{"id":847,"date":"2015-01-26T07:52:38","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T15:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=847"},"modified":"2015-01-30T10:47:44","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T18:47:44","slug":"review-the-house-of-silk-a-sherlock-holmes-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/26\/review-the-house-of-silk-a-sherlock-holmes-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel<\/a> by Anthony Horowitz<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I tried to read The House of Silk<\/i> last summer. It took me a week to get through 70 pages, but then I gave up. I just wasn’t in the mood. I\u2019m more in a reading mood lately, and this time I polished off the whole novel in a single day. I am definitely in a reading mood now. Also, the book\u2019s very readable.<\/p>\n

My last several reviews have contained some form of the phrase \u201ca friend loaned this to me,\u201d and I\u2019m almost done with that stack of book. Honestly, this is not the sort of pick I\u2019d pick out for myself. Does a Sherlock Holmes novel not written by Conan Doyle amount to, essentially, fan fiction? Not that fan fiction is, in and of itself, bad. But certainly there\u2019s something about Doyle\u2019s style that only Doyle can do, yes? So why read Anthony Horowitz\u2019s version?<\/p>\n

Because it\u2019s all about character, isn’t it. And I think that when most folks think of Sherlock Holmes, they go with not Doyle but the cartoonified Basil Rathbone version from the late 1930s. On top of that, they may layer the very modern Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Robert Downey Jr\u2019s version. Maybe they\u2019ll even throw in TV\u2019s House, or memories of Encyclopedia Brown.<\/p>\n

The point is, Doyle\u2019s Sherlock is not the only Sherlock, and what Horowitz does is take the Holmes trope and write a mystery around it. And that\u2019s pretty much it. He takes advantage of the Holmes legacy and mentions Moriarty and the Red-Headed League and the Baskervilles and the 7-Percent Solution and all that stuff, but really, at the end of the day, The House of Silk<\/i> is just a mystery novel set in 1890\u2018s London.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s underwhelming. Oh well. Like a sci-fi novel that has lots of fun techno-gadgets to play with, Horowitz has the Sherlock observation\/deduction tricks to play with, which he does, so that the novel is fun to read, entertaining in that sense. But deep, evocative, thought-provoking? No, not really.<\/p>\n

Stereotypical Victorian era London, with snooty aristocrats, ragamuffin street children, pea-soup fog, dens of ill repute, etc etc. All with a modern take on moral outrage to keep the modern reader sufficiently horrified by the novel\u2019s end. If you like that sort of thing, you\u2019ll enjoy The House of Silk<\/i>. If not, give it back to the friend who loaned it to you and return to your Camus.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz My rating: 3 of 5 stars I tried to read The House of Silk last summer. It took me a week to get through 70 pages, but then I gave up. I just wasn’t in the mood. I\u2019m more in a reading mood lately, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-dF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}