Moriarty Returns a Letter: A Baker Street Mystery
Robertson has amassed good mileage—and some really good novels—out of the world’s endless fascination with Sherlock Holmes, going well beyond the old chestnut of claiming to have come across a mislaid Watson manuscript. Robertson’s protagonists are a couple of drily funny British lawyers who work out of offices at 221B Baker Street. They get sacks of mail from people who believe Holmes is real. Occasionally, a letter will pique their interest and send them off on the trail of a miscreant. The novels began as wonderful mixes of suspense, detection, and muddle-through comedy, though the tone darkened as the series went on. This latest has gone grim. It begins with the whipping of a half-naked man with a knotted rope, then moves to a bombing death, and the entry of the flippant heroes halfway through doesn’t lighten the tone. There’s a subtext here: the evil is loosed because gullible people believed, like the letter writers, that Holmes existed. The novel can be read as a warning against believing in fairy tales, or simply as an artfully done mystery. --Don Crinklaw