BOOK REVIEWS: A writer's view of other writers

 Mrs Hudson and Sherlock Holmes by Liz Hedgecock

A few months ago, when I couldn’t find anything I fancied reading, I stumbled upon Liz Hedgecock’s cozy comic fantasy series about a magic bookshop  and found it mildly diverting. The books were easy to read quickly, undemanding, gently entertaining, fairly forgettable. However, while looking them up on my Kindle, I noticed she had written a series of detective novels which used the conceit that Mrs Hudson was much more than Sherlock Holmes’s middle-aged housekeeper. I remembered reading some books like this several years ago, novels which I had found gripping and entertaining at the time, and I thought it was odd that Liz Hedgecock might have written them as my knowledge of her writing was based on the magic bookshop series.

            In fact, it turned out that she hadn’t. The books I was thinking of were by Martin Davies. However, Hedgecock’s trilogy about Mrs Hudson also proved to be superior to the magic bookshop series, being much longer, much less lightweight and in my opinion better written.

            In this fictional world, Mrs Hudson is young, attractive and married to a police officer. However, in book one, her husband vanishes and she is forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet. This leads to her meeting Sherlock and Dr Watson, both young men here, and becoming Sherlock’s assistant initially, then later his colleague and eventually his wife! This is all good fun, and is wrapped around a fairly interesting series of mysteries to be solved. The plots are as silly as in the original Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, but we view them through female eyes which is quite enlightening.

            It was entertaining to see the Holmesian world from a female viewpoint – clothes and make-up, fashion, life in domestic service, the rules of mourning, the strict protocols about visiting and other social interactions, and the restrictions put upon women at the time, are all fascinating and offer a new way of interpreting the stories. Sherlock himself is not undermined by Mrs Hudson’s detecting success, but our view of her as a slightly prim landlady, bemused by Sherlock’s shenanigans, is thoroughly dismantled.

            I enjoyed these novels very much, though they are definitely light reading. They have enough substance to keep the reader interested, and provide excellent reading material for winter afternoons , but they aren’t works of high-brow literature. Hedgecock has written another Holmes series, plus several other cozy detective series involving women detectives, with both modern and historical settings. I would give most of her novels that I've read three stars, but this particular series deserves four.

 

**** Recommended

If you liked these books, other series which take a sideways look at the iconic Sherlock Holmes stories include:

Sherlock & Jack series by Liz Hedgecock

Holmes and Hudson mysteries by Martin Davies

Mrs Hudson of Baker Street series by Barry S Brown

Mrs Hudson and  Mary Watson Investigations by Michelle Birkby

The Gower Street Detective series by M.R.C.Kasazian (about Sidney Grice,  a detective similar to Holmes)

The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry (more of a literary novel than the others on this list}

 

Other novels by Liz Hedgecock:

Booker and Fitch cozy detective series

Maisie Frobisher cozy detective series

Pippa Parker Mysteries series

The Librarian of Crooked Lane ]Book 1 in The Glass Library series]  by C.J. Archer

This is the first in a series called The Glass Library series. The second book is released today, I believe. These stories are very similar in style to the Liz Hedgecock novels. Set just after the First World War, in a world which is very like our own but in which magic exists, they are the adventures of Sylvia, a young woman who is struggling to survive after the deaths of her brother in the war and her mother of illness. She has never known her father.

        While attempting to investigate her brother's claims in his diary that he might be a silver magician, Sylvia becomes embroiled in an art crime mystery, which leads to her getting to know a handsome and charismatic young man, from a wealthy, eccentric and prestigious family, who happens to be a detective. The basic plot is enjoyable but uninspiring, but the characters are quite endearing and there are some imaginative touches here and there. Archer leaves enough threads hanging loose to suggest that the second book will build on them. 

        I would describe this as a cross between a cosy period detective story, a romance and a magical fantasy, a pleasant book to wile away time while drinking tea or before dropping off to sleep in bed.

*** pleasant, undemanding 

Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire [first in The Wayward Children series]

This is another YA fantasy series, but the writing and the imagination on display here is far superior to the run-of-the-mill stuff you often find in such a category. McGuire can really write. Her prose is lucid, engaging, sometimes shocking, often unexpectedly comic, and her stories are fast-paced but still gripping. You could read this book in a long afternoon, and it would not be a waste of an afternoon.

        Imagine a world where lost children haven't necessarily been abducted by psychopaths and kept prisoner in someone's secret room, or become drug-addled prostitutes on the streets of some faceless city. In this world, children who don't quite fit into their families, who are not quite what their parents wanted or who come from dysfunctional families, sometimes find doors into other worlds. These other worlds are many and varied. They can be plotted on a sort of map where the compass points, rather like in Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Librarian series, are Nonsense and Logic, Wicked and Virtue. Children seem to find the place where they feel most at home in these alternate worlds, but sometimes they are thrown out for breaking a rule or they leave or are forced to leave for some other reason. When that happens, they find it very hard indeed to resume their former lives. The worlds in which they have lived change them in fundamental ways. 

        Schools exist to help such children. Some help those who wish to forget their weird experiences and fit back in to the 'normal' human world. Others, such as Eleanor West's Home For Wayward Children, aim to help those tragic souls who desperately wish to return to the worlds from which they have been exiled. The school is a refuge, an escape from parents who can't believe their children's tales or understand the true nature of their disappearances or their intense desire to disappear again. In this sense, it is rather like Miss Peregrine's School For Peculiar Children. However, I would say it is better.

        This first novel considered Nancy, a Persephone-like figure who has been in The Halls Of The Dead living off pomegranates and trying to be as still as a statue. McGuire cuts out all the extraneous stuff and gets right in there - and she doesn't make allowances for the tender sensibilities of her YA readers, which is all to the good. This story is often shockingly gothic, macabre in fact, and reminds me a little of the recent Addams Family spin-off about the daughter of the family. It is also funny and light-hearted at times, poignant and sad at others, capturing the emotions of sensitive teens very accurately, though without wasting time going too deeply into their psyches. What child doesn't feel at some time like an outsider in their own family, like someone who belongs somewhere else, somewhere where everyone understands them and they fit in, even if that place is as bizarre as Alice's Wonderland? 

        I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and that was down to the brilliant writing. The series has won two Hugo Awards, an Alex Award, a Locus Award, and a Nebula Award. and been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award, and it appeared on the 2016 Tiptree Honor List, so I'm not alone in my admiration.

***** Highly recommended