The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore

Note: this review may contain some spoilers, read this review AFTER finishing the book. 

The thing that caught my attention when picking this book was the idea of combining modern mystery fiction with historical fiction which I love. Having two different genres in one book is a great idea, on paper at least. But when writer Graham Moore tried to do so, it was a complete fail in my opinion.

Writers are always careful when it comes to trying out new things. So before reading this book, I though that Moore would do the same. Using these two important styles is a hard task; one that Moore did not know how to use.

Moore approach with using these two literary genres is that he includes two different stories in the book. One story that focuses on a present-time murder mystery and the second one goes back to the Victorian times and involves the great writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Canon Doyle. With these two different times that Moore uses in his book, he then tries throughout both stories to establish a connection between them, a weak connection, in my opinion.

Let’s start with the first story that the novel tackles. A modern day mystery story that revolves around a secret literary society called the Baker Street Irregulars. So far so good, you can’t go wrong with secret societies and literature (ask Dan Brown about it). My problem with this first section of the book was not the story itself (although some times it was weak) but rather with the characters themselves. For example, the main character of the story, Harold was built as this clumsy character that you can’t help but root for, because he clearly is being established as this weak underdog who is always out of luck. Moore explores this fact in the first few chapters. But then, and from nowhere, the character suddenly becomes a hero that can solve everything and anything. What bothered me the most was also the fact that Moore tells us that Harold is a coward from the beginning, but then changes his mind and portrays him as this hero that does not deserve to be one. I did not like this change of character. It shows that a writer did not figure out his own characters and just went with the easy choice and changed their core elements just for the sake of moving the story. If you ever want to see consistency when it comes to mystery characters, read any Stephen King novel (well, not any but all the good ones) he knows how to write good characters that act in both a normal way and also in a consistent way.

The story in this part of the story is O.K! Nothing special. Nothing I have not read before.

Going to the second part of the story, I have to be honest, I enjoyed this part. Although Moore did not fix his issues with inconsistent characters, I did not care because he used the great Arthur Canon Doyle as his main character. And after reading Moore’s notes on the story itself and his list of the true facts that he used in it, readers will enjoy this part of the story even more.

The problem with this part of the book is that although we as reader are happy that we get to see our famous Victorian writer in action, the connection that Moore tries to build between the different timelines damages the story itself and makes the plot very weak. This connection also will limit the things that the characters can do. And that what made this story useless, we don’t want a story that the only purpose of it is to connect and feed the plot of another one. We want two separate stories that talk about the same thing. We did not get that, but rather a boring story that uses an interesting character that did not do much because the writer wanted to maintain this level of similarity between the two stories.

I have to note that my review of the book is my own opinion of it. There are many readers who reviewed the book and loved it. We all have our own opinions, but I personally did not enjoy this book. So for that, I’m giving it a score of 2/5.