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| The 1989 hardcover from St. Martin's Press |
Thirty years ago I belonged to some Doubleday book
clubs—mystery and science-fiction among them. (The clubs are still around, but now they are owned by Book
Span, a division of Random House, which also swallowed up Doubleday long ago.)
In 1990, through the Mystery Guild Book Club, I acquired The Book of the Dead
by Robert Richardson. I bought it because it was described as a book within a
book, a mystery within a mystery—and the secondary book was a Sherlock Holmes
novella to boot! Well, books
within books make my heart sing. I looked forward to reading it.
The protagonist, that is to say, the wannabe detective is a playwright
and novelist named Augustus Maltravers. The Book of the Dead is the third novel
featuring Maltravers, the first two being An Act of Evil and Skeleton Key. Maltravers turns up in a series of six
novels, the final three being The Dying of the Light, Murder in Waiting, and
The Lazarus Tree. In 2014 and 2015, Endeavour Press reissued all six books as
Kindle e-books, and they seem to be selling quite well.
Now, despite all my excellent intentions and my fondness on many levels
for the book’s subjects and structure, for good or ill, it went unread these
last 28 years, but I determined I would finally crack it open, read it, and
comment upon it for this, my “Ruminations” blog.
Of course, since there are two books in one, something should be said
about both of them. I’ll begin with the Sherlock Holmes story. Its title is "The Attwater Firewitch" and
it constitutes 47 pages of this 183-page hardcover novel. Since 1974, Holmes
pastiches have been streaming endlessly from a bottomless well, books and stories
numbering into the thousands. And most of them follow the traditional Conan
Doyle model of having Watson sit down and craft a narrative version of a Holmes
adventure. I have not read but a smattering of these; and those that I have
read, usually do a fair-to-great job of approximating Watson’s vocabulary,
cadence, tone, and so forth. Those pieces that cannot meet these criteria jarred me out of my pleasant suspension of disbelief. Well, in point of fact, Richardson’s attempt at crafting a story as though he was Watson is not especially successful, at least to my “ear.” His Watson simply
sounds too modern.
Then, there is the story, or plot, of this pastiche. It is mainly a new
take on The Hound of the Baskervilles and offers little satisfaction...at least in 2018; it may have "played" better in 1989. Its
inclusion in a contemporary mystery novel, though, implies that this Holmes
story must contain some element that helps Maltravers solve the contemporary
mystery...and indeed it does, but in such a minor, almost insignificant manner,
that I felt the author, Richardson, was stretching, and that he really ought to
have tried harder.
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| The Endeavour Press e-book |
As to the Maltravers mystery, it’s adequate. The novel is a by-the-numbers novel of manners set in a large and ancient manor house. To my taste the solution to the murder is a bit of a deus ex machina, while Booklist says it is a thoroughly English mystery. Frankly I’ve not read many modern English mysteries. Nevertheless I get the impression that such works are expected to harbor as a matter of course some dryness, some OCD tendencies, servants, and some obligatory scenes of elegant dining, either breakfast or dinner, with many people sitting around the table.
I
suppose the $64,000 question at this point is, Was it worth it?—the book being
on hold for 28 years? Of course I could say that I’m mainly dissatisfied with the
book, as I expected more from the book-within-a-book device, especially after frequently thinking about the book for 28 years; but who am I to judge given that a glance at customer reviews shows that lots of people love the book.
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