Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, and Company© 2011 Anthony Horowitz
ISBN 978-0-316-1970-4

While his wife is assisting her former employer (Mrs. Cecil Forester) deal with the severe bout of flu being suffered by Mrs. Forester’s son, Watson has returned to spend some time with Holmes.  Very soon, three cases engage Holmes’ attention.  First, art dealer Edmund Carstairs, asks Holmes to find the man who has apparently been following him.  He suspects the man of being Keelan O’Donaghue, the surviving member of a gang of thieves who destroyed (accidentally) a shipment of paintings he had sent to an American client.  And, it appears, this man has broken into his home and stolen a family heirloom necklace.  With the assistance of the street urchins dubbed the Baker Street Irregulars (especially Wiggins and Ross), Holmes traces the necklace to a pawn shop, and follows that up by tracking down the apparent thief—whom he finds murdered in a cheap boarding house.

The second case follows directly from the first—the young boy, Ross, who found the pawnshop, has disappeared.  He is found murdered, after being tortured.  Holmes traces him back to a school/home for young orphan/homeless boys from the streets of London.  Ross Dixon, to give him his full name, had run away from the Chorley Grange Home for Boys (presided over by the Rev. Charles Fitzsimmons).  This, however, appears to be a dead end, but for the piece of white silk tied around his wrist.

And the third matter Holmes is called upon to investigate involves the mysterious House of Silk.  No one knows what it is, or what it does.

Horowitz manages this fairly complicated narrative very well.   And he does an excellent job of the setting (London and its environs in winter), Watson’s character and narrative voice, and Holmes’ as well.  (Holmes is a difficult character, I think.  It’s difficult to make someone who is portrayed as being more-or-less emotionless, as a creature of pure logic, also as an interesting and occasionally empathetic friend.)  Lestrade has a fairly prominent role to play, and not as the complete dunce of a police inspector that Conan Doyle made of him.  Obviously, all this being Holmes, all three strands of the investigations are successfully resolved, although I can’t say that we feel particularly happy about the implications of the various resolutions for the characters involved.  As pastiches of the Holmes saga go, this is one of the best I have read.  [Horowitz has written one more—Moriarty (2014), which I intend to get to soon.]