The House of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel
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I should also add that the plot of the book came very quickly. In fact, by the end of my original meeting, when I hadn’t even accepted the commission, most of it was in place. This is very rare for me and helped persuade me that I should go ahead. Writing the book was also an intense pleasure and I hope I won’t sound arrogant when I say that I think it is my best work. I am not superstitious by nature but Doyle, of course, was a confirmed spiritualist and before I began writing The House of Silk, I went out and bought an old Holmes edition which he had personally signed. It was with me the whole time and that tiny, neat signature became something of a talisman for me. I even felt occasionally (or was tempted to feel) that Doyle was in some way watching over me, guiding my hand. This may sound completely ridiculous but it’s just how it was.
By a strange coincidence, I was invited to give a talk to the Sherlock Holmes society in the House of Commons while I was writing the book and it was then – December 2010 – that I announced it for the first time. I can’t say they were completely overwhelmed. These people take Holmes very seriously. They can recognise a short story from a quotation of three or four words. Once a year they visit the Reichenbach Falls and dress up as their favourite characters. They are not eccentrics or fanatics but they are fairly extreme and they can be found all over the world.
This essay is, in part, adapted from the talk I gave that night. And it seemed important to me to reassure them that I was not going to play fast and loose with their beloved creation. Part of this was commercial good sense. If you annoy the core enthusiasts, you’re going to make enemies you don’t need. I have had contact with several estates – Tintin, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming – and know this to be true. But I was more swayed by a sense of personal responsibility. I liked Sherlock Holmes much too much to want to muck him up.
And so I set out the ten rules which I would have beside me as I wrote The House of Silk – and here they are again. If you’ve read the book, you can judge for yourself how well they were kept and, indeed, if they were worth keeping.
1. No over-the-top action. I’ve already touched on this – but after writing nine Alex Rider novels, this was the most difficult, the most exasperating piece of self-restraint. It’s difficult to think of a modern thriller without gun-fights and car chases. We all know that Holmes is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman and occasionally carries a firearm. But the original stories have a cerebral, even sedentary feel to them. My image of Holmes is in his study, in front of the fire – not escaping from circular saws or diving six storeys into the River Thames. All that I can leave to Robert Downey Jnr. The House of Silk has disguises. There are expeditions to Bluegate Fields, to Vauxhall and to the slums of Boston … but I hope I have managed to avoid the genre-crossing extremes which, though enjoyable, might best be described as Indiana Holmes. I have to admit, though, that I was quite pleased to be able to sneak in the brief coach chase at the end.
2. No women. Of course it was tempting to create a romantic lead, to give Holmes a love interest. But re-reading the short stories before I began work, I came almost immediately upon that famous sentence – ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman’ – and knew at once that it would have been madness to try and create another Irene Adler. I did briefly think of bringing Irene back (I believe she appears in the second Holmes movie) but I felt somehow it would have been taking a liberty and anyway Watson had already set the seal on that subject: ‘All emotions and that one (love) particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.’
3. This is very much related to rule number two. There would be no gay references either overt or implied in the relationship between Holmes and Watson. This was hinted at in Billy Wilder’s film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes which has a scene with Watson tangled up with dancers from the Bolshoi ballet. But it is of course silly and wrong – although I did have an advantage, being a modern writer, in that I was able to examine some aspects of the sexual mores of Victorian England in a way that Doyle could not.
4. No walk-on appearances by famous people. The American writer, Nicholas Meyer put Holmes together with Freud in his 1974 novel, The Seven Percent Solution. Billy Wilder had Queen Victoria. I’ve heard that one Doyle pastiche even has Holmes meeting Hitler! But for me the power of the books is that they largely create a world of their own with very little reference to contemporary affairs. Holmes quotes Goethe, Flaubert, Petrarch, Poe and Winwood Reade but even his most august clients – The King of Scandinavia or Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein tend to be fictitious. This seemed to me to be a good rule so I followed it too.
5. No drugs – at least, none to be taken by Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes now has a reputation for being something of a cocaine fiend, it’s only in The Sign of Four that we meet him when he is actually taking the drug. I was very nervous of doing any post-modern take on Holmes and it struck me that to have him ravaged by cocaine would only detract from the story-telling. I knew that drugs would play a part in the story – I wanted to describe an opium den because Holmes had never actually visited one – but drug addiction was out.
6. Do the research. Try to get the details right. It’s unlikely that the Doyle estate knew this – or cared – but all my life I have read and enjoyed nineteenth century literature: Dickens, George Gissing, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith and so on. This made writing the book and finding my voice a lot easier. I also received a great deal of help from other sources – you’ll find them in the acknowledgements page. That said, I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes too … and will argue (when the time comes) that this is entirely in the spirit of Doyle who was himself occasionally slapdash. Watson’s wound, for example, moves from his arm to his leg. And most famously, in The Speckled Band, snakes cannot climb ropes!
7. Use the right language. It’s quite difficult to pastiche nineteenth century English in a way that won’t put off twenty-first century readers, particularly younger ones. I have to say that I plucked quite a few words out of the original stories to act as guideposts, to give the text a sense of authenticity. My favourites are: ‘snibbed’, ‘foeman’, ‘sickish’ (used by Lestrade) and ‘passementerie’. That said, the book is actually being written in around 1916 and I would imagine that by this time Watson’s own language and writing style would have become more modern.
8. Not too many murders. Again, this is a point that I’ve already made but it was a very important discipline to set out at the start. And actually, when I count up the bodies, it does rather looks as if I’ve failed.
9. Include all the best-known characters – but try and do so in a way that will surprise. Mrs Hudson is there, of course, as well as Lestrade, Mycroft and Wiggins. In each case, I added very little to what was known about them simply because it seemed to be taking liberties. I have, however, given Lestrade a Christian name … Doyle only every provided an initial. And of course, I had to have Moriarty in the book … that was obvious from the start. Even so, I shied away from making him the main villain. It’s odd that a character who is only mentioned in about three of the Sherlock Holmes stories and who only appears in one should have had such a huge impact on crime fiction. Perhaps it has something to do with his name? I loved including him in Chapter 14 and although I have no plans to write a second Sherlock Holmes novel, I have a suspicion that the two of us will meet again …
10. Rule number ten was the most important rule of all and as I am writing this in August, before the publication of The House of Silk, I don’t yet know if Orion will have twisted my arm and made me break it (the rule, not my arm). It was this. When publicising the book, never, ever be seen wearing a deerstalker hat or smoking a pipe. I actually asked my agent to put this into the contract.
By the time you read this, I will know if The House of Silk has been a success or not. All I can say is that I have never written a book with more pleasure nor been more pleased with the result. This essay appears, I believe, in the ebook. Doyl
e, who was always a man ahead of his time, would have had no trouble with it but personally I find it hard to believe. No paper, no cover, no back cover blurb? But then I always was old-fashioned. The nineteenth century is where I most like to be.
Anthony Horowitz
August, 2011, Crete
Ten Fiendishly Difficult Questions about Sherlock Holmes
1. Who wrote ‘Dynamics of an Asteroid’?
2. What was Victor Hatherley’s profession and which part of his body did he lose?
3. What do the killers in The Speckled Band, The Lion’s Mane and Silver Blaze all have in common?
4. What was Mary Watson’s maiden name?
5. What links The Greek Interpreter, The Final Problem, The Empty House and The Bruce-Partington Plans?
6. Why is The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone unique?
7. Napoleons plus students plus gables plus orange pips equals what?
8. What relevance does the answer to Question Seven have to 221B Baker Street?
9. Who was ‘the second most dangerous man in London’?
10. Name the odd one out: Inspector Lestrade, Wiggins, Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson.
ANSWERS
1. Professor Moriarty.
2. He was an engineer. He lost his thumb. (The Engineer’s Thumb)
3. They were all animals.
4. Mary Morstan.
5. Stories in which Mycroft Holmes appears or gets a mention.
6. It’s the only Holmes story told in the third person.
7. 17. (The Six Napoleons, The Three Students, The Three Gables, The Five Orange Pips).
8. There were seventeen steps to Holmes’s rooms.
9. Colonel Sebastian Moran (The Empty House).
10. Dr John Watson. The others have no Christian names.
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2011 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Anthony Horowitz 2011
The right of Anthony Horowitz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 3384 1
Orion Books
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5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Preface
One: The Wimbledon Art Dealer
Two: The Flat Cap Gang
Three: At Ridgeway Hall
Four: The Unofficial Police Force
Five: Lestrade Takes Charge
Six: Chorley Grange School for Boys
Seven: The White Ribbon
Eight: A Raven and Two Keys
Nine: The Warning
Ten: Bluegate Fields
Eleven: Under Arrest
Twelve: The Evidence in the Case
Thirteen: Poison
Fourteen: Into the Dark
Fifteen: Holloway Prison
Sixteen: The Disappearance
Seventeen: A Message
Eighteen: The Fortune-Teller
Nineteen: The House of Silk
Twenty: Keelan O’Donaghue
Afterword
Anthony Horowitz on Writing The House of Silk : Conception, Inspiration and The Ten Rules
Ten Fiendishly Difficult Questions about Sherlock Holmes
Answers
Copyright