Holmes devotees will know that The Great Detective’s last canon adventure was ‘His Last Bow’, in which he foiled the German agent Von Bork on the eve of World War One.
It ends with Holmes in an oddly reflective mood:
‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.’
George Mann’s ‘The Spirit Box’ takes place in the heart of that storm, England 1915, as German zeppelins pummel London and the toll of life lost on foreign battlefields extends all the way back to Dr Watson, now an old man living in Ealing.
A trio of curious deaths involving tigers, steam trains, and the River Thames, draws an aged Holmes out of retirement on the Sussex Downs and back to The Capital. From there the game quickly hot-foots to a far greater, more occult, mystery involving a man named Seaton Underwood and his curious soul capturing spectrograph…
Questions of the occult and the fate of the soul strike a chord with the intense atmosphere of death that hangs above a country at war. The now pensionable Watson is tired and grieving. Holmes’ presence reinvigorates him somewhat, but Mann has made sure that an atmosphere of mourning pervades. There’s a great sense that the London of old, Holmes’ familiar foggy warren of Hansom cabs, opium dens, and crooked alleyways, is being blasted away forever by German bombardment.
It is a more down to earth than previous Sherlock Holmes books released by Titan. Not that we didn’t love Guy Adams’ Sherlock-meets-a-sharktopus, or James Lovegrove’s Victorian Transformer, but the fact that Mann creates a satisfying balance between the mysterious and the material will please the more down to Earth Holmes fans who shun rumours of giant rats.
Fans of George Mann’s Newbury & Hobbes series will be pleased to know that The Spirit Box is another Holmes story that intersects with their universe, as Sir Maurice Newbury crops up several times to aid the investigation. As a nice little bonus, the book also features a short Newbury & Hobbes story, The Lady Killer, which sees Newbury and Queen Victoria in the aftermath of a train explosion.
It all makes for another fine instalment in Titan’s expanding tales of The Great Detective, and an interesting further expansion into the world of mystery and shadows that Mann has been building through both the Sherlock Holmes and Newbury & Hobbes books.
Published on Friday 22 August 2014 by Titan Books.
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