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May. 9th, 2020 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMy roommates and I were discussing good and bad choices in Irene Adler Fiction recently, which led directly to my notalgia-purchase of Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first in a series of Irene Adler Mystery Novels that I devoured as a preteen.
The most charming thing that this book does is give Irene Adler her very own Watson: Nell Huxleigh, a Respectable Parson's Daughter whom Irene discovers in danger of living on the streets in the first chapter and immediately carries off and deposits in her apartment to live there forever and narrate all her adventures.
Nell is a great narrator for multiple reasons: a.) she's a fantastic embodiment of the trope 'primly respectable woman consistently surprises and scandalizes own self with capacity for Adventure'; b.) she's extremely judgy about everything and it's very funny c.) she doesn't care at ALL about Sherlock Holmes, which means that the books also care relatively little about Sherlock Holmes, which makes for a really refreshing change from the vast majority of Irene Adler Appearances in media!
Also Nell/Irene/Geoffrey Norton is a great OT3; Irene and Geoffrey get off on the wrong foot while Irene is investigating his missing family Marie Antoinette diamonds and Nell spends the entire rest of the novel attempting to convince her two crushes that they really would like each other, she promises, if they just gave it a chance, maybe she should read more of their letters out loud to each other to convince them?
Relatedly: this is very much the kind of book that's like 'how did Irene and her canon husband meet? OBVIOUSLY she was hired by TIFFANY to investigate his MISSING FAMILY MARIE ANTOINETTE DIAMONDS!' It fully luxuriates in gratuitous references, unnecessary historical cameos, and hilariously dramatic additions to canon events; it's completely cheesy and I kind of love it. Moments that made me laugh the hardest:
- Irene and Nell encounter the murderer from A Study in Scarlet in a taxi, who immediately recaps the entire story for them, bleeds on them dramatically, hands them some Significant Jewelry and wanders away
- Irene and Nell Solve the Mystery of Who Poisoned Irene's Boyfriend's Father (The King of Bohemia)
- Irene and Nell dig up buried treasure in Oscar Wilde's backyard (and do not give any of it to Oscar Wilde, who could probably use it)
...ok I have to talk a little more about the gratuitous Oscar Wilde cameos because there are so many of them and I'm really not sure that Carole Nelson Douglas fully understands that Oscar Wilde was either a.) a satirist or b.) gay? But she definitely understands that he was Aesthetic!
Anyway, stay tuned for future adventures, including Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Meet Nellie Bly, Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Hang Out With Sarah Bernhardt, and Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Fight The Golem of Prague.
The most charming thing that this book does is give Irene Adler her very own Watson: Nell Huxleigh, a Respectable Parson's Daughter whom Irene discovers in danger of living on the streets in the first chapter and immediately carries off and deposits in her apartment to live there forever and narrate all her adventures.
Nell is a great narrator for multiple reasons: a.) she's a fantastic embodiment of the trope 'primly respectable woman consistently surprises and scandalizes own self with capacity for Adventure'; b.) she's extremely judgy about everything and it's very funny c.) she doesn't care at ALL about Sherlock Holmes, which means that the books also care relatively little about Sherlock Holmes, which makes for a really refreshing change from the vast majority of Irene Adler Appearances in media!
Also Nell/Irene/Geoffrey Norton is a great OT3; Irene and Geoffrey get off on the wrong foot while Irene is investigating his missing family Marie Antoinette diamonds and Nell spends the entire rest of the novel attempting to convince her two crushes that they really would like each other, she promises, if they just gave it a chance, maybe she should read more of their letters out loud to each other to convince them?
Relatedly: this is very much the kind of book that's like 'how did Irene and her canon husband meet? OBVIOUSLY she was hired by TIFFANY to investigate his MISSING FAMILY MARIE ANTOINETTE DIAMONDS!' It fully luxuriates in gratuitous references, unnecessary historical cameos, and hilariously dramatic additions to canon events; it's completely cheesy and I kind of love it. Moments that made me laugh the hardest:
- Irene and Nell encounter the murderer from A Study in Scarlet in a taxi, who immediately recaps the entire story for them, bleeds on them dramatically, hands them some Significant Jewelry and wanders away
- Irene and Nell Solve the Mystery of Who Poisoned Irene's Boyfriend's Father (The King of Bohemia)
- Irene and Nell dig up buried treasure in Oscar Wilde's backyard (and do not give any of it to Oscar Wilde, who could probably use it)
...ok I have to talk a little more about the gratuitous Oscar Wilde cameos because there are so many of them and I'm really not sure that Carole Nelson Douglas fully understands that Oscar Wilde was either a.) a satirist or b.) gay? But she definitely understands that he was Aesthetic!
Anyway, stay tuned for future adventures, including Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Meet Nellie Bly, Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Hang Out With Sarah Bernhardt, and Irene Adler And Her Husband And Their Spinster Watson Fight The Golem of Prague.
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Date: 2020-05-10 01:08 am (UTC)ACD wasn't great at keeping track of his timeline, so if you arrange the Holmes stories in the most plausible chronological order Watson starts out as Holmes's bachelor housemate, then gets married and moves out, then his wife dies and he moves back in, then after that point there's some more stories where Watson is married and living with his wife again without explanation.
A common patch in fandom is to assume that Watson married twice and ACD never got around to explaining who his second wife was and how they met, but I've also seen an essay arguing that his first wife never died (the story in question just says "a bereavement" and leaves the reader to assume who died from the fact that Watson is back living with Holmes, and the essay suggests that it was a temporary separation following the death of a child) -- and, on the other hand, there have been people who have amused themselves by going in the other direction and mining the stories for evidence of a third, fourth, etc. wife.
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Date: 2020-05-10 02:26 am (UTC)Becca -- I read the opening chapters of the spinster Watson book and it was great! But it's like 83 here (normal temp is....around 70?) and I got sandbagged by a nap. But it's really good so far!
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Date: 2020-05-10 01:25 pm (UTC)