HOLMES ENTANGLED

Fiction
A manuscript to kill for

HOLMES ENTANGLED

By Gordon McAlpine

215 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Gordon McAlpine, the master of avant garde mystery metafiction, is back with a new novel. His previous novels, Woman With a Blue Pencil and Hammett Unwritten, are also reviewed on this site.

Holmes Entangled opens in Buenos Aires, circa 1943. After completing his shift, Jorge Luis Borges, assistant librarian at the Miguel Cane Municipal Library, quickly makes his way to the office of a private detective.

In his encounter with the detective, Borges (who somehow knows the exact amount of money in the gumshoe’s wallet) claims that someone is stalking him – an assassin intent on killing him. Why? Because Borges is in possession of a rare manuscript that someone would kill for.

The manuscript, called Uncertainty – a True Account, was written by Sherlock Holmes – the real Sherlock Holmes – in the late 1920s. It’s a memoir of the then 73-year-old Holmes’s strangest case ever, a case that he came out of retirement to take. A case like nothing he had ever seen before, one with earth-shattering implications.

The narrative then switches to Holmes’s first-person narration:

I am not who you think I am.

Nor am I who you think I was, which may be more to the point, considering the misinformation disseminated to readers of true crime by my late friend and chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson. Oh, I acknowledge that his inaccuracies were never complete falsehoods but more matters of exaggeration, concision, or omission. Rather it is I who bears responsibility for the single instance of pure fabrication in the accounts, namely that I retired to a country life. Not so.

After retiring, Holmes decided to vanish completely from public life, disguising himself as Dr. Heinrich von Schimmel, a German historian and professor, and giving lectures at universities, most recently at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Then a famous writer named Arthur Conan Doyle recognized von Schimmel as Sherlock Holmes and begged for his help.

Conan Doyle had a well-known passion for the occult, especially spiritualism. But then, he experienced something at a prominent séance that he simply couldn’t explain – the spectral apparition of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. There’s just one little problem – Baldwin is very much alive.

Not only that, but the “ghost Baldwin” he saw – who was crippled in an accident at 29 and never became Prime Minister – told him that Sherlock Holmes was disguising himself as Dr. von Schimmel. Unable to explain or debunk this strange encounter, Conan Doyle wants him to investigate it and determine if he’s being duped by a clever fraudster – or if he encountered the ghost of a Stanley Baldwin from another universe, something Holmes is extremely skeptical of.

So the great detective takes the case, teaming up with the late Dr. Watson’s widow, their former landlady, Mrs. Hudson. Disguising themselves, they infiltrate the home of Madame Du Lac, the medium who had conducted the séance where Conan Doyle had his bizarre encounter.

After Holmes quickly exposes Du Lac as a complete fraud, she admits that her séances are shows performed to entertain her paying customers, but the one Conan Doyle attended was a very small-scale séance conducted at the home of Lady Vale Owen. There, Madame Du Lac didn’t have access to her more elaborate special effects. She didn’t create the “ghost Baldwin” and has no idea where it came from.

As Holmes continues his investigation, it leads him to the then-new science of quantum physics. While the theory of multiple universes has been posited by everyone from the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe to the legendary French poet Charles Baudelaire to the Buddha, the advances in science and mathematics have shown that the theory of multiple universes may be true.

After a fortunately unsuccessful attempt on Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and the murder of a brilliant young quantum physicist and his publisher, the trail leads Sherlock Holmes not to his old nemesis Professor Moriarty (who died some time ago), but to his estranged older brother Mycroft, who at 80 years old is still a secret agent for the British government – and one of the most powerful men in the Empire.

The mind of the brilliant, skeptical master detective is about to be challenged in a way that he never could have imagined, and his integrity challenged to the point that he may have to publicly ruin his client in order to save the man’s life…

Holmes Entangled is Gordon McAlpine at his best – a mind-bending feast of mystery and metafiction featuring one of literature’s most endearing and enduring characters. Highly recommended!

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Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com