heroes to a conspiracy that could threaten the very foundations of life in Victorian England. While Watson pretty much existed only in relation to Sherlock, Douglas is his own man, with charitable and business interests that provide the impetus for the case at hand. And while Douglas serves as his foil, the older man is given much freer rein in the narrative than his counterpart, Dr. Mycroft, after all, is nothing if not self-aware, a trait which is a large part of his contrary charm. “That you would rather use your considerable gifts to wield power, to barter it, and eventually to consolidate it.” “I infer that you gain no true sense of accomplishment from solving mysteries,” Douglas went on. “I shall take your advice into consideration, Douglas. “But as an older ally, one who went through heartbreak at least as great as yours, I wish you were less … dour.” I am not faulting you,” he added when he saw his friend’s expression darken. Now you sequester yourself within that carriage of yours, curtains drawn, nose buried in economics. “You are no longer the carefree young man riding through London on horseback, always a hair’s breadth from calamity. “These few years have created a change in you,” Douglas said, refusing to be distracted from the subject. But not quite yet-there are still physical heroics to be had here! In both these and less-taxing pursuits, he finds able assistance in Douglas, who in these pages feels like an even more natural companion than before, his shrewdness clarifying for the reader Mycroft’s emotional and intellectual evolution: In sharp yet convincing contrast is the depiction of Mycroft as a young man who, after suffering the heartbreak of the previous novel, is slowly calcifying into the sedentary curmudgeon familiar from the original stories. His callow youthfulness rang far more truly than in books that try to make him relatable by softening his edges. I also appreciated how young Sherlock-in these pages, still at university-was even more unapologetically obnoxious than in Sir Conan Doyle’s stories. Denning’s Warlock Holmes series is unparalleled in that category).Ī large part of this, I believe, is in the way our authors have boldly filled in the blanks of the Holmes brothers’ lives-particularly their childhoods-in a feat of biographical extrapolation that proves how much they know and love the canon. What I did not expect was a book that has easily become my all-time favorite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pastiche (that doesn’t involve overtly supernatural elements anyway- G. I quite enjoyed that tale of detection and adventure across two continents, and I expected more of the same with the sequel Mycroft and Sherlock. The general opinion was that it was a solid novel that put forward an entirely plausible adventure starring Sherlock Holmes’s older brother as a young man alongside said brother’s best friend, the 40-something-year-old Trinidadian Brit, Cyrus Douglas. Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse is a clever pastiche in the world of Sherlock Holmes that expertly captures the tone of the originals while creating a world all their own.Ī few years ago, I suggested Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse’s Mycroft Holmes to my book club because I thought it sounded like the kind of mystery that was accessible to readers of varying tastes.
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