The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: Sherlock Holmes with a Twist
June 19th, 2007
A few weeks ago I posted about my discovery (again, thanks to Dormouse) of mystery writer Laurie R. King. I started with the Kate Martinelli series (set in the present—or near-present—day) and have just completed the first of the Mary Russell series (set in the 1910s and 1920s and featuring Sherlock Holmes). It’s called The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (who knew that Sherlock Holmes had an apiary?), and it’s delightful.
From some point in her nineties, Mary Russell, born in 1900 to an American father and a Cockney Jewish mother, recalls her teen years, during which she met and learned from—and grew to love—Sherlock Holmes. When I say “love,” I don’t mean necessarily romantic love, though it seems from summaries of the rest of the books in the series that Russell and Holmes will indeed marry at some point. This love is a meeting of the minds, a partnership that is no less passionate for being intensely cerebral, and it is one that becomes deeply grounded in trust.
Okay, now I’ve made The Beekeeper’s Apprentice sound like a romance novel, which it isn’t. Nor is it exactly what many people would consider a mystery—the several crime-puzzles contained within the novel aren’t particularly complex or challenging as a “whodunit.” Nor are they meant to be. King, I would argue, is more interested in Mystery than in mysteries. Her novels trace the enigma of finding companionship in the midst of loneliness, of the healing of a soul.
And now I’ve made it sound like psycho-babble, which it isn’t, either. King’s writing is often hilarious, and the skilled construction of her sentences is a relief from less graceful or witty prose. She even has demonstrated the ability to write as well in third-person contemporary American language as in first-person 1910’s British language (albeit with a few unobjectionable anachronisms thrown in for effect).
But, anyway, back to the Mystery/mystery point. In a passage rather similar to some essays on King’s own web site, Russell says of the period during which she was studying theology at Oxford, “I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human speculation concerning the nature of the Divine. That the two were not unrelated did not occur to me for years.”
Yes. Good. I like that. Not only does knowing human sinfulness help us to understand God better, but, as when Holmes admires a criminal’s brilliant, if twisted, mind, we can also see the glory that God has planted in human nature. It’s kind of like the best of Calvinism mixed with the best of the Enlightenment.
King’s Holmes is rational to the core, but he is a good deal more vulnerable than the Holmes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I have to admit that I’m not that familiar with Doyle’s stories, though). He is retired, after all, and before Mary Russell stumbles (literally) upon him, he seems to be wearying of life. By the way, King’s Holmes is a little younger than the canonical one, which she addresses in the novel by having Holmes say that “Watson,” as his biographer, felt that his protagonist would be more respected if he were not quite so young as in real life. Thus, we have a Holmes who is in his fifties during the 1910s.
Russell (as she is called by Holmes) is a tomboy of sorts, but not in the clichéd way of much recent fantasy or adventure fiction. “Tomboy” is not the defining aspect of her personality, nor is “bookworm,” nor any other label that might be applied to her. The undercurrent of her traumatic past also helps to keep any easy stereotypes at bay.
Russell is also 5’11”, which allows her to carry off physical feats not possible for tiny Veronica Mars (Could Russell crawl through a dog door, though? I think not!). The Beekeeper’s Apprentice really made me think about how the physical is so often a key plot point in a story involving a female detective. Do we ever think so much about a male detective’s height or weight, and how it affects the story’s action? Discuss.
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6 Comments Add your own
1. icelimbo | June 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I was a huge SH fan in junior high and the interest has stayed with me over the years. Canon has it that Holmes was born around the middle of the 1850s, so if our spunky girl apprentice was born in 1900 and they meet in the 1910s, that’s just creepy, especially given Holmes’ attitudes towards women. It’s simply not probable (if we’re trying to honestly deal with Holmes as Doyle wrote him) for him to marry a girl 45 years younger. Even if we grant that Watson described him as younger when Watson wrote about him, to imagine Holmes married at all, at any stage of life, borders on the ridiculous. It also makes no sense for Watson to do such a thing at the very beginning of their acquaintance and living arrangements, not knowing that there would be a future market for his stories of his and Holmes’ adventures. Also, if Holmes really was 5, 10, 15 years younger, Watson’s recounting of how they met (”A Study in Scarlet”) must be a complete fabrication, down to small details. No, it won’t do. I’m fine with authors co-opting other fictional characters for their own writings, but my feeling is they should either be completely plausible or completely depart from what’s already been written. Just my two cents. PS - It’s canonical that Holmes was a beekeeper on the Sussex Downs in his retirement. See the story “His Last Bow,” set in 1914.
2. theottery | June 20th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Yeah, I think it’s supposed to be a pretty complete departure from the canon. Holmes’ attitude toward women doesn’t really come up much, because he pretty much treats Russell as if she’s a young man. I’m not sure when the marriage happens, but I am interested to see how it’s handled.
The age difference between them is supposed to be 39 years. It might not give you the ickies if you read King’s books . . . but this would not be Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, so it might be too frustrating for you. It seems some Amazon readers feel the same way!
3. icelimbo | June 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Hmm… even 39 years would be creepy, but as you say, I haven’t read the book, so maybe the author can carry it off. It would just feel really weird for Holmes to be romantically attached. And he treats her like a young man? Even weirder (though there is, of course, the camp of scholars determined to read Holmes and Watson’s relationship as homosexual). For all Holmes’ mistrust of women, you never see him treating any of them like a man - his sensibilities are firmly in the Edwardian era he comes from on that point. Holmes often shows great kindness and thoughtfulness where women are concerned, but he never is open emotionally to them. I don’t just mean romantically, I mean emotionally. There are women he admires, women he feels honor-bound to protect from cruel men, and women he is willing to trust in helping him bring a case to a satisfactory conclusion, but he never has a woman confidant, never a woman he is close to or shares a friendship with. So maybe it really is a complete departure, and if that’s the case, it seems more appropriate to me - though still weird
I just don’t like revisionists who try to have their cake and eat it too. If you do end up reading the book where Holmes marries his young apprentice, let us know your thoughts about it.
4. theottery | June 21st, 2007 at 9:51 am
Holmes’s treatment of Russell as male is sort of to render her more asexual, and thus less troubling to his composure. It also makes it more convenient for him mentally when they have to travel together, etc. King addresses the difficulty of the Victorian/Edwardian Holmes living in a new, war-torn, modern world–and new gender mores are certainly a big part of this.
Hey, Dormouse, do you want to weigh in on this, since you’ve read farther in the series?
5. Dormouse | June 22nd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Since our Otter has my copy of TBKA, and I wanted to read it, I checked it out from the library yesterday–perfect timing, as I can now answer these questions with the book clear in my mind.
First of all, King does directly address Holmes’s canonical attitude towards women. Russell writes:
Looking back, I think that the largest barrier to our association with Holmes himself, that inborn part of him that spoke the language of social customs, and particularly that portion of his makeup that saw women as some tribe of foreign and no-entirely-trustworthy exotics. Again, events conspired. Holmes was, after all, unconventional and outright bohemian in his acquaintances and in his business dealings. His friendships ran the social spectrum from the younger son of a duke through the staid and conventional Dr. Watson to a Whitechapel pawnbroker, and his profession brought him into contact with kings, and sewer-men, and ladies of uncertain virtue. …. Perhaps, too, there is some truth in the immutability of first impressions.
Because when Holmes first meets Russell, he honestly thinks she’s a boy. It’s Russell’s first (and only, for a long time) triumph over him–that he is totally mistaken as to her sex. His view of her is heavily informed by that first impression of her as a boy. What’s more, King makes it very, very clear how truly startled Holmes is to find a mind exactly like his own in a 15-year-old girl.
The love story is a true meeting of the minds–it’s the rare chance of finding a true intellectual equal (for two people with that hard, diamond-like brilliance that defines Holmes) that creates the love between them.
As for the age thing, King addresses it somewhere, including a timeline for her justification of the revision of Holmes’s age. That Watson has fictionalized his stories is emphasized throughout Russell’s narrative; I think on her website, maybe, King lays out what informed her decision to make Holmes younger than he is in canon.
As far as Holmes not marrying…because King emphasizes the extent to which the stories are told from Watson’s POV, she also emphasizes how much Watson has missed or left out. Not that he doesn’t understand Holmes, b/c he does, in his way. But King’s Watson sees that hard brilliance and distance from humanity, and not the extent to which even Sherlock Holmes has to have some human nature in his soul. (Otherwise, he’d be a sociopath.) (I admit that King’s Holmes, though, is not Conan Doyle’s, and I’m okay with that. Other Holmeses, who are perhaps closer to Doyle’s, are still infused with humanity and even, occasionally, love. I can’t see how that betrays the spirit of Conan Doyle.)
It also makes no sense for Watson to do such a thing at the very beginning of their acquaintance and living arrangements, not knowing that there would be a future market for his stories of his
If he’s writing the stories, then he’s assuming a market. Why not change some of the facts to make it more acceptable to a broader audience? If he wrote the stories later, then he knows there’s an audience. If he wrote them at the time things were going on, he’s assuming that someone, somewhere, will want to read them, and marketing the stories will necessarily be a part of that. The difference is that Conan Doyle’s Watson is a chronicler–he’s writing strict non-fiction. King’s is a fictional biographer–he’s writing the truth, but telling it slant, demonstrating a certain level of literary and business acumen.
6. Dormouse | June 22nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
As for the question of size and physical ability of male detectives, I think maybe we do see that from time to time. I haven’t read all of the classic detective novels–Agatha Christie or any of those–but I’m quite certain that physical things like, I don’t know, Nero Wolfe’s girth or the fact that Peter Wimsey isn’t a huge, strapping man do come into play. (I know that’s true of Peter–his lithe agility is referenced more than once by Sayers.)
I think it matters more for women like Veronica, who is so incredibly tiny, or for Russell, who’s unusually tall, b/c it enables a different kind of mobility or different challenges. But fictional detective work usually requires a fair amount of activity, and thus physicality is a necessary element in sleuthing.
Unless you’re Nancy Drew, in which case it only matters that you have Titian hair and always keep your hanky clean.
Elizabeth Peters’s detectives are women, too, and she does bring in their physical bodies–but she in much the same way as does with her male. Even those things that make her female characters seem like a male fantasy are treated as an irritation, rather than something to be proud of. (With Peabody, at least, the physical characteristics are often more of a hinderance. Peabody is…ahem…apparently very well-endowed, and it occasionally stops her from crawling through narrow spaces. Not that her husband Emerson, who’s quite a large man, does much better. But they’re archaeologists, so they’re good at squeezing into tight places.)
Similarly, Peters’s Vicky Bliss finds being an almost-6′ blonde woman with a Barbie-doll figure an incredible irritation. It makes her stand out in a crowd. (It’s interesting that Peters pairs Vicky with a man who probably looks like a handsomer version of Peter Wimsey–relatively slender, average size, probably blonde–whose great skill is that he can be anyone he wants to be. He’s a master of disguise. He is also either exactly Vicky’s height or slightly shorter.)
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