Murder and cigarettes. That about summed him up

Anthony Horowitz – The Twist of a Knife

There is plenty to be said about the usage of the character of Sherlock Holmes in contemporary fiction, decades after the final “official” story that Conan Doyle wrote. In my research on the Sherlock Holmes character I have encountered numerous stories and novels that utilize the character. While pastiches and parodies of the character have existed since Doyle’s own time, sincere stories told with the character have sprung up since the characters entered the public domain, though some aspects were only free to use by the public since the start of this year (notably, the Enola Holmes film was caught in the middle of a lawsuit for portraying Holmes as more emotional than found in the original stories, with the lawsuit claiming these characteristics only appeared in the final few stories that at the time were not in the public domain). While most of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels published today are done so without the approval of the Conan Doyle estate, there have been notable exceptions.

Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk and Moriarty were advertised as being the first new Sherlock Holmes novels that were not pastiches authorised by the estate, with the Young Sherlock Holmes books by Andrew Lane also having the official stamp of approval from the estate. The two Anthony Horowitz novels were published in 2011 and 2014 but my focus today is on the follow up novels that Horowitz wrote that seem at first glance unrelated to the Sherlock Holmes books. Following the publication of Moriarty, Horowitz published an official James Bond novel before publishing an original mystery book called Magpie Murders, a detective novel about the author of a detective novel who seems to have committed suicide. The novel utilizes a story within a story format, with the detective character in the novel’s novel bearing similarities to Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with Atticus Pünd being German rather than Belgian but bearing many other resemblances to Christie’s sleuth. This novel very much appears to be a modern take on Agatha Christie, as reviewers have noted. But if this book series (the sequel being published in 2020) is Horowitz’s take on Christie, his Hawthorne series of books is his take on Doyle’s work.

The basic premise of a first-person narrator working with a consulting detective for the police in London and writing down the peculiarities of the case and the detective for publication is very much reminiscent of Doyle’s writing. In place of Watson we have Anthony, a fictionalised version of the author who struggles to keep up with the deductions and workings of Hawthorne, the stand in for Holmes who struggles with addiction (smoking cigarettes in almost every scene) and is disliked by the majority of people he interacts with but whose mind is perfect for the role of detective, having been kicked out of the police years prior. In the first, The Word is Murder, we learn that Hawthorne was a consultant on a TV series for Anthony, years before they team up again to solve mysteries together.

It would be very easy to say that the novels appear like Sherlock Holmes stories with the serial number filed off, and that’s exactly what I am saying. Horowitz throughout the novels makes no effort to hide this, frequently referencing the Sherlock Holmes stories and the similarities to the situation Anthony and Hawthorne find themselves in. In the second book, Hawthorne’s book club even end up reading A Study in Scarlet, which the club members dislike and prefer the BBC’s Sherlock adaptation of instead. While only four of the novels have been published since 2017 (the most recent one having released last year), there are plans for at least 12 books in the series. As a fan of the Sherlock Holmes canon, I must say I rather enjoy these novels as modern interpretations of a Sherlockian detective and his less capable biographer, which play out seriously despite some moments of humour. On the other hand, there is plenty to be said about the numerous humorous pastiches of Holmes that exist, though that might be for another blog post.