From a very early age, I was enraptured by the mystery genre, devouring novels mostly by British writers whose style, less noir and more cerebral than their US counterparts, appealed to me. I particularly enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read all of the stories at least twice, and have watched many adaptations of the stories for films and television.

One experiences a sense of sadness when the author of stories that you like dies and you know that there will be no new ones coming and I am certain many aficionados of Sherlock Holmes wish that there were more stories to enjoy. When Conan Doyle, tiring of being stuck in this series, killed off his much-loved character in one short story The Final Problem, the resulting outcry pressured him to bring him back three years later in another short story The Adventure of the Empty House, using a highly contrived plot device to explain how he hadn’t really died.

The Holmes canon is so well known and the character so iconic that many authors have written stories based on him as well as other characters that appear in the stories and copying the style of writing, a literary form known as pastiches, a high-brow version of fan fiction. I have resisted reading them, thinking that they would never be able to accurately recreate the atmosphere of the stories and thus would be a disappointment. Then I heard that the Conan Doyle estate had authorized Anthony Horowitz, a well known mystery writer in his own right, to write new Holmes novels. I just read the first one The House of Silk (published in 2011) and it was very satisfying. Horowitz not only portrays Holmes in a way that is consistent with my impressions of him, he also captures well the writing style of Holmes’s biographer Dr. John Watson.

I enjoyed the book and can recommend it to anyone seeking a new Holmes story.

I will not describe the plot but there is one new element that Horowitz introduces that is worth commenting on. While Conan Doyle’s Watson describes the atmosphere of London at the end of the 19th century, the dirt and griminess, the thick fogs, the poverty and general squalor, he does not editorialize about the social conditions that existed at the time, especially the appalling conditions of children. These stories do not have any political message, explicit or implicit. Homeless children appeared in the stories as the Baker Street Irregulars (the name given to them by Holmes), consisting of a group of street urchins that Holmes would employ to serve as his eyes and ears, because such urchins were so ubiquitous that they could be everywhere, serving as his spies without exciting suspicion. But we were never told anything about the Irregulars except that they were rough and rowdy and scruffy and energetic. They were anonymous except for their leader who was called Wiggins. We are not told anything of their lives, the conditions of which must have been harsh. The Conan Doyle books are not like those of Charles Dickens, who wrote with barely concealed rage at the appalling conditions in which poor children lived in those days.

But Horowitz’s Watson takes the opportunity of the search for an Irregular who goes missing to note that the lives of these urchins shed a poor light on London society at that time.

In 1890, the year of which I write, there were some five and a half million people in the six hundred square miles of the area known as the Metropolitan Police District of London and then, as always, those two constant neighbours, wealth and poverty were living uneasily side by side. It sometimes occurs to me now, having witnessed so many momentous changes across the years, that I should have described at greater length the sprawling chaos of the city in which I lived, perhaps in the manner of Gissing —or Dickens fifty years before. I can only say in my own defence that I was a biographer, not a historian or a journalist, and that my adventures invariably led me to more rarefied walks of life — fine houses, hotels, private clubs, schools and offices of government. It is true that Holmes’s clients came from all classes, but (and perhaps someone might one day have pause to consider the significance of this) the more interesting crimes, the ones I chose to relate, were nearly always committed by the well-to-do.

However, it is necessary now to reflect upon the lower depths of the great cauldron of London, what Gissing called ‘the nether world’, to understand the impossibility of the task that faced us. We had to find one child, one helpless tatterdemalion among so many others, and if Holmes was right, if there was danger abroad, we had no time to spare. Where to begin? Our enquiries would be made no easier by the restlessness of the city, the way its inhabitants moved from house to house and street to street in seemingly perpetual motion so that few knew so much as the names of those who lived next door. The slum clearances and the spread of the railways were largely culpable, although many Londoners seemed to have arrived with a restlessness of spirit that simply would not allow them to settle long. They moved like gypsies, following whatever work they could find; fruit-picking and bricklaying in the summer, bunkering down and scurrying for coal and scraps once the cold weather arrived. They might stay a while in one place, but then, once their money had run out, they would bolt the moon and be off again.

And then there was the greatest curse of our age, the carelessness that had put tens of thousands of children out on to the street; begging, pickpocketing, pilfering or, if they were not up to the mark, quietly dying unknown and unloved, their parents indifferent if indeed those parents were themselves alive. There were children who shared threepenny lodging houses, provided they could find their share of the night’s rent, crammed together in conditions barely fit for animals. Children slept on rooftops, in pens at Smithfield market, down in the sewers and even, I heard, in holes scooped out of the dust-heaps on Hackney Marshes. There were, as I shall soon describe, charities that set out to help them, to clothe and to educate them. But the charities were too few, the children too many and even as the century drew to a close, London has every reason to be ashamed. (p. 74-75)

There is another Sherlock Holmes book by Horowitz written for the Conan Doyle estate called Moriarty, the name of Homes’s arch villain, that I plan to read soon.

Horowitz has also been authorized by the estate of Ian Fleming to write fresh James Bond stories as well and has written three so far.. He is clearly a versatile writer.