Kissing Sherlock Holmes, T.D. McKinney & Terry Wylis, 2011, 73k words/175 pages
“My dear Watson, how does one go about kissing a woman?"
Sherlock Holmes’ question leads to a lesson Watson never expected to teach. And feelings he never thought to explore. A single kiss alters Watson’s world while the announcement of Holmes’ upcoming marriage sets an odd fear in his heart.
Amidst the beauty of an English country party, the greatest detective the world has ever known searches for a traitor. Somewhere among the glittering nobility a sadist lurks, using blackmail to destroy lives and endanger a nation.
Only Sherlock Holmes can save an innocent man and bring the traitor to justice. It’s a search that could cement the greatest friendship of all time into something far deeper and stronger...if the hunt doesn’t end Watson’s life first.
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I read this yesterday. Like a compulsion. I have attempted to avoid spoilers for the book, but read at your own risk nonetheless. Warnings for brief discussion of (discussion of) rape.
I am torn in two directions here - not by the quality of this book, which is fair to poor on any given page, but in how I should treat my irritation with it. On the one hand, this book is basically a romance mystery novel and does not really purport to be anything else, therefore why should I hold it to higher standards? On the other hand, I paid money for it when better fanfic exists for free, at my fingertips at any moment, and those authors are paid nothing for their troubles. Point #2, however, is clearly a personal bias.
At any rate, published or not, this is a piece of fanfiction, and one with a great many flaws at that. And, being that it’s published, I feel I can freely give my honest opinion on it should anyone here be interested in purchasing it for themselves. I am not usually in the business of reviewing products like this, so basically I will just enumerate its sins and (dubious) virtues.
Virtues
The case itself is not a terrible one, its premise no more contrived than Arthur Conan Doyle’s might be, though I did find it a tad simplistic. Its conclusion, also, was dissatisfying, and yet I’ve put it in the virtues column, and I’ll tell you why: it was, perhaps, the most compelling component of this literary turd. I stayed up too late last night to reach its conclusion, and I really did want to get there (I don’t say “find the culprit” because it’s disappointingly obvious by about halfway through, and I’m not even any good at mysteries). I can’t say what about the case so caught my attention since I have so many problems with characterization and the original characters involved, but it might just be my own compulsion to see a mystery through to the end, like an addictive episode of Law & Order you know isn’t very good but damned if you’re leaving the house before the hour’s up. In any case, the majority of this novel is taken up in unraveling the case, and if you like casefic and are the type who can put up with what goes in the “sins” column, maybe you will like this book.
A few of the original characters are tolerable.
Page 11. I really, really liked it. It's all downhill from there, I'm afraid.
Sins
Excuse me while I get both prolix and nit-picky. I defend my position based on the fact that as a published novel (with not one author but two), I believe that some of the issues with this book should not be present. Things I would forgive (if with a roll of the eyes) on the internet are more noticeable in print. First of these that spring to mind:
This desperately needs a line editor. I can’t find the name of one on the copyrights page, but I assume this publishing company (a small independent) doesn’t just let manuscripts through without looking them over, though apparently not with a comb fine-toothed enough. I’m talking about serious homophone problems. Not just once or twice, or in particular passages, but throughout the book. Really? Even professionals can’t catch everything, and I’ve seen novels with a mistake or two, but this is sort of baffling. Likewise there are other grammatical/usage mistakes that I can’t attribute to the conceit of “Watson as writer/narrator.” I know this is not a deal breaker for some, but for my part I find it irritating and unprofessional in the extreme.
Needs a Brit-pick. I’m not talking about spelling conventions because I really couldn’t care less about regional spelling differences unless it changes how something is pronounced (Mummy, aluminium), I’m talking about the same kind of non-Brit-who-hasn’t-done-their-research stuff you might find in online fic. As an American myself, I know it’s hard to get everything right, even with reliable Brit-pickers who give themselves completely selflessly to my work, but I can’t help thinking, once again, that this is a published novel and someone should know better. If I as an American (granted, one who has lived in Britain and is familiar enough with many of the issues) can easily pick out various (simple) mistakes, then you really have a problem.
The sex. Florid, purple prose, inexpert participants nonetheless giving great blow-jobs, cream spilling everywhere…just. No. No. Likewise, I find the placement of the sex in this story highly suspect, but that’s just me.
Moving on to broader issues: Holmes and Watson get together within the first chapter of this novel. That’s fine, I guess, maybe not what I would normally want for a getting-together story, but my real complaint is that it’s so… easy, I guess. There’s just no conflict, either in coming together for the first time or in the course of navigating their relationship throughout the book, and honestly, issues of the time and homosexuality aside, I cannot believe that a relationship with Holmes would ever be something easy or without conflict. Anyway, everything’s sunshine and flowers and declarations of love (which I find out of character even outside this book). Even the “worries” about the day’s mores, the sodomy laws, the potential ruination of their entire lives should this come out, seem rote and, to a certain extent, brushed aside and dismissed in deference to unremitting fluff. Listen. I have nothing against unremitting fluff. I write it myself. But in a full-length published novel fanfic of ACD canon, how can these conflicts not be present? I understand not wanting to dwell on it (do we really need yet another a “let’s angst about our sexuality” story a decade into the 21st century?), the need to find different stories to tell, but the lack of attention to it here rings decidedly false, and only brings up questions. But, back to the first point of how they come together so quickly: I can’t help but think a lot of these questions (for example, Watson, who has never considered Holmes that way before, thinks nothing of jumping into a permanent relationship with his male best friend. Really? Really?) could have been circumvented if this story were told within the confines of an established relationship. I can’t help but think that the authors thought of a premise - Holmes announcing his upcoming marriage, asking for “kissing lessons” from Watson - and decided to go (very smoothly, without conflict) from there instead of thinking about how it might affect the story as a whole.
Relatedly, why is it that every one of the original characters who finds out about Holmes and Watson is totally supportive, unfazed, and not at all inclined to inform the authorities? I could believe this about “fellow inverts” who appear in the book, but everyone? Not believable at all, I’m afraid. Likewise stretching the bounds of my suspension of disbelief is just how indiscreetly Holmes and Watson behave.
Writing out accents phonetically: why are people still doing this? Not only does it make dialogue difficult to read for the characters who “speak “this way, it diminishes them and makes them subordinate to people who speak so-called proper English. Think of the characters authors often choose to write like this: Scotty, Chekov, motley southern American characters or working class/Northern/Western English characters, not to mention Scots (you are neither James Kelman nor Irvine Welsh). Inevitably these are characters whose dialects have been deemed less than “standard” English, and they, their language, the entire population they belong to, get cast as subservient to those who speak “properly.” There’s a rant in here about the question of “proper,” but I will spare everyone that. There are some who would make the case that for Watson as writer/narrator, this is in character. I’m of the opinion that just because you’re doing a pastiche of a well-loved Victorian character, you don’t actually have to follow the literary conventions of that time. For the love of Zeus, it’s gay porn - you’re not sticking to the spirit of the day’s literary conventions anyway. There is also the problem of Brit-picking again - if you’re married to the idea of a phonetic accent, you’d best be damned sure you’ve got syntax and dialectic word usage right as well (and I’m of the opinion that these are the only things you need to convey an accent), because if I’m reading your phonetic accents (with difficulty) and it’s of a working-class English character, my brain should not be pinging on Southern U.S speech patterns, or Australian, or whatever else. That character needs to be completely drawn, and totally of his own location. Anyway, it all boils down to this: writing out accents is a bad move. Doing it wrong compounds that badness exponentially.
References to rape are fleeting, but an important plot point, and of the forcible sexual encounters Watson says "that's no better than rape." No, actually, that's the definition of rape. Without getting into characterization again here, and what Watson's ideas about what constitutes rape are, this is just shoddy work. If the authors didn't want to address it properly, they could have just stated what happened and let it go. Instead, they have Watson utter this gross line, which only calls attention to the rape culture, our rape culture, that produces such a line.
Female characters: sigh. We have, of course, the vilified woman. A woman who, if she were the protagonist of her own novel, would be a heroine who echoed through time. Jane Eyre. Elizabeth Bennet. Headstrong young women who speak their minds and capture the collective imagination, not to mention the hearts of their suitors. But because this particular woman is in a Holmes novel, she’s painted as ridiculous, tiresome, unacceptable and even evil. I don’t care how many times Watson says “poor girl,” that does not get to stand in as sympathetic characterization, which is the authors’ job to develop. There is another female character who is kind and clever and good, and we’re meant to look to her as evidence that the authors are being fair to female characters even in the face of Holmes’s characteristic misogyny and the general treatment of women in this time period, but saying “look over here so you don’t see what we’ve done over there!” is a feeble conceit that does not hold up to scrutiny. Contrast this with the sentiment that all the men in the book are either amazing and dashing and sensitive and all-around wonderful or they’re poor delicate flowers who have to be protected from deceitful, cruel women, and what you’ve got is a sad, sexist portrayal of women, and I’m accepting no excuses on that front. Disappointing in the extreme.
So, that was Kissing Sherlock Holmes. All around, not a read I would recommend, though if you don’t mind the general romance novel trope and you like casefic, you might as well give it a try. When I bought this book, I also bought My Dearest Holmes by Rohase Piercy, published 26 years ago now. It got worse reviews on Amazon than Kissing Sherlock Holmes, but that got rave reviews and obviously you can see what I thought of it. I’m given to understand that My Dearest Holmes focuses a little more on the issues of sexuality and the dangers of the expression thereof in the Victorian era, so maybe on that front I will find it more compelling and believable. I also bought a short story anthology, A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes, which seems to be as well-received as Kissing Sherlock Holmes. In any case, if I have the energy, once I’ve finished My Dearest Holmes and A Study in Lavender, I’ll do write-ups for those as well.