House of Silk

House of Silk is the first official Sherlock Holmes novel approved by the Doyle estate (or the first in a long time, not sure which), and I was interested in tackling it.  But I think that Anthony Horowitz drops the ball in a couple of ways.

The hard thing about writing a Sherlock Holmes novel, I think, is that the detective is so brilliant that it's hard to keep him stumped for the length of a novel.  Horowitz solves this problem by intertwining two mysteries, "The man in the flat cap" and "The house of silk."  The first one (the flat cap mystery) starts off the novel, then Holmes is drawn into the house of silk story, and then there's a coda in which he solves the flat cap story.

Part of the problem here is that by the time we return to the first story, the stakes are so much lower than those of the main story, and we haven't seen the characters for so long, that the ending doesn't feel so interesting.  And this is unfortunate, because of the two stories, I felt like the flat cap story was much more authentic.  The resolution of that mystery felt like the sort of thing Conan Doyle would have written.

The house of silk mystery, on the other hand, is more problematic.  Part of the problem is that it's obvious from early on what the resolution is, because Horowitz tells us it's too shocking to be published during Watson's lifetime.  That doesn't leave too many options, and it was clear to me that Horowitz was going for the most obvious one.  In addition, I thought that his usage of Moriarty was gratuitous, as is giving Watson's wife a deadly disease just to show (I assume) that he knows that Doyle is contradictory about her, and that some fans speculate there was more than one wife.