It was Conan Doyle who coined the phrase, about art in the blood and the curious forms it can take. It was inevitable then that someone would sieze the opportunity to weave something altogether more substantial from the remark. And weave away the author certainly does, spinning a spider web of mystery and intrigue, lifting it from mere pastiche to a wholly enjoyable in its own right. "Sherlock Holmes is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation." The author had me at the very mention of Holmes off course but to play a mental game of "Did he really have a go at the Ripper mystery?" was just the blood red icing on the cake.Some one had donated it to the Oxfam book store and I thank them. "..disatrous Ripper investigation.." oh be still my beating and throbbing imagination.It is not that long since I read Sherlock Holmes And The Breath Of God so my mind has not strayed that far from Baker Street, although this feels an altogether swarthier tale than that one. That one felt like a League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen spin off but this feels more Doyle like, despite its use of the real and the imagined. In that first book our heroes met a right rum bunch of old coves, satanists, ghost hunters, ghost breakers and charlatans which all goes quite a bit Grand Guignol by the end of the affair. This one feels a bit more grounded in a post Victorianna sort of way.Although the presence throughout of the morally ambigous French detective Vidocq lends the affair a certain Gaellic frisson. Make off that what you will, Vidocq certainly does. In his eyes, to do what thou wilt remains the whole of the law. So to speak, ahem...
As far as sherlockian ( Er, Holmesian?) pastiches go this is easily one of the best i have read in some time. Quite good enough to stand as an original text without the bookend of it being another found lost manuscript by Mr Doyle. It flowed really easily, nary a moment of it feeling it had no place in the canon, despite the appearence of some equally fictional detective figures and real history beings. Axtually that canon has been fored so many times it is difficult at times to recognise the ammunition of prose bnecessary to feel part of the history of Holmes. Like Doctor Who the character has had so many lives and staggers under the weight of over a century of continued story telling.
