Customer Reviews

The Holmes Inheritance

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This is, heaven help us all, the first of a series. A sequel, "The Holmes Factor," has just been published. I stumbled on this book by accident and, bestirred by memories of excellent Sherlockian pastiches by August Derleth and John Dickson Carr, I decided to give it a try.

In the normal course of events, having read a book of such imposing ineptitude, I would simply sigh a little despairing sigh about time wasted and go on with my life. However, the author has chosen to preface his book with the following boast: "my efforts throughout to avoid offending the thousands of worldwide devotees of one of the greatest and best known characters in modern English writing constantly imposed upon me the research required for a non-fiction book." That statement, I think, makes him fair game. So here goes.

The gimmick of this series is that it chronicles the career of a son of Sherlock Holmes, Sebastian Holmes, born of a liaison entered into by the great detective after his little set-to with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Since that scuffle took place in May 1891, it follows that Sebastian could have been born no earlier than the spring of 1892.

The year in which this adventure takes place then assumes some importance. Winston Churchill is First Lord of the Admiralty, so it can be no earlier than 1911. World War I has not yet broken out, so it is no later than mid-August 1914. As the second book is specifically set in 1913, since Churchill seems firmly accustomed to his governmental post and as a shooting party is organized at a country estate in Virginia, I think it reasonable to assume that the tale takes place in the summer or fall of 1912. Sebastian, then, is a callow youth of twenty, or less.

For the purposes of this story, First Lord Churchill sends this boy scout to America with no particular brief or intelligence service contact, just to find out something ... anything. Naturally, the boy trips over whole battalions of the spies that P.G. Wodehouse and Aleister Crowley, two other young Englishmen visiting the United States at about the same time, inexplicably missed. When Sebastian asks for a little walking around money, Churchill obliges the lad with a transfer of £4 million (about the cost of a battleship, a dreadnaught) . . . yeah, right.

Callow Sebastian even manages to run into A Woman, one Princess Anna, no less. The lady travels under her own name, pretends for some curious reason to be an Austrian princess, although she sports the accent of a Berliner. She quite correctly assumes that neither Sebastian nor anyone else will be bright enough to look her up in the Almanach de Gotha to discover that she's really a Prussian (as though it makes any difference.) Since Sebastian is the unexpected son of Sherlock, can we readers have any serious doubt that Princess Anna will eventually turn out to be the daughter of Irene Adler in some later book of this series?

And those spies, their basic schemes don't seem to involve doing anything illegal. They are busy buying small quantities of American-made arms and relatively microscopic quantities of ammunition for shipment (after a stopover in an English port!) to Germany--just what a country with the Krupp Armaments Works really needs. Oh, and some German museum must have asked for examples of antique weapons, so the so-called spies have also bought some Gatling guns. It is 1912. Europe basks in a long summer of peace, and has been doing so for more than forty years. No American arms company would hesitate to make a nice, tidy little foreign sale like that. Why, they'd boast about it in the annual report.

Consider Sherlock Holmes. Freemantle has him residing at 221B Baker Street, busily engaged in his profession, Mrs. Hudson in attendance. Plainly, the wheels of Mr. Freemantle's research have fallen off, for early in 1904, Dr. Watson had announced in the pages of the Strand Magazine for all the world to know that his friend Holmes had retired to Sussex to take up bee keeping. (Holmesian scholars tend to put the actual retirement date no later than December 1903.) For the year 1912, we know precisely what Holmes was up to. He certainly was not standing by to watch his boy handle his first case. No, he was undercover, probably in the United States, as an Irish-American mole, steadily burrowing his way into the spy ring of the infamous Von Bork, a task he would complete just as a cold east wind swept over England in August 1914.

Freemantle treats us to spycraft by giving us numerous pages of Sebastian's secret communications in a code so secure that it transforms plaintext "freighter" into "FREEIGGHTEER" (page 265). Somehow, I am not impressed. Freemantle's grasp of historical characters appears less than firm when we note that Churchill hobnobs with a certain sailor named Jack Fisher rather than the better known Admiral Jackie Fisher. He has Sebastian listen to the daily news on a radio, a very neat trick, since commercial radio broadcasting effectively began in the mid-1920s.

Freemantle's America of 1912 is a little off kilter. Both the country and many of its inhabitants have a curiously European tone. On the other hand, a prosperous Virginian is said to own a "plantation." An Irish cop in New York describes something as "kosher"--nah, I don't think so, not in 1912. Sebastian buys a Smith and Wesson revolver. As he is a complete idiot, he carries it fully loaded in his pocket. When he has need of it, he doesn't think he can pull it out of his pocket AND click off the safety before he'd be overwhelmed. The safety? On a revolver?

A comment on the style in which the book is written: High Commercial Hack. There is not a memorable line, image, idea or snatch of dialogue in the whole thing.

The tale of Sebastian is irrelevant, of course, for Holmesians know that there is far better evidence for quite another son of Sherlock Holmes. Just as suggested for Sebastian, he was born while Holmes traveled to avoid the vengeance of the Moriarty Gang. His mother, however, could be none other than The Woman, Irene Adler. The boy was born in Montenegro. His safety demanded that he not bear his father's name, but he did take the same syllables and the same vowels. As an adult, he bore stronger resemblance to his Uncle Mycroft in mind and body than to his father. He followed in his father's profession, though, and he was equally lustrous in it. His name was Nero Wolfe.

At the outset it should be noted that the Publisher's Weekly review (above) is quite misleading. Fans of Sherlock Holmes know that Mycroft is not anybody"s "rival politician" but a Mandarin of the permanent civil service and for amny years a very powerful man. And Sherlock Holmes, in this story, is as vigorous as ever; his apparent disability is a device to throw off the evil plotters. I would have to take issue with Mr. Freemantle as this is not his usual fare and the attempts to recreat Doyle's style is not a complete success. The plot itself reflects the Holmes pastische much more than it does Doyle himself.

The plot revolves around Winston Churchill's efforts to learn if the German's are (this is on the brink of World War I) trying to undermine the neutrality of the United States in Germany's favor. Churchill is played as himself. The character Sebastian Holmes is played as a headstrong youth who should probably not have been sent on this mission. But the story is strong enough to carry the characters along and it has an ending which helps to pick up the pace at the end. In fact, pacing seems to be a real problem here. And, having Sebastian keep up with the news on the radio in 1914 is a big stretch. I've read about 20 of Freemantle's novels. This is not one of his best.

Sherlock Holmes has an illegitimate son sent to America in search of pro-German workings just before World War One. Back in Lonson, Holmes and Watson stay in London and play at being grumpy old men while Mycroft complains about Churchill. Sebastion Holmes talks to everyone, and talks, and talks, endlessly. This book was so dull it took a full week to finally reach the end.
Worse than the dullness was the complete lack of anything resembling historical accuracy. The radio is listened to by several people a full decade before it was invented. Watson suspects Holmes of indulging in his "old habits", something he never did on a case. A postscript implies Churchill all but arranged the sinking of the "Lusitania" and repeats the lie that the second explosion was caused by contraband munitions exploding, when it was known long before the 2004 publication of this mess that the cargo hold was discovered fully intact by the same undersea cameras that found the "Titanic" and the second explosion was likely caused by the coal dust igniting as a result of the torpedo hitting it, as the U-Boat captain had written in his log at the time.
Impossible as it seems, Brian Freemantle's take on Holmes makes even worse reading than the ones by Alan Vannerman! Too bad Amazon only goes as low as one star, this one's really a zero.