Customer Reviews

Night Watch: A Long Lost Adventure In Which Sherlock Holmes Meets FatherBrown

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Any author who undertakes to "do" Arthur Conan Doyle takes a great risk.

Trying to emulate the great Mr. Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories can be dangerous,
indeed. But Stephen Kendrick in "Night Watch" has done a splendid job of presenting yet
another Sherlockian story. Naturally (and would we expect otherwise?), this one is a
long-lost Watson recollection, but no matter.

Kendrick's story is quickly afoot and the pace never slows down. Tis the season:
Christmas Day, 1902, in London. A group of international religious leaders are meeting
and, voila, a corpse in their midst! A priest is found murdered, a real grisly affair.
Immediate authorities are without a prayer, and Holmes is summoned. Kendrick presents
all the standard clue requirements (red-herrings, too!), baffling to everyone but our
Sherlock. In an interesting--and delightful--twist, Kendrick enlists the aid of the liturgical
side, too, in the form of young Father Brown!

Kendrick has done his homework well and the novel provides great insight into the
setting/situation, as well as presenting a great story line. Not being a totally committed
dyed in the wool Doyle fan (I can appreciate him, but he's not my favorite writer of the
genre!), I found Kendrick's "version" an exciting piece to read, one that certainly kept my
interest as his suspense is well-paced and captivating. A fun book to read! (Billyjhobbs@tyler.net)

This new addition to the Holmes canon will be very welcome reading, certainly to the Baker Street faithful and also to those who haven't had the pleasure of meeting Holmes and Watson before. "Night Watch" is cleverly plotted and written; Kendrick amplifies Conan Doyle's somewhat spare style without breaking the mood of the original stories. Many Doyle characters we know and love show up--even Mycroft drags his substantial butt out of the Diogenes Club--and also we have an interesting encounter with Father Brown in his early days, for good measure. The best test of a Holmes story is how you feel when you've finished it--and finishing this book, I felt the same way I did on finishing "Hound of the Baskervilles": sorry to see it end, and wanting more.

From the publisher's blurb:
"Holmes and Father Brown have but one night to solve the grizzly murder..."
Well, how hard can it be to find a large North American Brown Bear in an Anglican Church?
Sigh...
"Grisly"... not "grizzly". "Grisly" is a kind of a murder. "Grizzly" is a kind of a bear.
This might be the best Holmes-homage yet, but when publishers themselves have no regard for the language that pays their bills, it is impossible to take anything they say - or print - seriously enough to want to buy it.
Throw out your spell-checkers, and READ.
Don Hawthorne

Night Watch is a passing good mystery story. It has trappings of the gothic-- spooky, nocturnal settings; seemingly supernatural happenings; and an interweaving of frightening superstition. The plot also has some enjoyable complexity-- such as when Sherlock solves the mystery, but later, Father Brown re-solves it again, this time with a somewhat different explanation of events!

The book's subtitle suggests a balance between the detective genius of two literary master detectives-- Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. However, this promise is not delivered. We meet Father Brown when he is very young in this novel, just approximately 20 or 21 years old. He says little or nothing throughout most of the book, and appears as a minor character at best. In the closing pages of the novel, Holmes seems to sense Brown's promise but that promise is simply stated, not dramatically rendered. Holmes says of Father Brown, "don't let that stolid round face and those blank grey eyes fool you. Brown's a little genius, mark my words."

Holmes himself is too meditative -- a kind of crackerbarrel theologian. He waxes philosophic a bit too often. He is portrayed near the end of his professional career, and Watson explains that as Holmes has aged, he has begun thinking more about higher, meditative sorts of truth. But even though Watson states this, it does not jibe well with the Holmes' portrayal as an acid sort of skeptic whom we came to know in the original Arthur Conan Doyle books.

I don't want to seem too hard on Mr. Kendrick's novel. It was entertaining to a point, and provided some entertainment on a chilly autumn evening. However, it can't compete in quality with several other recent pastiches (imitations) of the Sherlock Holmes books, such as those written in recent years by Larry Millett.

Stephen Kendrick enters the Holmes pastiche realm with this meeting of Holmes and Father Brown. Creating a murder mystery set at a secretive international religious conclave, Kendrick sets an interesting table. Populated with familiar characters (Mycroft, Lestrade, Watson) and using the clever excuse that this was Watson's undiluted (by Doyle) account; Kendrick creates a page turner. But the little errors kept nagging at me. Like when Holmes states he never caught the Ripper because "he was too random, impulsive and totally haphazard," then in the next paragraph Holmes says, "The odder the murder, the easier it is to solve." The Ripper murders were not odd? Later Kozan, the Buddhist monk, compliments Holmes twice on his familiarity with Buddhist principles. Did he forget the first conversation? I'm usually not that much of a nitpicker but these types of errors interfered with my enjoyment of this book.

This is a wonderfully entertaining book with an extremely clever plot. The use of world religions added an interesting backdrop to the tale and I learned some new traditions. This was obviously carefully planned out and, though the clues are all there for anyone to see, it would take a rare mind to pick up on them. This book is a terrific holiday gift for anyone who loves the London of Sherlock Holmes.

What would happen if the immortal detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown met with a brutal murder to solve?

This is the fascinating question posed by Rev. Stephen Kendrick's 2001 Book, Night Watch. The plot of the story is that Sherlock's Holmes' brother, Mycroft, the British's government's most indispensible man as Sherlock Holmes described him, calls his younger brother in to investigate a murder. The rector of an Anglican Church is found dead in his church, with his body mutilated. The prime suspects: leaders of the world's major religions who'd gathered in Britain for some inter-religious dialog. Father Brown is serving as an interpreter for a visiting Italian Cardinal.

The murder and its solution are fantastic. However, the story is dragged down because of some errors in Kendrick's writing mechanics and also because Kendrick's story was frequently derailed from the story to Kendrick's religious agenda. In part, the book was written to back up Kendrick's assertions in Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes which seems to suggest that in Holmes later days in became someone who could best be described as "spiritual and not religious." Unfortunately, the author seemed to work too hard on this angle, which distracted from the main point that readers who weren't enthusiasts of Universalism picked up the for: a murder mystery.

Kendrick's treatment of Holmes, Watson, and Brown was good, but in places uneven. I found some of the conversations between Holmes and Watson not entirely believable and out of place in a mystery novel. Kendrick's Holmes was a cut below Doyle's in solving the case, and Kendrick tried a cheap out by simply saying that Doctor Watson's accounts had been exaggerated or unrealistic. To be fair, Kendrick is hardly the first author of a Holmes pastich to use that out. What Arthur Conan Doyle created in Holmes was a bit of a mental Superman, and like Superman it's very hard to come up with a worthy opponent for him. So, it's far easier to move the character closer to reality.

His portrayal of Brown, while not having the flair of G.K. Chesterton, and leaving the character a little flat was still essentially the same orthodox Catholic priest that readers have come to know and love. Given that Kendrick, as a Unitarian Universalist, comes from a completely different theological perspective than Chesterton, he deserves to be commended for not trying to tamper with the character, as some interpretations have tried to change Brown into their vision of what a Christian should be rather than the character Chesterton created.

Of course, in a two-detective story, one detective usually draws the short straw, and Brown clearly has the back seat to Holmes. However, in Chesterton's books, Brown off hung around in the background until coming forward to the solution to the crime.

Kendrick's deserves credit for the audacity of it all. He's the first author I know of to try and bring these giants of detecting onto the same stage. And he produces an interesting, albeit not completely satisfying tome. Here's hoping that others will follow Kendrick, and this isn't the last Holmes-Father Brown crossover we see.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes-type mysteries who appreciate a historical setting will relish Nightwatch, a mystery set in Edwardian London telling of a priest's murder during a secret high-level interfaith meeting. It's up to Sherlock Holmes and Watson to uncover the roots of the murder, embroiled in both religious and political connections - with assistance from priest Father Brown. The added emphasis on psychological motive makes this especially intriguing.

This becomes such an oddball story. It touches a lot on religion, though, the main characters are admittedly not believers. It has Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, involved, though he is reputed to refrain from leaving his club. It also has Sherlock not truly solving the crime, though he does get it mostly right. I had a hunch the solution was what it was from the beginning, which makes this story a bit obvious.
Sherlock and Watson are tapped to solve a crime in a church. The church was holding a secret meeting of religious persons from around the world and the host priest is murdered. Mycroft is there as an adjunct to the police from the government (he is so important).
After reading the story, I read that the author is a priest, so the religious side became obvious.

This book is excellent! First, is is true to Doyle's original style and second it a wonderful read. One of the best non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes novels I've read.