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It has been a month or more since I read this Sherlockian pastiche. I was singularly unimpressed by it, which rather surprised me as I had enjoyed (in spite of its dismal tone) GODS OF WAR by the same author. I've always taken pleasure, to one degree or another, in those who had the skill and the courage to fill in the holes Watson left in his stories from the life of Holmes.
While Lovegrove has the skeleton of the Canon correct, his fleshing out of Holmes in this work was not wondrous. Holmes, at his crankiest, is always a gentleman, particularly to those who are not his companions. Not so in this book. At one point, Holmes becomes voluntarily addicted to a drug other than cocaine - and the reason given for this is not nearly as compelling to me as it was to Mr. Holmes. Also, his conversations don't seem nearly as Victorian in their tone or content as they might be. There are virtually no passages that bring to the reader a sense of Oxford at this time period; the lack of description is strange. By the end of the Canon, most readers have a fairly good feeling for what London was like at the time, both physically and with respect to the people who inhabit it.
I've been a dilettante as a Sherlockian for many years. The last straw for me was Holmes's violation of one of his most famous dictums: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (from The Sign of the Four). For those of you willing to risk the disappointment, the denouement of ENGINE will probably take you back a pace or two. I certainly didn't expect it, or consider it worthy of the Canon.
§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.
Reviewed by PJ Coldren, January 1990
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