Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare (The Watson Files #1), by J.R. Rain & Chanel Smith
Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare by J.R. Rain
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I learned to read by secretly snatching my mother’s early 20th-century editions of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Since then, the fascination with anything Holmes has never left me. Many have tried to spin further tales of Holmes and Watson; some did well, others failed miserably. This one, sadly, falls into the latter category.
The story is rather convoluted, albeit light in detail. Watson is reduced to a mere admiring fan, trapped in a constant "reverie and renewed admiration for Mr. Holmes", while Holmes himself is more of a generic action hero than a detective. In one particularly jarring scene, "Holmes delivered a punishing uppercut to the man’s jaw" so hard his feet left the ground, before the detective "delivered an unforgiving heel kick to his jaw to finish him off". This isn't the Holmes of Baker Street; it's a Victorian John Wick.
The writing is mediocre at best. It begins with a clumsy "find-and-replace" job of the opening of “A Study in Scarlet”, even bizarrely changing St. Bartholomew’s Hospital to "Bart’s Clothing" (apparently Watson was a tailor before he was a surgeon?).
»On that very same day, I was standing at the Criterion Bar, when I was tapped on the shoulder by a young man I recognized as having worked as a dresser under me at Bart’s Clothing before the war.«
When a book can't even decide if its protagonist is a doctor or a clothes shop manager, you know you're in for a rough ride.
The authors also have Watson break the fourth wall to tell the reader, "you all know how things progressed from there... don’t you?" It’s a move that feels less like a narrative choice and more like the authors admitting they couldn't be bothered to write their own setup.
Whenever the authors felt they found a "great" old-sounding word or phrase, they used it ad nauseam. For example, Watson often “ejaculates” words - at one point even "ejaculating his name in surprise" - or relentlessly refers to Holmes as his "dear friend and colleague" and "good friend" in a way that feels utterly performative.
Furthermore, the prose is riddled with jarring anachronisms that shatter any sense of the period, such as Watson mentioning having "regular sessions with a mental therapist" to handle his transition back to London. The problem: this kind of therapy hadn’t been developed yet.
There are huge information dumps at several points in the novel that attempt to make up for the lousy storytelling but only succeeded to further annoy me. Even the central mystery is resolved almost instantly through a lazy application of "backward reasoning" that feels less like deduction and more like a script skip.
If you’re a Holmes connoisseur, stay away. One star out of five.
Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam
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