Book reviews

Sherlockian Books for Young People

Book Cover: Eye of the Crow by Shane Peacock Peacock, Shane. Eye of the Crow. Toronto: Tundra books, 2007. 250 pages. Ages 10-16+

Youngsters who relish a rousing good mystery should certainly enjoy Eye of the Crow, the first case in Shane Peacock’s "The Boy Sherlock Holmes" detective series. This adventure, set in 1867 London, is a real page-turner, filled with surprises, including a teenage incarnation of the future Professor Moriarty and the adolescent Holmes’s first romantic interest, Irene Doyle, a prelude to his adult attraction for another Irene, “The Woman,” Irene Adler.

When the novel opens, Sherlock is a thirteen-year-old misfit, brilliant, bitter and bullied at school, living in a dreary flat in an East End slum and dreaming of a better life. Sherlock’s mother is well-born, the daughter of an upper class family who has committed the social sin of marrying a man considered “inferior,” despite his above-average intellect and university education. She had defied her parents and eloped with an intellectual Jew, and for this rebellious act of flouting tradition and Victorian propriety, she has been disowned by her family. Sherlock’s father has been denied his deserved opportunities and prevented from achieving his full potential. Only low wages and poverty-level employment are available to him, while Sherlock’s mother has to supplement their meager income by providing singing lessons to the daughters of the wealthy.

Thus, because of his parents’ status as social outcasts, Sherlock bears the emotional burden of their romantic rebellion. Without friends, solitary by both nature and choice, Sherlock has only his wits and his resolve to aid him in seeking a viable sense of his own identity. Given this bleak prologue to his future career, Holmes’s canonical reticence regarding his earlier family life and the sordid squalor of his youth is quite understandable and plausibly explained in Peacock’s narrative.

Nevertheless, the boy Sherlock is indeed fortunate as he enters his teens, for his sharp powers of observation and deduction are clearly evident even in this dark world. Viewing the London scene all about him, he finds pleasure in applying his intellect to the analysis of even the tiniest details and subtlest behaviors of all those he chances to meet. Peacock’s young Holmes is depicted as having all the emerging talents and many of the character traits which will reach their full development in the iconic adult Master Sleuth. His relentlessly probing eye, his complex and enigmatic ego, his absolute integrity and unflinching pursuit of justice, and his commitment and perseverance in seeking truth are all visibly realized in the juvenile Sherlock. Peacock has created a fascinating figure and an appropriate model hero for his audience, one who will well deserve to become a favorite character of his young readers.

In the beginning of this adventure, a beautiful woman is the victim of a vicious stabbing. In the dead of night, shrouded in a yellow fog, she is left to die in a pool of blood in a dark alley. There are no human witnesses to this horrific crime, only an ominous flock of crows. They, and a missing diamond, will play a key role in the Boy Sherlock’s solution of the mystery surrounding her brutal murder.

Partly to entertain himself, Sherlock focuses his analytical eye on the shocking crime, treating it as a challenge to his budding detective skills. More than once, he finds himself compulsively drawn to the murder scene, where on one occasion, he encounters a young Arab, who will soon be accused of the killing and arrested for the crime by Scotland Yard’s Lestrade, the father of a later Lestrade. Aided by Irene Doyle, the younger Lestrade, and even by his ongoing childhood nemesis, the bullying gang leader Malefactor, Sherlock races about London on his quest to save the innocent Arab suspect. But once the “game is afoot,” even Sherlock himself is accused of the crime. Since in 1867 Victorian London thirteen-year-old boys are hanged for crimes far less serious than murder, Sherlock must now not only save the Arab but he must save himself as well.

Finally, when Sherlock begins to visualize the murder through the eye of its only witness, he is able to perceive the truth at the heart of the mystery, freeing the Arab and clearing himself. However, a fatal error during his investigation and the tragic result of that error forever alter young Sherlock’s life, thus forming the complex, very private character whom we revere today as the World’s Greatest Detective.

This reviewer highly recommends Shane Peacock’s Eye of the Crow as the first case of a new series of youth-centered Holmes pastiches. Although not part of the juvenile audience, this 71-year-old Holmes devotee thoroughly enjoyed this adventure of the young Sherlock. Readers, even those much older than 16, should find this tale a fun read.

Peacock, Shane. Death in the Air. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2008. 254 Pages. Ages 10-16+

In Shane Peacock’s second well-paced, suspenseful adventure Death in the Air (not to be confused with Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mystery with the same title), in the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the future Baker Street detective again joins forces with his attractive young ally, Irene Doyle, and the crafty teenage gang leader, Malefactor, Sherlock’s rival for Irene’s attentions. As readers of Eye of the Crow now realize, this unlikely part-time childhood partner in detection appears to be an early avatar of the much more formidable adult Professor Moriarty, as Miss Doyle images that other Irene, Irene Adler. Here too is the elder Inspector Lestrade as Sherlock’s early foil, and a new ally, the daring young aerialist known as the Swallow. This youthful hero is only one of the many well-crafted characters in Peacock’s narrative.

During the sweltering heat of July, 1867, the thirteen-year-old Holmes still suffers from the shock of his mother’s unexpected death the previous May in that squalid East End rookery known as The Seven Dials. Sherlock carries a heavy burden of guilt because of her death, the result of his investigation of the brutal back-alley stabbing of a lovely young woman. Now dedicated to solving such mysteries, Sherlock immerses himself in another case, that involving the notorious Brixton Gang, a brazen and baffling robbery, and a violent death in the midst of an extremely popular public entertainment.

Sherlock’s father, a university-educated Jewish intellectual and societal victim of Victorian anti-Semitism, is currently working at London’s famed Crystal Palace, a masterpiece of pseudo-Gothic Victorian architecture erected to dazzle the world with the marvels of British technology and culture. The boy dectective himself is now employed by a kindly apothecary, Sigerson Bell—medical man, scientist, even Victorian alchemist, who becomes both friend and science tutor to Sherlock. Years later, during his “great hiatus” following his supposedly fatal plunge over the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes will assume the identity of a man named Sigerson, and disappear from 1891 to 1894. It is also interesting to note that his mentor’s last name is the same as that of the Edinburgh University physician and professor who was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical professor and mentor in deductive logic, Dr. Joseph Bell.

Acknowledging his debt to Dr. Bell, Conan Doyle wrote this in an 1892 letter:

It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place [Holmes] in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward. Round the centre (sic) of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go—further occasionally . . .

Sigerson, Irene Doyle, and other such references, in both Eye of the Crow and Death in the Air, are examples of Peacock’s affectionate homage to the particulars of Doyle’s own life, as well as to elements of the original Canon.

Visiting his father at the Crystal Palace one day, Sherlock joins a host of spectators at one of Victorian England’s favorite entertainments—the acrobatic skills and netless highwire dynamics of trapeze artists and tight rope walkers like Leotard, Blondin and the Flying Farinis. During this performance what appears to be a terrible accident occurs, when, without warning, the master aerialist, Monsieur Mercure, “the bird-like leader of the flying Mercure family,” with a heart-wrenching cry, plummets 100 feet to his death upon the Palace’s wooden floor virtually at the feet of the stunned Sherlock. Just before he dies, the bleeding and badly broken acrobat manages to gasp two cryptic words into Sherlock’s ear; “Silence . . .me . . .,” he rasps. In the frenzy that follows this shocking tragedy, the consistently perceptive youth sees what no one else notices—something odd about the trapeze bar lying beside the twisted body. And based on what he observes, he suspects murder, so for him “the game is now afoot.” However, what the adolescent sleuth does not yet know is that his investigation will lead to a rift between Irene Doyle and himself and expose them both to danger from the ruthless Brixton mob.

As Sherlock dashes through a vividly drawn and sharply detailed London, from Mayfair to Charing Cross to the grimmer East End and still magnificent Crystal Palace in a city suburb, the reader races along beside him in his quest to solve the puzzle of the daring robbery, discover the identity of the Flying Mercure’s murderer, and bring the vicious Brixton gang to justice. Peacock’s narrative is suspenseful and well-paced, his characters are engaging, and the Boy Detective is appropriately brilliant, admirably committed, and intensely energetic in his pursuit of the truth. In short, this new case of the Boy Sherlock is an absorbing read for mystery fans ages 10-16 and even older.

Dr. Wayne Scott is a retired professor of English and American Studies. He received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University where his major areas of studies were medieval literature, Victorian studies and the novels of Charles Dickens. His teaching career includes positions at Penn State University, Case Western, Wittenberg and Gannon. Since becoming a resident of Columbia, SC, he has taught at Claflin University and Newberry College. During the summer of 2003-2004 he was visiting professor at Stamford University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Dr. Scott is a contributor to the college textbook American Civilization and Culture and other scholarly publications. He is currently at work on a Holmes/H.G. Wells pastiche and an historical thriller involving a Holmes-like American detective and his pursuit of Jack the Ripper. He is greatly interested in promoting reading among young people, particularly reading about Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Scott is a member of the Hansom Wheels scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars in Columbia, SC.