Undiscovered Scotland

 

"The Devil's Blaze: Sherlock Holmes: 1943" by Robert J. Harris is a thoroughly enjoyable homage to Sherlock Holmes, narrated as ever by Dr John Watson. The interesting twist is that it is not inspired directly by the original stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather it is based on the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as portrayed by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in a series of twelve films made by Universal Pictures from 1942 in which the settings were updated to the 1940s.

So there's a sense in which this book is a homage to a homage: and very good it is too. It is set largely in London and Scotland in 1943. The publisher's blurb sets the scene well: "Across the city prominent figures in science and the military are bursting into flame and being incinerated. Convinced that the Germans have deployed a new terror weapon, a desperate government turns to the one man who can track down the source of this dreadful menace - Sherlock Holmes. The quest for a solution drives Holmes into an uneasy alliance with the country’s most brilliant scientific genius, Professor James Moriarty. Only Holmes knows that, behind his façade of respectability, Moriarty is the mastermind behind a vast criminal empire. As they pursue the trail of incendiary murders, Holmes is quite sure that the professor is playing a double game and that there lies ahead a duel to the death which they cannot both survive."

The result is a book that is both easy to read and hard to put down. It's a romp that manges to replicate the lightness of touch and feel of the orginal Sherlock Holmes stories and following Homes and Watson's progress becomes a thoroughly enjoyable experience. We paused for thought at the idea of direct input by keyboard into a digital computer in 1943, but then the villain is meant to be well ahead of his time. And the suggestion on p162 that London ambulances and police cars had sirens in 1943 was one we slid across almost without stumbling. But perhaps that's the point. The original Universal Pictures films were clearly meant as entertainment rather than as records of their time: and Robert J. Harris has captured the entertainment value of the films beautifully.