Author: Vaughn Entwistle
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Rating: WORTHY!
I'm not a big fan of novels which take real historical characters and have their way with them. It seems disrespectful, if not misleading or downright insulting, so I must confess up front that I had a problem with that, and it was only because it was Doyle and Wilde that I found myself drawn to this one. Who wouldn't be intrigued by a pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde?! But given that Holmes is fictional and Wilde is not, then I would certainly consider the next best thing: Holmes's creator, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and Wilde. Curiously, Wilde's birth year, 1854, is the same as Holmes's fictional birth year. So this is what was offered, but it did fall a bit flat for me. Doyle seemed altogether too adolescent, and Wilde was nowhere near as entertaining as he ought to have been. It's difficult to see where this can go as a series.
I should confess also that I do not believe in any of the psychic and supernatural nonsense purveyed in this novel. There is no respectable evidence whatsoever that there is any such things as ghosts, life after death, mind-reading, levitation, teleportation, clairvoyance, or any of that flim-flam, and there is much evidence that the people claiming these abilities or experiences are at best misguided and lacking a solid scientific education, and at worst, delusional, lying, or knowingly fraudulent.
Having made that clear, I do like a good supernatural story, but have a hard time finding one. I did like this novel and enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go in terms of becoming a series, especially since there were so many "trifling annoyances" in the text, which I shall delve into shortly. This is a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it takes place immediately after he's killed off Holmes (in tandem with with his arch enemy Professor James Moriarty) at Reichenbach Falls at the end of his story: The Final Problem published in December of 1893. In this fictional account by Entwistle, Doyle wants to move on from these trifling (I love that word!) stories and create something new (in actual fact he wanted to devote more time to his historical fiction), but the reading public hates him for destroying their beloved hero to the point where they're pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables at one point (which seemed rather excessive and exaggerated to me).
It so happens that Doyle is contacted in a rather mysterious way by someone who is a medium, and who has foreseen her own destruction at a seance to take place in the near future. Doyle is angered by, and dismissive of this encounter. Later, he starts to feel that he was wrong, yet when he revisits the address where he met this woman (very mysteriously in the dark), he discovers no one is there. His friend Oscar Wilde becomes so intrigued by the story that he volunteers to accompany Doyle when he goes to the inaugural meeting of the Society for Psychical Research where this deadly seance is due to take place.
The novel is well written, if a little too modern in general style for what Entwistle seemed like he was trying to do, which is to evoke Doyle's style. Indeed, it reads more like an Agatha Christie or a Charles Dickens novel than a Holmes mystery. The Victorian influence in some areas of the novel seemed at odds with the modern influence in others. For example, with the "disguising" of names and addresses. Yes, it was done back then, but given the rather modern tone of the novel, I saw no point in doing it here. Nor did it really disguise the address: 42 _______ Crescent! Victorian London was large, but I'll warrant that there were few "crescents" in it even then, so I found that weak attempt at anonymity to be rather fatuous, and especially given that the blank line was repeated annoyingly often!
There were many other minor issues, such as the curious case of the repetitive repeating! Yes, we know that Wilde has full lips and large hands, and that he smokes Turkish cigarettes! There honestly is no need to lard the text with repeated references to these attributes.
Entwistle purposefully misspells the name of Daniel Home (a well-known "psychic" fraud) - using 'Hume' throughout this novel. The name was pronounced 'Hume', but it was spelled 'Home', and Home himself added the 'Dunglas' in the middle of his name - it was not his name from birth. Contrary to descriptions used in the novel, Home wasn't American (not by birth). He merely resided there, but he was, in fact just as Scots as Doyle. Entwistle owns up to this misspelling in the Author's end note, but I found it rather insulting that this author evidently thinks that his readers are not smart enough to grasp that Home should be pronounced 'Hume' once it's explained. Why not embrace it and have one of the characters mention this at the start? I have to say I disagree with his approach here. And contrary to Entwistle's assertion that Home was never caught faking, he was indeed caught faking on several occasions, and damning evidence of his fraud was discovered in his belongings after his death.
On the topic of names, I don’t get why Entwistle consistently refers to the main male protagonist as Conan Doyle. It’s not an hyphenated name and is the equivalent of referring to Wilde as Wills Wilde, which he does not do. It seems oddly irrational and inconsistent to me. Whilst on the topic of Doyle, I might mention that he was primarily an ophthalmologist, not a family physician as such. Although he obviously did have the training, it's a bit misleading to represent him as a general practitioner, especially since he really never practiced!
Note that contrary to Entwistle's misleading description, moths do not eat clothes or other fabrics. It is the larvae of the moths which do the eating, most specifically the larvae of Tineola bisselliella, and then they eat only natural fibers preferably containing keratin, not synthetic - which of course were in any case scarce in Doyle's era. On this same lack of understanding, Entwistle appears not to grasp that the plural of candelabrum is candelabra - as any writer of that era would have known. While candelabrums is acceptable (odd as it may appear to some of us), I doubt a writer of that era, which Entwistle is evidently trying to emulate, would employ it. He gets further into trouble with this when he employs the singular candelabrum to indicate what is clearly more than one candlestick on p131.
There are also inconsistencies in the novel. The most glaring one, to me, was that Lord Web arrived after we’d been informed that Thraxton Hall had been cut off from outside society by the flooded river, and yet not one person remarks upon this. If the Hall was cut off, then how did Webb get there?
It may seem inappropriate to involve Doyle in the supernatural, given his dedication to resolving mysteries in perfectly mundane and scientific manner through his Holmes character, but the truth is that Doyle was sadly gullible when it came to the psychic charlatans of his era. Indeed it was why Houdini, the scourge of frauds, broke off his friendship with Doyle.
Entwistle is misleading in claiming a big age difference between Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor. They were close to the same age, and both in their early to mid-fifties in 1893, so she was not the young flirt as she's rather shamefully represented here. Indeed, she was dedicated to women's issues, so I found Entwistle's depiction of her to be insulting.
But enough nit-picking. What of the story in general? I found it enjoyable and engrossing, notwithstanding the problems I had with it. I wanted to read it and was interested in what happened, so the author did his job. I was intrigued by the idea that the medium, Lady Thraxton, might have been a ghost. In order to find out, you will have to read the novel! She was definitely a charming and interesting character who was under-used in my opinion, but as appealing as she was, I found myself far more intrigued by another character who played far too small a role in the story, most of it undercover. No spoilers for you there!
So, in short, I found this novel to be a worthy read. It was very easy to get through it, but it seems to me that it will appeal more to they who enjoy Victorian supernatural tales than for they who are fans of Sherlock Holmes or of Oscar Wilde.
