Good Night, Irene

Since his creation, Sherlock Holmes has been considered to be one of the greatest of all the literary detectives. Authors have reinterpreted the Holmes canon in new and unexpected ways. I am just beginning to realize how many Holmes interpretations are out there. One of my favourites is the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King. My mother recently advised me of a new interpretation - the Irene Adler series by Carole Nelson Douglas. Thus intrigued, I ordered the first book, Good Night, Mr. Holmes, from the library and read it immediately.

I will say that I prefer the Holmes in the Mary Russell series: there he is a little more human, instead of a merciless, mechanical, thinking machine. However, with Irene Adler as the heroine, perhaps that is to be expected. There was also a brief moment of bait and switch at the beginning of the novel when I read along in the first person, thinking I was hearing the voice of Irene Adler, only to be surprised several pages later when the narrator became introduced to Irene Adler! However, perhaps that is more the fault of the person who wrote the blurb on the back of the book than the writer, for not indicating the true provenance of the narrator. Irene Adler is a known commodity in the Holmesian world; Penelope Huxleigh, not so.

After I recovered from my initial shock, I quite enjoyed the book. Penelope is an interesting and intelligent narrator, and her cool intelligence and morality are a perfect foil to Irene's passionate sense of drama and intellect. Penelope is Watson to Irene's Holmes; but a Watson with her own gifts to bring to the deduction of mysteries. Just as the Holmes stories are about male friendship, so is this book about female friendship. There is also a nice contrast between Irene's free-spirited American feminist and Penelope's parsons'-daughter conventional Victorianism. The two characters relate nicely to one another and their friendship is enjoyable and believable.

The story is a touch oddly plotted in that it suddenly seems to skip a number of years while alluding to other events that happened in those years that we are not privy to (and that presumably do not intersect with the mystery plot underlying this narrative.). My point only is that I don't think that the gap in years is necessary for the novel - a gap in months would have sufficed.

One should know the Holmes stories well to read this book - I like how the author weaves Irene Adler into the established Holmes mysteries (beyond "A Scandal in Bohemia"). It is like seeing the other side of the story - the side that Conan Doyle did not write about.

I also enjoyed the descriptions of Victorian law and lawyers as represented in the person of Godfrey Norton. Penelope learns how to type and becomes a typist - in essence, an early form of legal assistant - to Godfrey Norton. He and his family are also the subjects of a mystery which causes him to be tangled up with Irene and Penelope. Now, I've read "A Scandal in Bohemia" and I know how that turns out. I know that Irene Adler marries Godfrey Norton in the end. But I hoped against hope the whole book that somehow that would change and it would be Penelope marrying Godfrey! That seemed a more likely pairing. However, the author is constrained by the source material.

In general, I really quite enjoyed the book. I was annoyed at first to find the book not in Irene's voice (and I still think she deserves a starring role and a chance at first-person narration) but I grew to like Penelope and enjoyed the relationship between the two characters. I am interested to read the other books in the series to see how the worlds of Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes intersect behind the curtain - as it were - of the Conan Doyle stories.