The Case of the Reluctant Agent

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Supposedly “a Sherlock Holmes mystery,” this book by an Edmonton
writer is not so much a mystery as a juvenile adventure set during World
War I. The author makes not the slightest attempt to imitate Conan
Doyle’s writing style, but has prefaced her tale with Doyle’s weak
and jingoistic story “His Last Bow” to show that Doyle, too, could
on occasion write unimaginative prose. That story, unlike the 47 Holmes
tales that preceded it, is written in the third person, as is this
story. Without the intimate narration of Dr. Watson, which connects the
reader so well to the original adventures, the writing is not engaging;
Watson does not even appear in the book until its closing pages.
Unbelievably—since the Doyle story Cooper-Posey includes describes
Watson as “an elderly man”—we are asked to believe that he “was
occupied on the Western front ... facing the Hun.”

Holmes is the eponymous agent in the decaying Ottoman Empire, chasing
spies and evading nasty Germans with a variety of disguises and in a
variety of languages, while meeting, in the most preposterous
situations, a woman with whom, we are asked to believe, he lived at 221B
Baker Street for almost 10 years. Very little of her story is set in the
familiar territory of London, which is just as well; the author has not
done even basic research about the city. She will not get a train to
Devon from Victoria Station.

Only a sense of obligation made me finish this book. To quote the
“real” Dr. Watson, in A Study in Scarlet: “What ineffable
twaddle!”