Holmes Is Back and Duels With The Devil
Sherlock Holmes: A Duel With The Devil by Roger Jaynes
In 1894, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sick of writing about his popular master detective, attempted to kill him off at Reichenbach Falls in a battle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Unfortunately, the beleaguered author found his creation had already gotten away from him and he was unable to resist the public demand to somehow resurrect him in 1905.
Somehow, then, I don't think Doyle would be too surprised to learn that even his death did not translate into the end of his creation. A steady stream of pastiches-of varying quality-has been published in the past century and there is no sign of their publications slowing down.
As pastiches go, Roger Jaynes' A Duel with the Devil is a decent one. They're not quite as good as the Laurie King novels, but that would be demanding an awful lot. Jaynes manages to avoid parody-an all-too-attractive temptation for many authors-while creating an interesting story that's enjoyable to read. It is by no means a perfect imitation of Doyle, but in many ways, that is one of the strengths of the book and how he manages to avoid parody. Jaynes resurrects characters we recognize by borrowing rather than imitating a style.
Jaynes uses a standard conceit-that of a recently discovered manuscript, a manuscript that Watson withheld from publication because of the sensitivity of their contacts. Watson then proceeds to tell us three tales, all of them involving the early entanglements of Holmes and Moriarty.
The three tales are:
The Case of the Dishonoured Professor
The Case of the Baffled Courier
Moriarty's Fiendish Plan
Strangely enough, I found the strength of the tales to go in that order as well. The first one was the most interesting and the strongest one while the third one, despite being the longest, was the weakest.
The Case of the Dishonoured Professor
The first story is a little slow to launch into the actual mystery, but that's hardly a disadvantage. Those first several pages serve to introduce us to Jaynes' version of Holmes and Watson, establishing their relationship and where they are in the previously established world created by Doyle. In this case, Holmes and Watson are approached by a man whose brother has disappeared under scandalous circumstances. He is convinced that the "known facts" are wrong and that his brother is not guilty of the crime he is supposedly fleeing from.
The investigation reveals that the brother, a mathematics professor at a university from which Moriarty was recently fired, is accused of blackmailing and murdering one of his colleagues. The murder was a brutal one-he was shot and then left on a train track where his body was mutilated. He then disappeared with the woman to whom he was about to announce his engagement. Things look pretty bleak. Holmes, of course, is able to get to the heart of the matter finding out not only what the real version of the events were, but who and what was behind them.
It is this story that I found the most interesting because it was difficult to solve. While I was able to figure out what had happened before Watson did, it was still suspenseful. Also, the machinations of the master plotter-and yes, all of these stories are about Moriarty-are truly evil and fiendish. Jaynes impresses upon you what a danger Moriarty is and how very good he is at covering his tracks.
The Case of the Baffled Courier
This story was equally engaging, but not nearly so suspenseful. Jaynes makes up for this in part, though, by increasing the amount of action and danger woven into the story. Howard Montclair, a solicitor, contacts Holmes with what he sees as an unusual rather than dangerous little problem. He has twice been asked to serve as a courier for a letter, delivering it to a mailbox in a hotel out of town. He's been paid handsomely both times for it. What is unusual about it, is that it coincides with the scheduled delivery of his brother's goods-his brother having been killed in a skiing accident on the continent.
Holmes is quickly able to see to the heart of the matter and launches a plan into action that reveals why Montclair was asked to perform such a strange task. He is also able to uncover and thwart another one of Moriarty's plans.
Moriarity's Fiendish Plan
The third case is the one that had the most potential but is also the one I had the most frustration with. It is by far the longest case and opens up with an intriguing report of vandals who have been spraying red paint and a strange series of runes on important statues around London. It also begins with Moriarty managing to nearly turn Watson into Holmes' assassin.
The bodies begin to pile up as Holmes investigates, snatching leads away from him just as he closes in on them. It is in this story that Jaynes' sportswriting ability serves him the most, as the action is terse, suspenseful, and quick moving.
My complaint about the story is not in how it was told, for it was told very well, but in the plot itself. Once the plot was revealed (which I will not do here), I was left thinking that it wasn't very fiendish at all (excepting for all the murders along the way to the final goal) and that there was no discernible purpose behind the vandalism and the runic warnings. Also, the ending was decidedly unsatisfying because there seemed to me to be a hundred different things that Holmes could have done to dissuade Lestrade from taking the course that the inspector did. Yet, no effort was made whatsoever, just a feeble protestation that Lestrade ought to believe his word.
I was also slightly uneasy with the narration of what took place in Moriarty's lair, a second-hand retelling that Watson recreates in more detail than seems reasonable-especially given that he then uses some of that retelling at a crucial moment later in the story. It stretched my credibility just a little too much.
To its credit, it is in this story where you most get to see the deviousness of Moriarty. If you were unconvinced that Moriarty was a "Napoleon of Crime," you will be after this story. If it weren't for the plotting problems that annoyed me, I would easily call it the best story in the group. However, I simply couldn't make myself believe it.
Highly Entertaining Read
That being said, overall, the stories were good ones. A Duel with the Devil made for highly entertaining reading and I wouldn't hesitate to either recommend the book or pick up Jaynes' next novel. The stories fill in some of the high-stakes duel that Doyle only refers to as the battle for "the very heart and moral soul of London."
If you're a Holmes fan who isn't a purist, pick up a copy of this novel-just released in paperback and hardcover on March 24, 2003. If you've never read Sherlock Holmes, what are you waiting for? Read the canon first and then pick up this collection of stories.
About the Author and Publisher
Robert Jaynes has been a sportswriter for the Miami Herald, Gannett News Service, and The Milwaukee Journal. He's received more than 45 national writing awards for covering various sports, including a "Sportswriter of the Year" award from the Associated Press Sports Editors Association. His sportswriting background is often evident in the terse, quick-moving style that A Duel with the Devil is written in. There's always action and, unlike Doyle, Jaynes wastes very little time in describing the landscape or the details of every face encountered.
A Duel with the Devil is Jaynes' first Holmes pastiche, but he recently completed another one called Sherlock Holmes and the Chelten Fiend and is about to publish another one about Al McGuire, a Marquette University and United States Basketball Hall of Fame coach.
A Duel with the Devil was published by Breese Books-a publishing house that has published a whole line of Sherlock Holmes pastiches by such authors as Val Andrews, Eddie Maguire, John Hall, Jim Gregson, Edmund Hastie, Ian Charnock, and William Seil.
