Locked Rooms

As this is the first in this series that I have read it seems a bit slow and seemed like it could be a shorter book. But I did enjoy it in the end and will go back and read it from the beginning.

Mary and Sherlock travel to San Fransisco where Mary lived. They investigate the deaths of her parents, and it seems someone is trying to get rid of Mary as well. The story is told both in the voice of Mary and the voice of Sherlock. Making some of it a bit redundant. About halfway through the book picks up and really ramped up at the end. Which would make it a 3.5 star read for me.

Quite a few readers I know - myself included - have what I like to call a “saturation point.” When a book series runs longer than three or four books, I have to stop at somewhere around book seven or so, because that is generally my saturation point for any given series. The length of each individual book has nothing to do with this saturation point level; merely the involvement I devote to the long-running storylines and characters of such series. I liken it to vacationing in one place for too long: after a while the scenery and environs that used to be so fresh and new are suddenly tedious and exhausting, which means that it is time to move on to someplace else.

This was how I was feeling about Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series. When I'd first discovered it I found it so much fun and the characters so interesting that I quite gladly blasted through the first seven books with barely a pause between them. Even when I wasn't quite pleased with some of the other books, I forged on, and found myself rewarded by more good books than bad in the series. But by the time I reached The Game, the seventh book in the series, I was already quite aware that I had reached my saturation point. If I pushed through reading the series, I might find myself displeased with a book I might have, on any other occasion, found enjoyable. To spare myself from that possible disaster, I put the series aside, intending to return to it when I the saturation point had receded. How long that would take, though, I did not know.

So I spent a good several weeks away from the series, reading other books, engaging in other series, but this time choosing to space them out so that I did not get to that saturation point again immediately. But when I read The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, I was reminded of the fact that I had not yet finished the Mary Russell series, and determined that it was finally time to go back and pick it up again. There were other books ahead of it on my reading list, but as soon as I had made it through those, I was able to open the eighth book in the Mary Russell series with the same sense of eagerness I had when I first started reading the series.

The general premise of the series is simple enough, and the stories of the previous novels memorable enough, that I did not need to go back and reread them in order to refresh my memory in preparation for reading the eighth book. Starting in The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the series introduces as its main protagonist a young woman named Mary Russell, who, as a teenager, encounters the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. This first meeting leads Mary becoming, first, Holmes's apprentice, and then his partner, and, finally (perhaps inevitably), his wife. Just as inevitable are the cases they find themselves solving together, and while some of them have been less than enjoyable (A Monstrous Regiment of Women), a great many more have been quite fun (my current favorite is O Jerusalem). The seventh book, The Game, was one of the latter, and so I was not completely adrift when I started reading Locked Rooms.

The eighth book opens almost immediately after the events of its predecessor. After successfully completing their tasks in India, Holmes and Russell board a ship to Japan, acting upon a message that requested their presence there. The events are only referenced briefly in Locked Rooms, and if I am not mistaken the entire story is detailed somewhere else as a short story. Nevertheless, after they conclude their business in Japan, they head towards San Francisco. This is apparently Russell's decision, since she thinks it necessary to go there in order to settle some business regarding her properties and assets in the area, many of which she does not really oversee since she lives in England most of the time now.

On the way there, however, she is plagued by strange, terrifying dreams, which only seem to have come up now that she is going back to the place where the most terrible moment of her life - the death of her family - occurred. But what she - and Holmes - finds out later, however, is that those dreams are really quite important, and that, moreover, they might be the key to finding out the truth about the accident that took away Russell's family and changed her life forever.

I will admit, I have rather been waiting for this book: waiting in the sense that it brings Russell back to her roots. I know that, in a way, O Jerusalem did that, and it did so admirably, but those were Russell's spiritual roots, not her actual, familial roots. Russell, as the narrator of the novels, has not really said anything much in the previous books about her family, aside from the fact that they died in a car crash, and I admit that I have been rather curious about what that family must have been like, to produce a person like Mary.

Unfortunately, any early revelations get mired in Russell's confused, and thus confusing to read, narrative. Returning to San Francisco seems to have scrambled her normally-stable brain, and she is not functioning as well as she was in the last few books. The pressure of all those returning memories - which the dreams are, anyway, at least in a coded form - seem to be all too much for Russell, though I suppose her attempts to make like an ostrich and bury her head in the sand do not help matters at all. I suppose she might be excused, because of the trauma of the events concerned (the great San Francisco Quake of 1906, and the accident that killed her family) would certainly result in a subconscious attempt to bury those memories, but I personally wish there was a better way to introduce Russell's past than that.

Do not get me wrong; I do think dreams can be revelatory, in the sense that they are a means of recovering ideas, concerns, even memories thought long lost to the dreamer. But I did not enjoy how Russell's dreams were given such importance in this novel. There are so many ways that the concerns regarding her family and the accident could have been raised and introduced; I do not think dreams were the best way to do so. I simply could not wait to get away from the chapters wherein she was the narrator, because she was beginning to grate terribly on my nerves and my desire to get on with the story.

Holmes is also equally frustrated with his wife's inability to think as clearly and efficiently as she normally would, and the third-person chapters involving his actions when Russell is not around are a welcome relief from Russell's narration. When reading mysteries, especially one involving the great Sherlock Holmes, narrations like Russell's simply have no place. It was always a relief to reach a set of third-person point-of-view chapters, because then it meant I wouldn't have to put up with Russell suddenly passing into reverie just because some small, random thing triggered a memory.

Despite that large, glaring failure in storytelling, the rest of the novel is actually quite good, despite Russell's tendency to drift off when something triggers her memories. The perpetrators behind the murder of Russell's family, and of a few other people close to her besides (including her psychiatrist) are really rather boring, as is their motive. Then again, this novel is not about crime of any sort: it's about Russell. The fact that the death of her family was murder was interesting enough, but I had hoped for something a little more villainous, a little more complex, than what the story provided. It's not as irritating as the case in A Monstrous Regiment of Women, but it comes pretty close.

One thing, however, did prove to be the highlight of the entire thing: the appearance, as a supporting character, of a notable personage. Many people tend to forget that Dashiell Hammett, before he was ever the pioneer of the classic hard-boiled detective novel genre, was actually a Pinkerton man, and hence knew something of the ins and outs of investigation. That he should make an appearance - and quite the appearance! - in the story is exceedingly amusing, and a pleasant surprise for the reader who has read - or seen - and loved The Maltese Falcon. There is one conversation, in particular, that Hammett has with Holmes that absolutely had me giggling in delight: about how investigations are never as exciting as they seem in the stories. Holmes complains about how Watson never mentions the tedium, and while Hammett agrees, he does say that, for the sake of storytelling, it's necessary not to mention the boring bits.

All in all, Locked Rooms is a relatively mediocre book in a series that has some really spectacular stories in it, but I suppose this is to be expected in a series as long as this. While I had hoped for something a little more exciting, what I got from this novel is rather better than an absolutely boring or abhorrent one.