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Laurie R. King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series has long been an odd, intriguing contribution to Sherlockiana. Russell's intellectual sparring with Holmes vindicates women, dragging Holmes almost kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Her detection method recalls that of a modern linguist or archivist and in that sense is very different from Holmes's forensic deductions. Even in the one canonical adventure that seems crucially to hinge on a cipher, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," the cipher turns out to be less helpful a piece of evidence than a chip from a bullet grazing a casement. In recent installments, King's series has suffered from her impulse to stuff this most avowedly homosocial detective into a heteroerotic box. He turns out to be the secret short-term "paramour" of none other than Irene Adler, "the woman" whose wit defeated him "In A Scandal in Bohemia," a story in which she is most certainly in love with someone else. In King's storyworld, Adler and Holmes have a son, Damian, a sensitive, introverted painter reminiscent of Wilde's tragic Basil Hallward, except, like his parents, Damian Adler is straight. Worse, Mary Russell marries Sherlock Holmes. Yes, that's right. Sherlock Holmes, husband.
Despite this contortion of Doyle's fictional universe, with THE LANTERN'S DANCE, King provides an engrossing reading experience. She achieves this by moving away from Holmes and focusing instead on Russell's investigation of an antique pocket journal that she finds in a box of paintings belonging to Holmes's great-uncle, a globe-trotting French painter who visited colonial India in the middle of the nineteenth century. The journal is written in a cipher, which Russell decodes. Its author is an Indian woman named Lakshmi, whose mother is French, who lived in "Chandernagore" (Chandannagar, Bengal), then England. Lakshmi's story is epic and fascinating. King narrates it in gorgeous yet never superfluous prose. Lakshmi's voice has the curiosity and vehemence that made Mary Russell into an icon, yet is different. Mary Russell's deduction of Lakshmi's biographical details from the historical and cultural contexts of the journal is fun to follow, and shows that all historians have a bit of the amateur consulting detective in them.
Russell eagerly communes with Lakshmi's spirit because they have a lot in common as intelligent women boxed in by various kinds of bigotry. Would Russell solve the puzzle of Lakshmi's identity or the less interesting mystery involving an apparent threat, from India, reminiscent of THE SIGN OF THE FOUR, to Damian Adler and his family? Who is Lakshmi, and how did her journal come into the extended Holmes family's possession? How might her story reveal more about who Holmes is, where he came from, and why he has made his life's mission the kind of detection he does?
King promises to answer these questions, and she definitely answers them. There is a big revelation at the end of the book. Not a terribly unpredictable revelation, but a cataclysm nonetheless. Lakshmi turns out to be more abject than I had hoped but Holmes more complex. A pity about his straightening out. I wanted to know what Holmes, armed with the knowledge Russell extracts from Lakshmi's diary, would do differently in the sunset of his career. To find out, I might read King's next Russell and Holmes adventure.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Sharon Nesvet, February 2024
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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