Enjoy Instantly Dust And Shadow: An Account Of The Ripper Killings By Dr. John H. Watson Conceptualized By Lyndsay Faye Ready In Publication Copy
the Ripper sfida Holmes
È sempre un piacere divorare l'ennesimo pastiches che pone Sherlock Holmes sulla scena del crimine di terribili delitti.
Soltanto lui può indagare e giungere ad una soluzione, La verità, anche la più difficile da scovare, con lui non ha scampo, Lo scenario è quello gotico del degratato quartiere di Whitechapel a Londra, nell'autunno del,
Lyndsay Faye ha portato il personaggio di Conan Doyle ad indagare su uno dei più celebri gialli irrisolti della storia.
Come sempre, a narrare gli eventi è il fedelissimo amico John Watson, Non mancano anche Lestrade ed il fratello di Holmes, Mycroft Holmes,
Sherlock Holmes è dunque sulle tracce di Jack lo Squartatore con una trama che si occupa di entrambi i personaggi in modo sapientemente colto, intelligente e fantasioso.
Gli omicidi efferati di due prostitute nel quartiere di Whitechapel convincono lispettore Lestrade a chiedere aiuto al massimo specialista di investigazioni criminali.
Senza dubbio Sherlock Holmes, accompagnato dal fedele dottor Watson, sa come dare la caccia allassassino che con la sua lama, grondante sangue, sta terrorizzando lEast End.
Ma quando il segugio di Baker Street rimane ferito nel tentativo di catturare il mostro, un sospetto infamante finisce per coinvolgerlo direttamente.
Il grande detective deve rompere gli schemi e contravvenire a ogni regola per smascherare linafferrabile assassino, che per lui è un vero e proprio avversario, poiché lo ha sfidato a catturarlo.
Lo consiglio vivamente.
I am neither a devotee of Sherlock Holmes nor of Ripperology the study of Jack the Ripper, but I did find this book very engaging.
I think that the author caught the rhythm and atmosphere of Conan Doyles fiction very wellthere were only a few instances where modern sensibilities slipped through.
By and large, I felt that Holmes and Watson behaved very authentically and I wouldnt hesitate to recommend it to my Sherlockobsessed friends.
Mind you, I am also a fan of forensicsbased mysteries, and Ms, Faye gives Holmes and Watson quite a boost towards modern forensic method, She brings them right to the brink, as far as they can go without modern theories and equipment.
I also appreciated how she gave Jack the characteristics which we now recognize as those of a psychopathic killer, while sticking quite closely to the facts of the case.
It is an easy and enjoyable read, well suited to the doldrums of summer,
In her debut novel, the author pits the iconic fictional detective Sherlock Holmes against the very real murderer Jack the Ripper.
With Ripperologists and Holmes purists aplenty out there, writing such a book had to be a somewhat daunting task sticking to the confused historical record of the Whitechapel murders while not marring the Conan Doyle tradition.
To her credit Faye does a pretty good job at walking writing this historical/literary tightrope,
Writing as Doyle did in the voice of Dr, Watson, the author does an excellent job in capturing Victorian London, its sights and sounds and smells, the shock of the Ripper murders and to a lesser extent, Sherlock Holmes, with all his quirks, intelligence and investigative methods.
Faye blends Watson and Holmes into the investigation without intruding, all the while sticking close to the historical record or at least what we believe is the historical record of Jack the Ripper.
The narrative was somewhat lacking for this reader with the inclusion of a female character that Holmes adds to the team.
Unfortunately she reads more like ast century character than a lateth century one, Also the solution and the culprit responsible are ascertained well before the conclusion and may not satisfy Holmes' purists.
That being said this is still an entertaining historical mystery, i, e. beach or airplane reading, and if that's your cup of tea, you won't be disappointed with Dust and Shadow.
Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcenter, com:. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP it is not being reprinted here illegally.
As I've mentioned here before, I'm one of the millions out there with an obsessive love for the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, originally the product of Victorian genre author Arthur Conan Doyle but that has since passed into the public domain, which now that anyone can write stories concerning has created in our modern times an entire "Holmesian" cottage industry of new tales, some of which are unofficially "blessed" by the Doyle estate and some of which aren't, not for legal reasons but to increase those stories' stature in the eyes of the buying public.
And in fact if you want a concrete, easytosee example of why it's so important that copyrights be held to a realistic timeframe, and why corporations shouldn't be allowed to own the rights to characters until the end of time, just look at all the detective projects in the last few decades that have exhibited Holmeslike characteristics most recently, for example, the popular dark comedy Monk:, and how all these shows would've been sued into nonexistence if the official rights to Sherlock Holmes were still owned by, say, Viacom or TimeWarner.
All modern stories share at least some traits with the older stories that came before them, which is why it's so important that these older stories eventually fall back into the public domain after the authors and their families have died, so that culture will have a chance to grow and expand in the first place, instead of stagnate into an endless series of empty, exactlyrepeating "authorized remakes" of all the stuff that already exists, like is happening more and more in our corporatedominated days.
Whew, sorry, soapbox digression over!
I just finished one of the newest Holmesian tales out there, in fact, Lyndsay Faye's unbelievably great Dust and Shadow, which very much does carry the symbolic seal of approval from the official Doyle estate, not the least of which is because of taking on a hypothetical question that Holmes fans have been dreaming of ever since the stories were first being published that is, what if the World's Greatest Detective had tackled the reallife "Jack The Ripper" murders, which really did happen in London in the same lates period that the fictional Holmes was supposed to have been an active detective there It's a question that presents all kinds of creative opportunities, and here Faye just delivers and delivers and keeps on delivering, turning in an astonishingly entertaining book almost steampunkish in its fantasticality, yet just enough grounded in the real world to not offend the sensibilities of those simply into Victoriana.
It skirts a thin line sometimes to get there, granted, and there are moments when the story's credulity comes close to tearing at the seams and of course if you're not a fan of Victorian literature in the first place, the entire project in general will give you a case of eyerolling so severe as to warrant a hospital trip but rest assured that the author eventually pulls the convoluted tale off by the end in spades, even more remarkable given that this is the young New York actress's literary debut.
And indeed, how is it even possible to think of either Sherlock Holmes or Jack The Ripper without automatically thinking of the other Certainly, news of both were being delivered to original VictorianAge readers at the same time, sometimes sidebyside in their daily papers and weekly periodicals the latest fictional escapades from the haughty, logicobsessed antihero, the latest true atrocities from the monstrous yet brilliant psychopath the very man who inspired the term "serial killer", both of them heavily informed by the rapid advancements in science and psychology at the time, both of their stories shrouded in the dark, smoky mist of a preelectric London, both of them dependent on the crimefilled back alleys of the city's worst neighborhoods in order to accomplish their aims.
It's just natural to want to bring these two archetypes together, something that Holmes fans have been doing in their heads for over a hundred years now and in fact, given that the development of Holmes' character was heavily influenced by the actual events going on in Doyle's lifetime, it should come as no surprise that their milieus should so neatly match up.
Now combine this with what has turned in recent years into a whole cottage industry of its own, the obsession among so many modern truecrime fans in actually trying to solve the Ripper case, which for those who don't know has by now inspired hundreds of books and a dozen informed websites and you can see why this might be the most perfect moment in history for someone to finally bring these cottage industries together into one giant ubercottage industry.
In fact, in what is sure to be a relief to all you Ripperologists out there, Faye herself starts out on the factual side with her own story, first laying down a narrative that pulls together all the undisputed details we now know about the cases or that is, I'm not exactly an expert myself, but at least all the strange little details found here the exotic grapes, the antiSemite chalk graffiti match up precisely with the only other detailobsessed Ripper book I've
ever read, Alan Moore's From Hell which was reviewed here last year.
It's only then that Faye starts shoehorning in the Holmesian elements of the story, changing the details on the detectiveside of the tale to complement the true facts of the Ripper murders, never the other way around but like I said, "shoehorn" is too harsh a term here, in that the usual tropes of a Sherlock Holmes story actually match quite perfectly on their own with the real facts of the Ripper case.
And thus do you end up with a perfect hybrid of a book, which can be enjoyed in two different ways by two entirely different sets of people it is not only a speculative nonfiction account of what Faye thinks happened during the Ripper murders, told through an inventive narrative format, but it's also a ripping Holmes pastiche that happens to have an extragory plotline, something as spectacular and melodramatic as any of the fictional Holmesian tales written over the decades.
Because make no mistake, Faye gets in all the wellknown beats that we "Baker Street Irregulars" demand in our Holmesian pastiches, which is what makes the genre in the first place so popular to try but so difficult to pull off: it is outlandish but not too much so relies on a series of exotic costumes and locations makes great use of Holmes' observational deduction of the world around him is sure to play on Holmes' habit of doing morphine when bored, so to slow his freakishly fast brain down to normal human speed with crimesolving being the only other thing besides dope to have this effect, one of the many tragically fascinating quirks about the character that makes us fans obsessive ones and as is becoming more and more popular these days although with its roots all the way back to the original Doyle tales, features a female with all the cunning and powers of Holmes himself, and who the notorious sociopath shares an uneasy mix of respect and sexual tension with throughout the book.
And thus does the majority of Dust and Shadow tick along in this fashion, with Faye building her case more and more over who she believes Jack The Ripper really was, as Holmes and company get closer and closer to nabbing this person in fictional form within our story and if this was all the book had been, it still would've been okay, albeit more of a clever academic exercise than anything else, kind of like Michael Chabon's competent but ultimately disappointing Holmesian pastiche The Final Solution.
But then in the lastpages, Faye does a truly remarkable thing, completely taking over emotional ownership of the story and ending it being any kind of pastiche at all, delivering an absolute knockout of a unique ending that has hints of modern psychology, Jhorror and more, a tantalizing glimpse of just what kind of freaky masterpiece of a genre thriller Faye could put out if dealing with completely original elements from page one.
In fact, I ended up bumping up my score today a little from what I was originally going to give it, just for having such a satisfying ending, which of course is almost a demand when it comes to stories like these because seriously, it just isn't a Holmes story it seems without the guilty party being discovered at the end in a spectacularly dramatic way, and a resolution brought about that lets us walk away from that story happy even if the story itself doesn't end happily, which a lot of Holmesian stories don't.
Faye obviously has a deep understanding not only of the parts that make up a great genre story, but how to put them together in a highly enjoyable way, and I'm expecting big things from her in the future as she starts tackling her first tales of her own complete invention.
Although you should be warned that it's still ultimately a story just for fans of a specific genre which is why it's getting the score it is today don't forget that to rate in thes at CCLaP, a book must transcend a specific genre and appeal to a general audience, for what it is trying to accomplish it does so almost perfectly, and for those looking specifically for a delightfully inventive Victorian tale, you will find almost nothing better in the entirety of.
Dust and Shadow comes highly recommended today for all of those people in particular,
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