If you’re one of the many languishing in limbo waiting for Series 3 of Sherlock, or you just want to read about Sherlock Holmes fighting a bear, then Andrew Lane’s fourth Young Sherlock Holmes novel, Fire Storm, may help make that wait a little less interminable.
You won’t find a young Watson or a teenage Moriarty, but what you will get is an entertaining adventure that hits all the beats of a typical Holmes story.
Whereas Anthony Horowitz’s 2011 Holmes novel The House of Silk was an impressively accurate facsimile of Conan Doyle’s writing style, Lane rightly chooses something more approachable for his series’ younger readership. His style is modern and unbound from the typical memoirs-style narration of the Holmes stories.
While some fans may feel that this change in style removes a key component of what makes a Sherlock story feel so… Sherlock, it compensates by allowing the story to rattle along at the kind of pleasingly rapid pace you expect in Young Adult fiction.
It’s a story of mysterious disappearances, blackmail, evil housekeepers, and a villain who can supposedly control the dead – uncomplicated and exciting, but not so outlandish that it feels like it’s taking liberties with the legend. It’s no ‘three pipe problem’ of a mystery, but that’s okay. Kids shouldn’t be smoking pipes anyway.
Our hero isn’t yet the cold and calculating Sherlock of legend. This is a keen young abacus mind, as emotionally frozen as his future self, but pricked by teenage flaws and the naivety of youth. A fourteen year old still getting used to the weight of a violin, but who can still stand in a crowd and pick out every sign and interpretation. The outline of Holmes is there, he’s just growing into it, and Lane is commendably restrained and respectful in the way he treats one of fiction’s greatest properties.
There are flaws, but they’re likely reflective of how you personally view Holmes. At one point Sherlock utters a ‘Wow’, which feels wrong for the character and anachronistic, but moments such as that are few and far between.
Not all may be keen on a villain who harks back to the days of moustache-twirling scoundrels and says things such as “Revenge is a dish best served cold, but I have been waiting so long that my revenge has congealed on the plate”, but this is a book for a younger audience. Let them enjoy the odd hammy cad now and graduate to the big boys like Charles Augustus Milverton and Colonel Sebastian Moran later.
Some may prefer not to hear of the infallible hero Sherlock as a boy, preferring to keep him locked in their imaginations as the master detective of legend, but for young readers circling the borders of Holmes lore, and older fans who’ve fully charted it, Fire Storm is a pleasing read.
Published on Thursday 26th April 2012 by Macmillan Children’s Books.
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