Keeping King's Characters Safely Locked Away
Locked Rooms by Laurie King
As any Laurie R. King fan will tell you, her books are always about something. The genre is merely the vehicle by which she explores her topic.
Want examples? In A Darker Place, she explores cults, religious communities, and the fine line between the two. In Folly, she delves into mental illness and depression. In To Play the Fool, her exposition reveals much about the tradition of fools throughout history. Monstrous Regiment of Women merges a look at mysticism and turn-of-the-century feminism. Justice Hall explores World War I and the British policy on deserters.
Granted, each of those stories are buoyed by a strong sense of storytelling: compelling characters, tension, mood, and strong plot. But woven in amongst the story is a well-researched exploration of some topic.
Locked Rooms, the latest in her Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series, continues this tradition. In its pages, King unfolds the horrors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She's meticulously researched both the earthquake itself and the resulting fires. She then manages to put a human face on it by taking us to meet people whose lives continue to be affected by it, even years after the event.
In Locked Rooms Russell and Holmes have left India where The Game took place and are now headed for San Francisco so that Russell can take care of some family business. On the way there, she is haunted by recurring nightmares that force her to face her own past and the death of the family that she loved.
King examines many other things in this novel besides the earthquake. She takes a look at repressed memories-why we repress them and what they can do to us. She glances at the interpretation of dreams. It is one of the odder moments that the highly rational Sherlock Holmes is much quicker to put stock in the evidence of dreams than even his theologically and psychologically oriented wife.
There are also many pages devoted to feng shui, including an explanation for why it is more rational than it appears despite its heavily mythological languages. Holmes may complain about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's obsession with the mystical, but he himself walks far closer to the spiritual side of life in these stories of his advanced age than he ever did in the original canon.
King also takes great joy in literary meetings. It's almost become a hallmark of the series. It begins, of course, with the very introduction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his best-known creation, Sherlock Holmes, in The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Later in A Letter of Mary, Dorothy Sayer's Peter Whimsey makes a brief appearance. Then in The Game, we get to meet Ruyard Kipling's Kim.
In this novel, it is the turn of Dasheill Hammett to make an appearance. This time, it is purely the writer who participates in the mystery, not his creations. By including him, she not only pays tribute to one of the greats of the genre, but she is also able to take jabs at the mystery-writing genre. There is a brilliant moment in which a fictional character speculates about what it would be like to be thought of as a fictional person.
On the downside, the plot of this novel and King's usual mastery of suspense suffers somewhat. It becomes more important to allow Mary time to explore her past and what it means to her than it is to keep the plot going. This leaves several holes in the story. There is no good explanation for why she is immediately shot at and then the danger abates for nearly a week, even though the villains have every reason to step up their efforts.
Too often, King indulged the comfort of her protagonists at the expense of the story. Long-time fans who have come to care about the characters will appreciate that they're finally getting a break. Unfortunately, it weakens the story and will make it far less compelling to anyone new to the series.
In a slightly different twist than in the past books (though reminiscent of the later books in Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series), the novel is split into different points of view, ostensibly from two different manuscripts. Given that Holmes does not reveal all that he did and was worried about to his partner, the narrative must sometimes switch to his point-of-view. This is done by having "Russell" sections written in the first-person and "Holmes" sections written in the third person. It's the first time in the series that we are able to see Mary through eyes other than her own. It also gives us a new look into the character of Holmes himself.
This book is far from the best in the series, but it does open a window into Mary's past, pushing her development as a character while allowing King to take us on yet another tour through history.
