Sherlock Holme Book Review - Sherlock Holmes and the Disappearance of Andrew Ivory
Posted by Steve Emecz on
Tom Turley (Sherlockian Author)
Having dealt with most of “the Immortals” (e.g., Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis) in his American Literati series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, Daniel D. Victor has lately turned to lesser-known—but still engaging—authors such as Frank Norris, Julian Hawthorne, and Anna Katharine Green. Here his subject is Carolyn Wells, who wrote almost two hundred mysteries and other works between 1896 and 1942. Many featured Fleming Stone, her stand-in for the Great Detective. In Victor’s latest book, as always, Dr. Watson presents the factual case (1906) behind Wells’ novel The Disappearance of Kimball Webb (1909), the only work in her vast oeuvre published under a pseudonym. Wells had her reasons, for the focus of Victor’s story is not Carolyn Wells or Sherlock Holmes but two young Anglo-Africans who found their way into London’s artistic and intellectual élite.
One is the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose music is still remembered on both sides of the Atlantic. His fictional friend, an Oxford graduate named Andrew Ivory, is at work on a book in which he writes: “[I]f a black man follows the rules, he can succeed in England.” Then Ivory disappears upon his wedding day. Not at all coincidentally, his fiancée is white. Dan Victor weaves a darker tale of thwarted marriage than Conan Doyle’s “The Noble Bachelor,” but all the elements of a good Holmes pastiche are there: multiple “red herring” suspects, an ingenious variation on the “locked room” trope, and a latter-day Scotland Yarder’s contempt for the retired Great Detective.
At the end of Victor’s story, a saddened Coleridge-Taylor learns the truth, a truth that Wells did not admit in her retelling of the case. “In England, the prejudice is repressed, hidden, secret. We educate the most accomplished people of colour from the colonies, and then we send them back home to extoll the virtues of empire to their fellows." But not, of course, the ones who break the rules. The 13th tale in Victor’s series is a thought-provoking novel that I highly recommend.
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About This Book:
An Anglo-African bridegroom disappears on the day of his London wedding in 1906, and Carolyn Wells, an American mystery writer who is visiting the bride's mother, enlists the help of Sherlock Holmes to find the missing man. With inspiration from the classical music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the defiant prose-poetry of W.E.B. Du Bois, Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Carolyn Wells confront the gruesome murder that underlies the groom's dramatic disappearance. Ambitious musicians, a scheming writer, and an overbearing detective from Scotland Yard make progress difficult for the sleuths, but thanks to his knowledge of chemistry, Sherlock Holmes achieves as much justice as is possible in a world riddled with racial prejudice and professional jealousies.
Author Dan Victor
ISBN 9781804248225
Book 13 in the American Literati Series