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THE CLASSIFIED DOSSIER: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DORIAN GRAY is the third installment in Christian Klaver's mashing-up of the Sherlock Holmes universe with classic late-Victorian supernatural horror, an endeavour that began with his mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. Dracula is back, as is his beloved Mina Harker (yes, more like Hollywood than Stoker) and Klaver's vampirified Dr. John H. Watson, M.D., who, as per usual, is our master of demented ceremonies. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DORIAN GRAY is enjoyable but could be even more demented than it is. It could also exploit its source material with more thoughtfulness. As a romp, though, it's quite the romp.
It's the late 1890s. Sherlock Holmes has a new case, courtesy of a letter written by a woman and delivered by post to his all-seeing, almost-all-knowing brother Mycroft. Holmes deduces that the woman has written it with "one of those atrocious bank pens." While all of us who have secreted multiple Bank Pens (or in my case, Cooperative Credit Union pens) only to find that they write illegibly may commiserate with Holmes, the decade when the fountain pen was a hot new technology was not in fact known for disposable pens, at teller's windows or anyplace else. The deliberate comic anachronisms only pile up from there.
The new case takes Holmes and Watson to see a traveling ancient-Egyptian-themed circus, which turns out to be composed of genetically altered human-animal mutants, victims of an overzealous devotee of Charles Darwin's somewhat new ideas. If you recognize this situation, you'll know what Victorian horror novel Klaver is mashing up. It's not, of course, Oscar Wilde's THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. Dorian Gray turns out to be behind the horrors of the mutant circus, and when one of the circus performers, a woman unfortunately crossed with a most ungainly animal, turns up dead, Holmes needs help solving the mystery–not only from Watson, but from Gray, Dracula, Mina, and many other Usual Suspects.
The action is clear and fast-paced. The world hangs together as a supernatural alternate-Holmes universe and the alterations that Klaver makes to the ripped-off characters' backstories are plausible. Watson's medical meditations on his vampirism, which he views as a medical condition, are interesting. Apparently, turning into a vampire is an effective weight-loss strategy. If you want to know why, read Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray. Overall, Watson-as-vampire is a conceit that works. He's already long been a literary vampire, surviving well beyond his century on the lifeblood of his friend Sherlock Holmes.
In the end, however, Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray remind me of the movie version of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN - a Victorian pantheon, painted in a slapdash way. For this reviewer, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is powerful not for its ludicrous plot, melodrama characterisations, laundry lists of Gray's collectible possessions, and Aesthetic purple prose, but for its subtexts and double-talk: Wilde's daring evocation of the quandaries, joys, and valuable insights of the nineteenth-century homosexual man he had recently realized he was; its celebration of the power of art to transform a utilitarian society; its ambivalent view of the artist's struggle with his (or her) art, other people, and multiple selves. If, as Wilde says, every work of art is a self-portrait, it's hard to tell who Christian Klaver is: his art is composed of paper-doll versions of characters that in their originals had depth and daring.
If you like how Hollywood or Hammer Horror does "the classics," you'll like Klaver's latest romp. I did, enough to want to read his next one. If you've read DORIAN GRAY, the novel by Oscar Wilde, more than once, you'll wish Klaver's mental attic was more cluttered than Dorian's abandoned schoolroom.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, April 2024
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