The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes: A Mystery, by Leonard Goldberg, published 2017
in 2015, disney released a live action movie called Descendants, in which it follows the exploits of the children of Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Jafar, and Cruella de Vil within a single universe. this movie spanned a franchise with a short form animated show, and two more movies, the last of which released in 2019.
The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes asks the question "what if we did that disney descendants thing... but with characters from the Sherlock Holmes canon?"
there's a high degree of novelty in this premise right? the daughter of Sherlock Holmes inheriting all of the abilities and traits that made him into the famous detective? sounds like it'd be a fun time. yeah. sounds fun on paper. sure. except the novelty sure runs out fast when every single character in the book is nigh indistinguishable from their ancestor character because they've inherited nearly everything from them, their name, their job, etc. only the titular daughter of Sherlock Holmes seems to escaped inheriting her father's gender too.
the cast of disney's descendants. this book feels about as graceful as this picture does.
a summary aka everyone has the same job as their parents
the book opens with John Watson jr., who is also a doctor, discussing his position of writing down the exploits of Johanna Blalock, much like how his father did for Sherlock Holmes. Watson sr. is still alive when this book takes place by the way, and is consulted in his old age about the facts of the case as they progress. Holmes seems to have passed within the past few years/recently.
As the narrative really starts, Watson jr. goes to visit Watson sr. who has taken residence back up at 221b. 221b's housekeeper is Miss Hudson, the daughter of Mrs. Hudson, who has inherited the family business of running this building. the Watsons are visited by a woman stating that she wants help or advice from Watson sr. as he knows the method of Holmes. she presents them with the case that her brother fell from the roof of their family home to his death. it's been considered a suicide due to the gambling debts he owes, especially to his friend Christopher Moran, but the woman thinks he was murdered. Watson sr. agrees to help.
the Watsons go to question the witness to the fall, Johanna Blalock and her young son who is about the age of 5 or 6. Watson sr. is inexplicably taken aback when he initially encounters the two of them, so Watson jr. takes up the helm of performing the interview.
Johanna and her son's statement do contribute to the validity of the sister's suspicion that the brother was pushed instead of it being a suicide. Watson jr. is impressed with the clarity of detail and the analytical skill at which Johanna reports her information.
Watson jr. rejoins Watson sr. and Watson sr. admits that Johanna's son is the spitting image of Sherlock Holmes as he appeared as a young boy in a photograph Holmes showed him once. Watson sr. then tells his son the story of how Holmes apparently had a one night stand with Irene Adler who just showed up at 221b one night, stating she was divorced and suffering from a terminal illness. Watson sr. never heard of what became of that union before now, but it's clear to the Watsons: Johanna is the daughter of Sherlock Holmes.
the Watsons continue with their investigation and encounter Johanna again, who can't leave the matter alone. Johanna joins them to another crime scene and through the tenure of Watson, and Lestrade's descendant also working for Scotland Yard, Johanna is allowed to investigate the scene even though she's a woman. They come to the conclusion that the brother's head was bashed in and then thrown from the roof to make it look like a suicide. The culprit could've only been Moran.
They learn that Christopher Moran is, obviously, the child of Sebastian Moran. Moran jr. served in the Afghan war just like his father and also seems to be a gambling criminal... just like his father.
Johanna and the Watsons do their best to uncover Moran Jr.'s crimes and realize he's a man with a body count, seeming to have murdered several other people and gotten away with it. he's done his best to cover his tracks or make up fake alibis and the like.
At one point, Johanna and the Watsons need to track Moran Jr. and try to enlist the help of a scent hunting dog. if you're at all familiar with canon, Holmes did this in The Sign of Four with a dog named Toby. so... they go get Toby's descendant. but the thing is, the dog is not simply "Toby jr" no, that would be too easy. the dog's name is Toby Two. Toby FUCKING Two. the pattern is starting to get infuriating at this point if i'm being honest.
i made this image from a screenshot of Toby from the Granada Sign of Four adaptation. but the site i use also deep fried it even more it seems.
they realize that the only way to actually pin Moran jr. for his crimes is to get him caught in the act. they locate the last man that Moran jr. will probably target, who is due to get a surgery soon. they come up with a plan that involves Watson jr. posing as the man and Johanna posing as an attending nurse (her previous occupation was a nurse also). this plan works and they successfully catch Moran jr.
the book ends with Watson jr. considering being Johanna's biographer just like his father. also did i mention that he's in love with Johanna?
the
so. ok. i'll start this off with saying that i found this book quite annoying. as i stated before there's a lot of novelty in having a Holmsian story focus around the descendants of the original characters but it's so superficial, especially when Every. Single. Character. Is. Exactly. The. Same. As. Their. Ancestor. around every corner was a descendant of a canon character. when Toby Two appeared that fucking BROKE me. you gave the dog a fucking descendant. fuck off oh my god.
the biggest issue that i do take with this though is the character of Moran. this is quite an antiquated concept now, so i don't know if many are familiar with it, but there was a train of thought as early as the 18th century, but especially prevalent during the 20th century, that the child of a criminal would have a genetic predisposition to also one day become a criminal. this was concept seeped in eugenics which was also a popular topic around the time.
i've been aware of this concept for a while, but it's a topic that's prominent in another book i actually like, Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie, where a woman is concerned her fiance won't marry her or have children with her on account of her mother being convicted of murder, but the woman believes her mother was actually falsely accused. this book presents the dangers that this concept brought: children and family members of criminals were branded as being possible criminals themselves, having done nothing than simply exist and some armchair ableists wanting to blame psychopathy on your genes.
so the fact that this concept is being applied to Moran, even if it's unintentional due to the entire premise of this book, is pretty disgusting. the idea that anyone is still using this concept as recently as 5 years ago in order to justify the crimes of a character is just callous and absurd. (except Sherlock Holmes media loves to just thoughtlessly throw around psychopathy and sociopathy concepts without considering the ramifications of doing so, don't they? yes, i am talking about BBC Sherlock.)
if i have to talk about the cast as a whole though, no one has any specific character traits that are really defining or sets them apart from their ancestor. all of the characters just feel like... they're filling roles. like... a Sherlock Holmes story needs a housekeeper, so there's a housekeeper. it needs a detective from Scotland Yard, so there's a detective. it needs a scent tracking dog, so there's a FUCKING dog. even Johanna feels like she's filling a role, even if she has the most defined personality out of anyone in the book. Scandal in Bohemia exists and has a "smart woman" character, so Johanna fills that role. the characters are just checking boxes, they're just names on a sheet. everything feels so... dull. i feel like Disney's Descendants probably gave more care to creating characterizations for their villain child characters than this book treated it's entire cast.
in terms of the mystery itself, i also didn't like it that much. about 1/4 of the way into the book, Moran becomes the ONLY suspect and the rest of the book is spent just trying to figure out how to catch him. it feels like a really bad version of an Ace Attorney case where you already know who the culprit is and you have to work backwards to connect them to the crime except you're not in control of the reigns of the fun story and instead you have to follow around three characters that are always annoyingly three steps behind the culprit because they keep taking time to explain every concept to you.
the story would've been much better if for some reason Moran WASN'T the culprit and it was actually someone else that the main crew hadn't anticipated. it could've even been another descendant-- like any of the descendants of Holmes' allies of the past-- and it would've made for a much better story! then the set up of all of the descendants having all their parent's jobs and lives would've played into the expectation that it'd just be another criminal, only to flip it on it's head! it would've been so easy to do! and instead you take a eugenicist's garbage approach to the story and made it bad! fuck!
sorry im gonna calm down
ok so... what are the people saying about it. turns out for once, the public agrees with me. even when people seem to enjoy elements about the story, they're still not rating it highly. they also bring up my same frustrations about the descendants/inheritance of qualities and dispositions. something that keeps being brought up in connection to this book though is the word "fanfiction". while everything written after the original canon would be considered fanfiction, it's being used in a derogatory sense that is alluding more to this being something that could be found on a self-publishing website or fanfic hosting site where there's little editing and oversight to the story. which i don't think i fully disagree with to be honest.
Angie Berry from criminal element writes:
Goldberg clearly loves the concept of inheritance, but it feels rather limiting and frustrating here. Claiming that someone has no choice but to follow the same patterns as their forebears makes for boring predictability with characters—a much more interesting, exciting story would be how someone could completely defy genetics and expectations.
from echoes-empty-mind blog post:
It is as if the author wants to reassure themself, of their connection to the original stories. The whole enterprise seems like an overtly complicated fan-fiction rather than an original reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Speaking of which, the mysteries are clunky, mostly predictable, and meandering.
review of familiar and passionate frustration a from Goodreads user LilyBooks:
[...] But my primary complaint is that this book assumes that the reader is just as stupid as those characters. In the course of the investigation, we are treated to multiple lengthy explanations to things that a person of average intelligence already knows. Being able to see up close but blurred at a distance is called near-sightedness? Shocking. (Note the word myopic does not appear in this text, which the original Holmes would no doubt know and use.) And it possible to determine if someone is near-sighted by asking them to both read and look across the street without glasses and have them tell what you they see? The field of ophthalmology is no doubt rocking from that revelation. Did you know that blood passes through both the heart and lungs in circulation? I never heard tell! Would you have ever guessed that a walking stick with solid silver ball on the top would cause a round fracture in a human skull? Probably not because John Watson, Jr. - a pathologist!!! - doesn’t believe it until Ms. Holmes/Blalock gives him a demonstration! Brace yourselves for this one, because not only is a whole chapter devoted to explaining it, but it also gets a paragraph long rehash in a later chapter in case you forget: the letter E is the most commonly used letter in the English language!
the book averages at a 3.6/5 on Goodreads and 3.28/5 on Storygraph. that's pretty low for a seemingly popular pastiche. when i think about it, this book does feel like it's probably trying to capitalize upon the fact that there are a lot of female crime fiction fans and this is an attempt to give us a female detective that's something on par with a classic detective. but then just going... whole hog and then some on that concept to the point it's just sickening.
regardless of how i personally feel about this book, there are five more books penned by Goldberg in this series: A Study in Treason, The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth, The Art of Deception, The Abduction of Pretty Penny, and The Blue Diamond. these books are rated higher than the first novel in the series, but that might be a combination of The Blue Diamond only being published this year and the lack of people reading it, and the fact that so many people seem to have dropped off from the series after the first book that only the people that actually like the series are reviewing them.
seeing these book covers in company of each other made me realize that they're trying to make that bowler hat into Johanna's deerstalker equivalent. not really a fan of it and i was never really a fan of the deerstalker if i'm being honest.
i can't say that i'll be joining the ranks of people continuing on with this series. maybe if i absolutely run out of stuff to consume. which will probably be never.
there are several other pieces of media that attempt to assign the skills of Holmes to a woman, most recently a TV show called Miss Sherlock, comes to mind. it's received international praise and i'd be interested in one day watching it myself.
Yuko Takeuchi and Shihori Kanjiya as Holmes and Watson in "Miss Sherlock", co-produced by HBO Asia and Hulu Japan.
i won't go into it fully now, but that reminds me that there's A LOT of Sherlock Holmes inspired media coming from Japan. through some research i discovered that Edogawa Ranpo is mostly to blame for that. but honestly, that deserves it's own post at some other time.