There are so many Sherlock and Watson retellings and pastiches that I’ve started to skip over them when I see the reviews. Alexis Hall’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, however, caught my eye and I am so glad it did. This book has the Sherlock and Watson characters and hallmarks, but they’ve been transmogrified by a brilliant imagination that also takes from Lovecraft, Sheridan le Fanu, and Robert W. Chambers to create a madcap adventure across space and time with an uproarious Holmes-clone and a comically buttoned-up Watson-clone.
John Wyndham knows he is a fish out of water when he takes up residence in Khelathra-Ven. After leaving his home country for a university education and a tour with the Company of Strangers against the Empress of Nothing, Wyndham doesn’t fit in to his Puritanical, witch-hunting town or family any more. He can barely afford decent lodgings, so he moves in with the highly mysterious and definitely unethical consulting sorceress, Ms. Shaharazad Haas. He’s not there long when Miss Eirene Viola shows up at 221b Martyrs Walk to tell Haas that she’s being blackmailed. She wants Haas to sort it out.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is one entertaining, bizarre episode after another. Wyndham gets dragged along on Haas’ investigation into Viola’s many ex-lovers to find out who done it. Each episode introduces us to weird characters in even weirder locations that are the product of the weirdest histories. Some of the places the two go to aren’t even, strictly speaking, real. Along the way, Haas and Wyndham will occasionally drop bons mots that are almost the complete inverse of dialogue from the original Holmes stories. I laughed every time I recognized one.
Wyndham is a fun character, who often acts as Haas’ conscience, but Haas really steals the show. I loved her utter disregard for social convention, laws, and her fierce loyalty for people she considers “hers.” I also very much loved what Hall did with her source material. I don’t want this to sound like I think this book is derivative. While it’s clear that Hall was inspired by Doyle, Lovecraft, Sheridan le Fanu, and Chambers, she gave free rein to her imagination to spin all of that into something delightfully original—and something that’s a hell of a lot of fun to read.