Having given up on no fewer than three Sherlock Holmes pastiches in this final entry for my Tuesday undertakings this month, I return to the source: what was for me the book that got me reading stories about Holmes not written by people called A. Conan Doyle or J.D. Carr, The House of Silk (2011) by Anthony Horowitz.

For reasons that elude me now — it’s not like there was a shortage of Sherlockian pastiches in 2011 — I remember being very excited when this was announced. Horowitz was, at the time, very much a children’s author with only one previous book for grown-ups to his name, the utterly bizarre and somewhat ingenious The Killing Joke (2004), which has lingered out of print and so is, one rather feels, unloved in Horowitz’s oeuvre. Perhaps it was because Horowitz was an unknown quantity in this field, and the Conan Doyle estate had nevertheless plucked him from relative obscurity to pen the first official Sherlock Holmes novel since Doyle’s death…

[Side note: people bring up The Italian Secretary (2005) by Caleb Carr around about this point in the conversation, and the internet tells me that that had the “approval” of the estate, but I’m not sure if “approval” means “Yeah, this is official in the canon!” or “Mmmm, we don’t hate it!” or “We acknowledge your writing of a book you’re legally allowed to include the character of Sherlock Holmes without contravening any copyright.” Argue it out amongst yourselves]

…there was something exciting about that prospect. So I snapped it up, devoured it, and came away — with one caveat — very excited about the world of the Sherlockian Pastiche, a world which, further exploration has shown, isn’t always as kind to the characters as Horowitz was here. It made me a fan of Horowitz on the spot, I’ve bought every other novel for grown-ups he’s written since, and clearly the Doyle estate were happy since he went on to write Moriarty (2014), a novel which, if also official in the canon (and we’re not sure it is), surely cries out for a third volume because, well, there are some contradictions.

What Horowitz gets right is the pace of his plotting, which perhaps fills in a little more detail that Doyle’s works would and gives us a Holmes that doesn’t need to add anything ridiculous — he’s Moriarty, he’s a vampire, he’s the Hound of the Baskervilles and a vampire and Moriarty — in order to make the character interesting.

“I sometimes wonder how I will be able to find the energy or the will to undertake another investigation if I am not assured that the general public will be able to read every detail of it in due course.”

Consulted by Edmund Carstairs, who has been followed from America by the last member of a gang he had a small hand in wiping out in a bloody shootout, it is initially right that Holmes turns down the case because, well, what case? There’s no sense of who the man is or where he may be found, and it is only once the Carstairs house is broken into and a theft achieved that there is really any crime for our intrepid detective to assist with. The scene is set well, the information all provided to Holmes’s acute brain, a few tantalising threads thrown out (“I wonder if Mrs. Catherine Carstairs is able to swim.”) and, as far as Holmes is concerned, the whole thing cleared up very quickly indeed.

I love this. I love that Horowitz’s Holmes is only holding on to revelations until the end because his ego demands it (“Holmes would never reveal what he knew without an audience. I would therefore have to wait.”) and not because there’s anything especially tricky in the setup to genuinely confound him. This is absolutely something that Horowitz gets right, the sheer, overbearing intelligence of the man, and I really enjoyed seeing this on the page here since it’s been markedly absent from the other pastiches I’ve read this month, with the sorts of trifles that would barely take him the flick of an eyelid to solve draaaaagged out so that a novel can be made of some minor problem.

Of course, murder results, and Holmes and Watson find themselves drawn into a conspiracy that reaches so high up into government that even Mycroft cannot help them. And again, Horowitz builds well from here, with the pair confronting new ideas within the canon, and the various set-pieces — the prison escape in particular — showing a delightful ingenuity, hinting at an author having a wonderful time playing in a sandbox the like of which he never thought would be open to him.

I like, too, that his older Watson is slightly sassier…

She was a grey-haired, sour-faced woman who sat with her arms wrapped around her as if she were afraid that the building would contaminate her unless she could keep herself as far away as possible from its walls. She was wearing a small bonnet and had a fur stole across her shoulders, although I shuddered to think what animal had provided it nor how it had met its end. Starvation seemed a likely option.

…and builds on the canon in a way that feels appropriate, being at the time of writing an old man who lost his closest friend and has had to endure years without him.

It is curious to reflect now, at the very end of my writing career, that each and every one of my chronicles ended with the unmasking or the arrest of a miscreant, and that after that point, almost without exception, I simply assumed that their fate would be of no further interest to my readers and gave up on them, as if it was their wrongdoing alone that justified their existence and that once the crimes had been solved they were no longer human beings with beating hearts and broken spirits. Never once did I consider the fear and anguish they must have endured as they passed through these swing doors and walked these gloomy corridors. Did any of them ever weep tears of repentance or offer prayers for their salvation? Did some of them fight on to the end? I did not care. It was not part of my narrative.

Most of what’s here is delightful, and Horowitz is to be commended on the tightness of his plotting, the clarity of his ideas, and the excellent way it all pulls together in the end.

However.

I find it pretty damn incredible — and not in a good way — that the Doyle estate, having been no doubt told what the House of Silk was going to turn out to be, were, like, happy for that to be the resolution of the new official Holmes novel. It’s a topic that no doubt deserves to have a light shined upon it, and which fiction is well-placed to work with, but, honestly, I find it so out of keeping with the nature of the rest of the Holmes canon that it holds me back from being too effusive in recommending this. I am staggered that Horowitz was allowed to do it, and I sort of wish someone had stopped him: because, yes, it works perfectly in the story he is writing, but it’s hardly in the spirit of the universe he is adding to.

And yet, there’s a clear deliberation behind it, which almost makes it worse. Horowitz folds in the existing canon beautifully — references to ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891), ‘The Resident Patient’ (1893), ‘The Devils Foot’ (1910), and others litter the narrative with a spryness and familiarity that shows the sheer amount of effort that has gone into making the world breathe…and I’d honestly be fascinated to sit down and discuss with him the decision to go to such a place. Obviously the decision wasn’t made lightly, but, yeesh, the book would be so, so much easier to recommend if it didn’t veer so violently into darkness in those closing stages.

As when I first read it, The House of Silk is something of a curate’s egg: a magnificently careful and loving homage to one of the most influential characters in fiction, taking care to show how well-written Doyle’s original stories are…

The fog, thick and yellow, was unfolding through the streets, deadening every sound. Vile, it seemed, like some evil animal snuffling through the darkness in search of its prey and as we made our way forward it was as if we were delivering ourselves into its very jaws.

…and being never less than faithful and thrilling in its construction. But that ending, and the topics it introduces, really does make for a very different book from what the overwhelming majority of people who picked this up would have expected, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I feel it all the more acutely, too, for how close Horowitz gets to perfection, but, well, let’s stop lamenting and move on. I’m still not sure anyone has equalled this in tone and structure when writing about the World’s First Consulting Detective, and I keep searching in the hope that someone might just manage it. So, if Horowitz wants to write a conclusion to his trilogy, you’d nevertheless find me at the front of the line to buy it. Fingers crossed…