Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, by Larry Millett, published 1998
i decided to go back to Mr. Millett's little Minnesota Holmes universe. i'm honestly glad i did. this is the sequel to Sherlock Holmes and The Red Demon, so it'd be wise to read my review on that book if you want some context. or don't. i'm not your dad.
this book in particular focuses around the Winter Carnival, an event that has occurred yearly in St. Paul, Minnesota since 1886. the event has often featured an "Ice Palace" which was a tourist destination for the city since then. to be honest, this book has made me interested in visiting the Winter Carnival some time in the future as i've lived around the Twin Cities for the past several years. i've visited a similar event in Duluth, Minnesota that focused around Christmas lights demonstrations and that was a lot of fun despite walking around in a huge park in sub freezing temperatures.
i'll preface the content warnings for this book as thus: i know there's a lot. i got to a point where i was recording them as i was consuming the book because there are a lot. HOWEVER, i think that this book actually tends to the subject matter in a humane way, and treating them with the respect it deserves. stuff gets heavy, it gets rough, but there is genuine closure and care taken when addressing these subjects, which is something i didn't really get in the previous book.
the content warnings for Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders are as follows:
murder, post mortem decapitation, veiled descriptions of date rape drugs, veiled descriptions of rape, suicidal tendencies, suicide attempts, blackmail, historic use of the "N" word, crossdressing but in the way that people are weird about it but not in an overtly transphobic kind of way, police corruption, slur for Italian people, and a dog is brutalized to deaththe return: the sequel 2
i finished this book in july 2022, shortly after i had finished writing my review of the Red Demon. i said that i didn't really enjoy the red demon, but writing that review spurred me on to try to start on this book. in my preface i said i did actually enjoy this book, but i might attribute it to the sequel phenomenon, in which because a sequel doesn't has to justify its premise or existence people generally receive it more favorably and the creators can jump quicker to the story without having to provide exposition on certain topics.
alike to my review of the Red Demon, i read this book over 2 years ago so the details about it are fuzzy, so i put the audiobook on 2.5x speed and let it run during my work day. this book is a niche of a niche so no one's cared to make a sparknotes version of what happened in the book and my summary isn't really sparknotes quality either, but i'm just trying to get the plot across.
2.5x speed summary
Holmes and Watson actually start their journey going to Chicago, solving a case that Watson doesn't delve into in the narrative but are called to St. Paul by James. J Hill to help solve the disappearance of Jonathan Upton, the son of one of the city's richest families, on the eve of his wedding. His wedding was to take place inside of the Ice Palace, a literal castle built out of blocks of ice for the St. Paul Winter carnival.
when they tour the carnival, they see a strikingly beautiful sculpture of a woman who appears sorrowful and find it's sculptor, an Italian man named Dante. they compliment him on his sculpture but Dante won't say what inspired it.
they encounter Millet's blorbo OC of a character, Shadwell Rafferty, an Irishman and tavern owner that also fancies himself as a criminal investigator. together the three of them look into the Ice Palace, the last place Upton was seen and they discover a cloudy block of ice where all of the other blocks that make up the Ice Palace are practically clear. upon dislodging it from its place, they discover the severed head of Jonathan Upton.
Holmes and Watson try to interview some people, and come up with a couple of suspects: Upton's father George Upton (who was ornery about his son's death and disappearance but seemed to care less after his body was found), his fiancé Laura Forbes (who sold back her wedding dress the day after he disappeared), and a previous suitor of his fiancé and chief builder of the Ice Palace Michael Riley (who worked for him and seemed to be bitter that Upton took Laura from him).
Frederick Forbes, a friend of Upton, comes to Holmes and Watson with a pasted together letter stating he's in danger and reveals that Upton received a letter several days before his own disappearance. Forbes fears for his life.
Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty break into Upton's house and find his diary where he admits to getting in with the "wrong" crowd at a club he frequented, the Muskrat Club, where he began raping virginal women that were drugged as to not remember anything, brought to him by an associate he called "Spider". Upton regretted these actions and when he tried to break away from these people and these activities, he was blackmailed ruthlessly by these people and Upton was considering suicide.
Not long later, Upton's father is discovered murdered and body stowed in a mound of snow near the Ice Palace. at the same time, Laura Forbes and Michael Riley are discovered to have married and were planning to elope to New York, but Riley was arrested for the murder of Upton. Laura reveals that she knew that Upton was raping women and didn't want to marry him and Riley wanted to reveal what he was doing but it had put him on bad terms with the Muskrat Club and whoever was organizing their assault upon women, whoever that was. what also unfolds from here is that $10,000 were embezzled from the carnival funds and the chief detective, Connor, seems to be involved in the situation, someone who has a poor rapport with Rafferty and verbally assaulted Holmes earlier.
a crossdressing racketeerer named Bouquet seems to work for the "Spider" and gets involved in the case as well, seeming to be the direct threat on Frederick Forbes' life. Rafferty's dog is killed by someone who tried to search Rafferty's home for Upton's diary and Rafferty goes berserk, it takes Holmes, the barhand, and Watson's sedatives to calm him down.
Holmes tries to lay a plan to catch Bouquet by using Forbes as live bait, but Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty get separated when Forbes gets narrowly stabbed. Holmes and Bouquet have a confrontation over the frozen river and Holmes falls through, but is saved by catching hold of a Muskrat home.
Riley breaks out of jail but it looks like an inside job, Laura is kidnapped and discovered in the Muskrat Club, but was merely drugged.
Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty go to the Ice Palace on the last night guessing that the "Spider" will try to wrap up everything here. Bouquet and the "Spider" do arrive, but the three are too late to stop the "Spider" for shooting Bouquet after pretending to give him $5000. The "Spider" taunts the detectives, stating that they could never pin him for anything that happened with the Ice Palace murders since they would only ever trust his word and the word of the head detective that's in his pocket over some foreigners and an Irishman. all the clues do not point to him and there was no proof.
the "Spider" goes to leave, his name not having been revealed during all of this but Watson says he knows who he is. a last moment to gloat, the "Spider" reveals that it was him that brutalized Rafferty's dog and in a moment of rage Rafferty shoots a shotgun shot at him, but it seems to miss and hits the ice keystone of an arch of the melting Ice Palace and it falls on the one who organized it all: Frederick Forbes.
the rest of the book is spent with Holmes unraveling why everything happened the way it did to the people involved, and Frederick Forbes seemed to have gambling debts and unsavory tastes in how to engage with women so he tried to steal money from the carnival fund since Upton had a hand in the construction, and used the blackmail he had against Upton to allow the theft, but that doesn't explain the murder.
Upton was actually murdered by Dante, the sculptor of that ice sculpture of the sorrowful woman. Dante had a daughter that after visiting St. Paul found herself pregnant, as a victim of the assault done on her at the Muskrat Club and by Upton. his daughter killed herself, unable to take the grief of discovering she had been raped and the incurring pregnancy. Dante killed Upton, used his excuse as working in the Ice Palace as his reason for being there after hours, stored his head in one of the molds for making ice bricks, then carted his body off to the city dump where the rest of the waste material from the Ice Palace construction was taken. Dante mailed his confession to Holmes and disappeared.
so two crimes intersecting at a single point, the murder and death of Upton is the cause of it all.
more about the Winter Carnival
the Winter Carnival is the oldest winter festival in the US, having been established in 1886. a notable aspect of the Winter Carnival was the construction of the Ice Palace, which by its name you can probably guess was a large building made entirely made of ice. Other ice sculptures were featured, as well as demonstrations and participation from the local Sioux people.
An illustration of the ice palace in 1887. By The H.M Smyth Print Co. - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004672439/, Public Domain, Link
due to the historically low temperatures of Minnesota allowed for the creation of ice blocks that were then placed as bricks. i was actually able to find a picture of what the ice palace of 1896 looked like when Holmes and Watson visited:
photo from the St. Paul Winter Carnival website: History of the Ice Palaces.
the archway that is featured in the photo there i believe depicts the icebrick keystone with which Forbes met his fate. it's neat to have the actual visual that Millet probably worked off of in order to build the scene of the Winter Carnival.
there's a plethora of information about the history of the Winter Carnival on the website too if you'd like to read up on the history of the carnival or see photos of the event more recent history.
an analysis
disconnected from the actual content of the story, the narration done by Steve Hendrickson is fucking good. this guy can do a million and one accents and within the first 5 chapters he does an American accent, an English Accent, an Irish accent, a Swedish accent, and an Italian accent. what a champ.
additionally, being in downtown St. Paul quite often these days it's fun to hear the directions being given by characters and know exactly what streets they're going down and what places they're going. a lot of the buildings in St. Paul are pretty old and seem to attempt to be maintained as best as they can be, leading to a lot of old brickwork everywhere so it's very likely that the streets look very similar too.
this book deals with a lot more unsavory topics but everything is approached with a level of care that i felt was missing in the Red Demon. Holmes' characterization feels a little more consistent and the mystery itself is really well structured in my opinion. i especially love the reoccurring encounter with Dante's ice sculpture and the descriptions of the melting Ice Palace.
unlike House of Silk, where the organizer of the events walks away basically scott free, the fact that Forbes actually dies at the end of this book as a means of catharsis feels very very good. the detectives lost, to both the burden of proof and personal attachment/anger, but it was what led to the conclusion of the case in a way that was actually satisfying.
overall, i think this is a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche. i'm not even mad i had to listen to the book a second time in order to remember all the happened. i enjoyed it, even if it were on 2.5x speed (i would've done 3x just so i could get through it faster but that speed was actually unintelligible. 1.5x speed is my normal audiobook)
if i had any complaint about the book, its that Watson takes a real back seat to everything. he's more or less a camera in which he perceives Holmes and Rafferty, and has the most importance when he stabs Rafferty with a sedative and when he saves Holmes from the freezing river. beyond that, he doesn't do much, which is a crime of a lot of Holmesian media that i can't just hold Millet to.
reviews
what do other people think? i blasted myself with reviews hoping that ANYONE on goodreads had a summary i could just use to remind myself of what happened but the general feel is similar to that of the Red Demon, people appreciate this pastiche for its historical accuracy and especially that of Minnesota, but also people fucking hated it because either they find Millet's characterization bad or dropped it when the dog died.
From Goodreads user Jennifer:
Written in the style of Conan Doyle, it is easy to slip into believing that this indeed, is another epistle from Dr. Watson, as described by Conan Doyle.
This book takes place in St. Paul, Holmes being summoned to help solve the mystery of the missing bridegroom. Murder takes place, threats, and intrigue abound. Some of the subject matter is disturbing (the rape of young women) but it figures prominently into the situation and while distasteful is important.
All in all, I enjoyed this book and will seek out the next in the series. I did not figure out who the murderer was, but felt it made sense in the end.
from Goodreads user Stasia Higgins:
Stopped at chapter 21. [...] Holmes is reduced to a mere investigator as opposed to someone who deduces facts out of trivial details. He never knows something without someone directly telling him.
Rafferty was fine. Less annoying than anticipated, but I’d still rather Sherlock Holmes be the main investigator in the Sherlock Holmes story.
I found the author’s introduction of a much more serious motive (gang rape) to be poorly handled.
And finally, the dog dies.
from Storygraph user truegrit:
If you like well researched historical fiction and Sherlock Holmes stories, here ya go.
i disagree with the idea that the "gang rape" was poorly handled, it's a rough subject no doubt but the characters in the situation upon learning about it deal with it maturely and treat it with the horror that it deserves. it's completely unlike House of Silk where it's not used as a shocking element of the case that the entire story hinges around, it's an aspect of the case that indicates how serious and difficult it was and why it was so covered up by those involved. believe me when i say it's not dealt with poorly, i don't know what that person is talking about.
there's also a couple of reviews that mention dropping the book after Rafferty's dog was killed. the dog dies offscreen and it's given the moment of tragedy and sadness that it disturbs, yet people called it "gratuitous". before that point in the book a man's head is found decapitated in a block of ice and a body frozen in a snowbank. and yet its the dog's death that causes you to drop the book? everyone has their own limits to the type of content that they can endure but to regard the death of the dog worse than that of humans in the book feels... bad in my opinion. i have empathy problems of my own, but it displays to me a warped sense of empathy that the death of a dog, who is just as fictional as the dead characters in the book and is as much a literary mode of delivering a story, is treated as if its a real animal death. sorry if this is a digression but it felt important to bring it up.
i realized in a couple of my other reviews as i repost them, i gave a rating out of 5 on how i felt about it, but i think i'm going to do away with that, and especially since i fell off with doing it anyway and go on a system of "do i recommend this or not" and i say, yeah! i do recommend it if you like Sherlock Holmes pastiches and historical fiction. it's a neat mystery.
play adaptation???
usually a pastiche doesn't get it's own transformative adaptation into another medium, but The Ice Palace Murders gets a unique place among pastiches that it did get one.
there was a short run of the play adaptation at Park Square Theater in St. Paul in 2015 with the man that narrates the audiobook, Steve Hendrickson, in the role of Sherlock Holmes himself. Hendrickson is also a local to Minnesota which is why Millet and him have collaborated on narrating all of the Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota books.
Actor Steve Hendrickson (center) in the title role of "Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders" at Park Square Theater in St. Paul.
Courtesy Park Square Theater
The one who adapted the book to play form, Jeffery Hatcher, is also from Minnesota and even had to fill in the role of Hendrickson's Holmes for a few shows when Hendrickson fell ill.
it's really interesting to read about though, how there's such a vibrant love for Sherlock Holmes in the state i live in and its fun knowing im not the only one.
but i mean, also there's the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes materials at the University of Minnesota. i want to go so badly to see it but i've not had the opportunity and the last time i checked they didn't allow visitors but i might try and see if i can get in....