The time is here for our most free-form book club yet. Our goal here is to discuss any Sherlock Holmes retellings or adaptations you have read (doesn’t have to be in the past month or two) and how they reflect on both the larger mythos of Sherlock and what it takes to tell a good story based on another.
For those of you returning or who might be joining in for #CannonBookClub for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome, you don’t have to be registered for CBR11. The topics are numbered, and we ask that you refer to them below by that number to help people find the conversations they are looking for. If you are responding to someone else’s thoughts, please try to reply directly to them.
We will also be talking on our Social Media platforms, and of course in our Facebook group, Cannonball Read Book Chat, we’ll have some additional prompts so please join us there as well.
On to our topics:
- Which retelling did you read, and why?
- As discussed in our previous book club, Holmes and Watson have come to be viewed as archetypes for certain types of characters. How are those archetypes used in your selection?
- Did the retelling you read build on the core characters in Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic, or rely on them?
- What essential characteristics of the secondary characters (Mycroft Holmes, Lestrade, or Irene Adler for example) were used in your remix?
- How much or how little does an adaptation need to “use” from the original for a good retelling?
- What qualities of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing style carried through?
- Did the allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing style positively or negatively impact your reading experience?
- How did the remix compare to the original?
- I have a thought that doesn’t fit with the above topics, meet me in the comments.
Come! The game is afoot.
#1 I read two adaptations.
First: The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall. This one I just happened to pick up from my library’s new book shelf, and then it turned out to be a Sherlock retelling. It was fate!
Second: The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield by John Lennon. It was just so wild that I found that he’d been into Sherlock and had written this. It was, in a word, BONKERS!
Question 1: I had quite the Sherlock retelling year this year! For Christmas, I got a copy of Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. I was so intrigued by that I bought the first in that series, Mycroft Holmes.
Finally, after discovering Anthony Horowitz, I read his House of Silk.
I loved all three of these novels, but House of Silk was the real stand-out for me!
I just started his novel The Word is Murder!
The Word is Murder and the Sentence is Death are fun! I enjoyed those, and then I read House of Silk and Magpie Murders and I’m a fangirl now.
KimMiE, although the stand out for you was House of Silk, & I will be picking that up at some point, are the books co-written by Kareem worth the time? I have been curious about them for a while. Thanks
Hi Mark, I really liked those, too! Although I have to say they are really up my street; I’m not going to pretend they are great literature. But they are fun and they fueled my desire to know more about the characters in early life. Mycroft & Sherlock is stronger, in my opinion. You can read my review here:
https://cannonballread.com/2019/02/mycroft-holmes-and-mycroft-and-sherlock-kimmie/
Thank you!
A 1: I have like 50 bazillion arcs right now that I’m struggling to get through, so I didn’t read a new retelling this month. Previously though, I read Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte and the two following books. They are YA books set in a New England prep school and around Europe with a gender flipped Charlotte Holmes and narrated by Jamie Watson.
A 2 & 3: In Cavallaro’s world, Jamie and Charlotte are descended from the original Holmes and Watson, and the two families have been entwined for generations. Charlotte is very much the offbeat genius with a drug problem and Jamie is the everyman chronicler of her and is also kind of overly emotional. I would say that Cavallaro both relied on our understanding of the Holmes and Watson archetypes, but also built on them and evolved them to fit into a boy loves unattainable girl dynamic.
A 4: The Moriarty family also plays a role in the series. And of course, Charlotte has a Mycroft like older brother.
A 8: I think Cavallero had some interesting ideas – what would a modern day descendants of Holmes, Watson and Moriarty look like and how would the mythology impact their families. Bot Cavallero leaned pretty hard on aspects of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope for Charlotte and made a weird toxic triangle between Charlotte, Jamie and August Moriarty. Jamie increasingly becomes a gross and entitled “good guy.” I stopped reading after the third book because it was just too icky.
I read A Study in Scarlet Women and A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas (who also named her genderswapped Sherlock Charlotte) and I LOVE that she split the various characteristics across several characters and I think it worked really well.
Its set in the same historical time-space, but she really broadens the type of characters we see.
I had planned on either reading Sherry Thomas or the science fiction book where Sherlock is an AI, but life happens.
I’m reading A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas. I love gender swaps and this one did not disappoint.
5. I think it depends on the end goal how much an author needs to pull from the original to tell a good remix.
There are definitely some retellings I’ve read over the years and I wouldn’t have known if I wasn’t told – and to me that makes them good books on their own merits but not good retellings. For me, a good retelling for its own sake, needs to have enough of the original’s connective tissue without feeling like its been made using tracing paper.
1. I recently re-read “Shadows Over Baker Street” a short story collection that places Holmes in a Lovecraftian universe. Why did I read this. Because the idea of Holmes, the ultimate rational being, having to confront the cosmic and ineffable beings that exist in Lovecraft’s stories was utter catnip for him. While the stories varied in quality, there were several that were outstanding
4. While most of the stories are focused on Holmes & Watson, there is one that focuses on Adler and is one of the standout pieces in the collection, Tyger, Tyger allows Irene’s intelligence and quick thinking to shine as she confronts a creature that would have confounded even Sherlock
5. One of the strengths of the Holmes stories is that one can take elements from them and still remain true to the original tales. The Neil Gaiman Tale “ A study in emerald” is an excellent example of this as it is an inversion of the traditional Holmes story, as he is the criminal being hunted, yet absolutely true to Doyle’s vision of the character. Plus, it combines many elements from Kim Newman’s “Anno Dracula” so I can assure you it is fun.
9. I recently reviewed on this site a series of books involving Holmes & Lovecraftian, but rather than rehash them here you can read them yourself. They started out strong & really faltered by the end
This sounds interesting. Do you need to be a Lovecraft fan to appreciate these stories? Not that I’m opposed, I just haven’t read anything by him (which is sort of surprising–my husband has a giant volume of Lovecraft on his nightstand).