Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most indelible characters. Scores of short stories and novels penned by his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and numerous "untold" adventures by 20th and 21st-century writers continue to keep Holmes alive and sleuthing.
Then there are the offshoots — not quite Holmes novels but definitely Holmes-like. David Pirie's "The Dark Water," a chilling Victorian tale of mystery and villainy, is a brilliant example of this category.
Holmes aficionados know well the story of Conan Doyle and his muse, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was Doyle's university professor at Edinburgh and later served as inspiration for the author's literary detective. Bell was able to size up a stranger — to know the unstated — purely through the science (and art) of astute observation and deduction. It might be scrape marks on a shoe, an ash of tobacco or a calloused hand and, well, the rest was "elementary."
The imaginative Pirie builds on this legend and offers a fictional account of Doyle and Bell's adventures in private crime detection. "The Dark Water," which will be released in paperback April 1, opens with a thrilling sequence as Doyle is drugged and tortured by his nemesis named Thomas Neill Cream. Doyle's captor is an evil mastermind akin to the infamous villain of the Holmes stories, Professor Moriarty. In fact, it quickly becomes clear to the Holmes fan that "The Dark Water" will foreshadow "The Hound of Baskervilles," "The Dancing Men" and "The Final Problem."
Needless to say, Doyle escapes from the clutches of Cream, and soon "the game is afoot." In Pirie's tale, Bell plays Holmes and Doyle his Watson. Like "a bloodhound with the scent," they track down Cream to the cursed seaside port of Dunwich. The novelist paints a vivid picture of a port breached by storms, the lower town taken and the last church on the cliff falling away, "its graveyard slowly crumbling grave by grave, as all the bone and decayed flesh scattered into the North Sea." From here, the story hurtles into perplexity and darkness.
Dunwich is an eerie setting, with a legend "more famous even than her witch, the notion that on a stormy night you could hear the sound of the old town's bells ringing out under the ocean." The witch of Dunwich and talk of a rune play parts in the grim adventure, as well as new mystical apparitions: The novel chillingly describes a human "with pale skin, and it was crawling. And then I saw the head, a big head, and, while I watched, it howled. Like a madman it howled."
True to the tradition, Pirie writes Bell, our Holmes substitute, as logical, emotionally distant and astute. While there is no deerstalker cap or calabash pipe, there is plenty of mystery, forensic investigation and bravura displays of deduction.
But "The Dark Water," which is Pirie's third Doyle-and-Bell novel, is weakened by references to earlier encounters with Cream and a lost love, Elsbeth, as told in Pirie's other books. For the uninitiated, the missing history bogs the story down in the early chapters, but soon an intimacy develops that makes the past seem present.
And what of the prose? Is it true to Doyle? Sadly, no. But comparing any 21st-century writer to Sir Conan Doyle is like comparing a Hollywood screenwriter to Shakespeare.
Conan Doyle was one of literature's finest writers, sans any footnotes. His descriptive power was first rate and his turn of a phrase was eloquent, yet distinctly masculine — none of that Brönte or Austen nonsense. His characters were fresh and durable.
The world has changed much since Doyle's time, and so has its expectation of literature. Finesse has been supplanted by speed. Readers want to come at their thrills head-on, not sideways.
In that sense, Pirie's style delivers. He seals the reader in a dank and ghastly 19th-century England, and his plot draws you in like a snake does an unsuspecting rabbit.
The cast is alive. The Victorian stage is set. With enough imagination, ingenuity and murder to satisfy any crime-solver, "The Dark Water" would make a great BBC production. 21st-century praise, indeed.
Grade: 4 out of 5
