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Review: The Sherlockian, Graham Moore

Harold is the youngest ever member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a secretive group of Sherlock Holmes devotees. At his first ever meeting, the preeminent Sherlockian in the world has come to present the lost diary of Conan Doyle, the holy grail of, you know, of Sherlock Holmes dudes. But when the body of the scholar is found strangled in his hotel room, Harold becomes obsessed with finding out the Truth. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago, Arthur Conan Doyle receives a letter bomb, apparently related to his decision to chuck his hero, Sherlock Holmes, off a waterfall. Trying to trace it back to its source, he finds himself in the slums of Victorian London on the trail of…a serial killer!

Books are so mysterious, aren’t they? They can have all the aspects of an awesome books without ever actually blossoming into an awesome book. How does that happen? Or more importantly, how does it happen that the book does blossom into brilliance? What is the thing that happens? Why are most boarding school/university books just fun because of the setting, but then The Secret History is rereadable four times in one year? Why is that?

As you may have begun to suspect, I was not satisfied with The Sherlockian. It had all the things! And it was fun! But why, why, why was it not amazing?

Poor old Sherlockian doesn’t deserve to bear the brunt of my wrath. It was, you know, fine. The mysteries had perfectly reasonable resolutions. Sometimes it got a bit show-your-worky with the awkward exposition, like, “As you know, the term suffragette was coined as a mockery of the women’s rights movement, whereas we call ourselves suffragists.” But mostly it was a good old lark.

The thing is, I’m having a small crisis. I haven’t been blown away by a new book in, like, months. Boo! What the hell, books? Why have you become so very lame? I finish reading them and I don’t even care whether I tell y’all about them or not. Will your lives be changed by anything I’ve read? NO. Will you even be transported to a place of minor joy? NO. Ou sont les putains de livres de putain d’antan? Is what I rather profanely want to know.