Book Review - The Baron of Brede Place

The Sydney Passengers - Passenger's Log Volume 30 No.1

This is the second novel in a series thus far of twelve, with the overarching title Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati. The purpose of this series is to involve Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson with writers from America, but set in England during the period Holmes and Watson were active, late Victorian and Edwardian England.

In essence, this novel is a retelling of the Conan Doyle story, ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’. In this case and in a helpful bibliography at the conclusion of the novel, Mr Victor has centred his story on the expatriate group of American writers living in England in the late 1890s. One of these is an absent Stephen Crane, the writer of The Red Badge of Courage.

Crane is in Cuba as a newspaper reporter covering the American-Spanish War of 1898. He is also working on an unfinished novel about a young American rent boy who he is living with in Havana. It is this situation for which Charles Augustus Milverton is blackmailing Crane, along with the fact that Crane’s “wife” Cora is a former brothel owner in America and not divorced from her legal husband.

The crime of blackmail is brought to 221b Baker Street by Crane’s friend Harold Federic, an American novelist and London correspondent for The New York Times. We meet Federic’s extended “family” – another source of Milverton blackmail – late in the tale. Milverton’s attempted blackmailing of Lady Eva Brackwell is introduced, and the story continues on the path of Conan Doyle’s original tale with a similar, but different, ending, with a nod to The Story of the Man with the Watchers and a hint of The Great Gatsby, which is not strange for an author with a PhD in American Literature.

This is a well written reimagined tale of ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’. The only reservation I have with the novel is that the principal American author for this story is Stephen Crane, but as he is in Cuba for the majority of the novel, he remains a somewhat indistinct character, unlike his “wife” Cora Crane.

Recommended for those interested in a variation of ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ and the expatriate group of American writers in late Victorian and Edwardian England.

The Baron of Brede Place is available from this site and all good bookstores.

It's book 2 in the American Literati Series.