The Sorceress and the Prude

[mtvessel]

Sep 2020
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter - Alexis Hall – Ace, 2019
* * *
There is something about the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that seems to attract fan fiction writers like bees to buddleia. This is a bit strange if you think about it. On the one hand you have Holmes, whom many would argue is more a logic machine than a fully rounded human being, and on the other you have Watson, who, apart from his bizarre and not entirely honourable habit of chronicling his friend's activities for commercial gain, is as boringly conventional a character as any in fiction. I guess this explains why so many writers feel the urge to come up with spicier variants on the Holmes/Watson relationship (for example, The Oxford Despoiler). How successful you regard these takes to be probably depends on how much you are invested in the original pairing. This one, which envisages Holmes as a powerful sorceress called Shaharazad Haas and Watson as an uptight trans man called John Wyndham, will certainly not please if you care deeply about the originals because it largely abandons any pretence of mirroring its inspiration within the few first pages. The fantasy novel that is built around them, however, is quite entertaining.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a blackmail letter received by Sharazad's ex-lover Eirene Viola. She wishes to marry Cora Beck, a warden of the Ubiquitous Company of Fishers, but their union is threatened by a threat to expose a dark event in Eirene's past. Sharazad deduces that one of five possible suspects must be responsible; the proprietor of a dark theatre, a notorious crimelord, a jilted lover, a vampiress, and an ex-noble who is now a revolutionary. Investigating them, however, proves to be quite a dangerous endeavour, even with a powerful sorceress as a companion.

I enjoyed the Cthulhu mythos-influenced worldbuilding which had some fun ideas (I particularly liked students having to live in a sunken city and commute to college by submersible because it was the only place with reasonable rents). There were also some nice set-piece encounters. However, the characters other than the two main ones were oddly unmemorable and the plot is too episodic to cohere into anything meaningful. The most irritating feature for me, however, was Wyndham's bowdlerisation and censorship of his descriptions of Haas' speech and actions, and his constant asides to the reader that he is doing this despite the admonitions of his publisher. I get that he is supposed to be a prude who grew up in a puritanical state, but the constant repetition of the joke rapidly grows very stale. Nor does it seem consistent with Wyndham's status as a cultural outsider. I suppose it could be argued that withholding of sensational details is a trait borrowed from the Watsonian original, but if you are going to re-work another author's literary relationship, it behoves you to at least try to do something interesting with it.