<p>When Ross’ sister asked Holmes if he was from the House of Silk, I immediately thought of a prostitution house. When the opium house was introduced, I changed my mind and thought they all may be part of a drug ring. I obviously should have stuck with my first thought. I was really disappointed that the story used the child molestation theme. I didn’t like it. I don’t want to read about child molestation as part of a book I’m reading for entertainment. </p>
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I was okay with it too. I figure she was a Brooke Shields type of look. There certainly have been stories of young women fighting in armies in the old day who weren’t caught, or at least had plenty of people looking the other way. <a href=“Deborah Sampson - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sampson</a> for example.</p>
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That’s interesting isn’t it? The sort of relationship they had seems to have been much more acceptable to Victorians than it is to us. In the current TV series, Watson is allowed to get a lot more irritated with Holmes - and he certainly doesn’t fawn on him.</p>
<p>I wasn’t really surprised by the child molestation aspect, though I can’t say I figured it out either. I never figure out mysteries. I don’t know if child molestation is overdone, since I don’t read a lot of contemporary mysteries. I read all of Dorothy Sayers, some Martha Grimes until the one where she doesn’t actually tell you the solution, just that her detective figured it out. I threw the book across the room and never read another one. I also read a bunch of Elizabeth George until I got annoyed with the characters. Last spring I read some Dashiell Hammett since I’d actually never read anything, just seen the movies.</p>
<p>Dorothy Sayer’s detective had a quote which I can’t find, but I thought was interesting. I just wish I knew where I could find it. But my recollection is that he said motive is not that important, people commit murder for all sorts of stupid illogical reasons, it’s the how that you really have to look at to solve a case. I think generally Holmes does that too.</p>
<p>I am too familiar with The Hound of the Baskervilles to remember any initial reactions - whether or not I figured anything out.</p>
<p>I agree about the clever jail escape in The House of Silk. I meant to find the original story in which Holmes and Watson help Dr Trevelyan but then forgot.</p>
<p>Watson may be a smart man but he can’t read people. Catherine Carstairs reminds him of his wife and he trusts the Reverend Charles Fitzsimmons. </p>
<p>I caught that the acronym for the Society for the Improvement of London’s Children is S.I.L.C. and that it had morphed into Silk. However, I couldn’t connect the two mysteries. Once Holmes points out that Ross recognized Carstairs through the House of Silk, the connection seems so obvious.</p>
<p>I can’t say I guessed the mystery of the House early on. Don’t know why - it seems obvious.</p>
<p>I like how Horowitz takes on the use of the Baker Street Irregulars and ponders Holmes’ use of children without questioning the morality of doing so. Some street urchins probably fared no better in actuality than those in the House of Silk. I thought it an updated (21st) century look at something that Conan Doyle would not have considered.</p>
<p>Caraid, I thought the use of child molestation the biggest departure from the original stories. The Holmes’ stories I’ve read keep it lighter. </p>
<p>mathmom: I agree. Holmes concerns himself with the ‘how’ and watches the ‘why’ fall into place. </p>
<p>Having never read a Sherlock Holmes novel before, I think I was expecting something different. I expected more humor and camaraderie between Holmes and Watson. I wasn’t expecting child molestation. Do other Sherlock Holmes novels go beyond the murder investigation to touch upon troubling social issues?</p>
<p>Edit - Ignatius answered my question as I was writing. Thanks!</p>
<p>With regard to Catherine Carstairs “passing.” I think it was not a far-fetched notion because of gender, but because of class and origin. British people in those days were pretty snooty and class-conscious. They also looked down on the Irish, who had distinctive accents. I felt that it was too much of a stretch for this lower-class Irish girl to have passed as someone who would be acceptable as a wife of an upper class Englishman.</p>
<p>When I found that I disliked the beginning of House of Silk so much, I looked over reader comments online and saw some spoilers, so I knew about the child molestation thing. Despite Watson’s explanation in the introduction, I thought it was an inappropriate theme for a pastiche of a Victorian novel. One of the reader-reviewers said the House of Silk reminded him of the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, and I agree.</p>
<p>Here is a passage from the book that Arthur Conan Doyle would never have written. Victorians did not openly discuss such matters!</p>
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<p>Apart from the anachonistic explicitness about the human waste, Horowitz states that there were “no hallways” and then mentions “the corridors.” Huh?</p>
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<p>I interpreted “corridors” as different from hallways – as makeshift gutters of sorts, perhaps open channels dug into the ground, that drained sewage from the building. I might be way off base, but that’s what I imagined. I definitely did not picture raw sewage running through the hallways. Ew!</p>
<p>Although I agree that the description was not something Arthur Conan Doyle would have written, I wouldn’t quite label it anachronistic because it bears similarities to some of Charles Dickens’ passages–perhaps slightly more graphic, but not much. </p>
<p>When kicking around the internet, I found this on Victorian Web. Sort of a digression from Holmes, but it speaks to the conditions that Horowitz describes:</p>
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<p>I found the Holmes’ story with Dr. Trevelyan:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.mysterynet.com/holmes/21residentpatient/”>http://www.mysterynet.com/holmes/21residentpatient/</a></p>
<p>Interrupting discussion to provide a “best of” book list for 2014. I love these things!</p>
<p><a href=“100 Notable Books of 2014 - The New York Times”>The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos;
<p>Back to our books and Silk…I did guess that the child molestation was at the root of the evil. I knew something was wrong as soon as Ross was shown with the eyes of terror. I thought the school for orphans with its headmaster was creepy and found the fourth building used for the Silk operations suspicious on their first visit. I don’t read much in the mystery genre these days, but I went into both of our selections wary of all except Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade. </p>
<p>I thought the use of the child porn element grotesque, even more so than “just” murder. However, it seemed more realistic to my modern sensibilities than belief in the supernatural hound of the Baskervilles. Like Caraid, I wish it hadn’t been about such disgusting abuse. I found the most repelling was the cornered Fitzsimmons’ cold response to Holmes of,“I am not ashamed of what we have been doing here at Chorley Grange” and the respectable-man’s- been- doing-it-for-ages rationalization of," the truth is that we have only been providing what certain men have been requesting for centuries…the ancient civilisations of the Greeks, the Romans and the Persians? The cult of Ganymede was an honourable one, sir…" Blech, blech, blech. </p>
<p>ignatius, thank you for the link to The Adventure of the Resident Patient. Now that’s a Sherlock Holmes story—concise and to the point, not a word wasted. I think Holmes himself would have found The House of Silk a little too rambling, with Watson doing a lot of poetic seeing and not enough constructive observing.</p>
<p>A few things I noticed in The Adventure of the Resident Patient:</p>
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<li><p>Holmes and Watson allude to an earlier conversation about Poe, which Horowitz also mentions in The House of Silk, in Holmes and Watson’s discussion of Poe’s Dupin, who believed “it was possible to read a person’s innermost thoughts without their being spoken aloud” (p. 10).</p></li>
<li><p>The portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and General Gordon also make an appearance in *The House of Silk<a href=“p.%2058”>/i</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>The villains in all three works—Resident Patient, Hound and House of Silk never face trial, but instead meet their ends as if by divine retribution. The Worthington men are presumably “among the passengers of the ill-fated steamer Norah Creina, which was lost some years ago with all hands upon the Portuguese coast.” Jack Stapleton is (again, presumably) sucked into the Grimpen Mire, and Inspector Harriman is violently thrown from his speeding carriage and dies from a broken neck.</p></li>
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<p>Another part of The House of Silk that I didn’t really get was the introduction of Watson’s wife Mary. We met her briefly, only to learn she had a fever that would eventually lead to her death. Her story was never really part of the larger story. What was the purpose?</p>
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<p>Good question, Caraid. It’s as though Horowitz had a checklist of things to mention! The little that he did say about Mary left me curious about her and wondering what information is provided about her in Arthur Conan Doyle’s works.</p>
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<p>Horowitz spelled Edgar Allan Poe’s name wrong. He also misspelled the name of the artist Pissarro. Among other mistakes!</p>
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Once upon a time there were copy editors who took care of this stuff. How I miss them!</p>
<p>I agree Mary is extraneous to the story. She gets mentioned in passing in other Holmes stories too. I think she’s supposed to humanize Watson in contrast to Holmes.</p>
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<p>You said it, mathmom! Today I was reading happily along in a new novel by an author I like, and…suddenly…there was a sentence where something was “reigned in” rather than being “reined in.” Ack!!</p>
<p>You’d think that horses had never been such a big part of our lives not too long in the past, lol. </p>
<p>On p. 259 of House of Silk, I noticed the sentence, “There could be no doubt who was behind the reins” (of a carriage). No, no, Anthony! It should be, “There could be no doubt who was holding the reins.” You get the idea that Horowitz dashed off the phrase “behind the wheel” and then thought, “Oops, I’m not writing about a motor vehicle” and just changed the word to “reins.”</p>
<p>Sorry, I’m a terrible curmudgeon about such things. It’s one reason I’ve been reading more classics in recent years.</p>
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<p>I agree with mathmom that Mary is probably mentioned in passing to mimic a few of the other stories, but I also think that she had to be mentioned because of the time frame of The House of Silk. Per Wikipedia (I would never claim to know such a detail!), Watson and Mary were married in 1889. If Horowitz had left her entirely out of the novel, purists would probably complain. The sum total of what is known about Mary can be found here: <a href=“Minor Sherlock Holmes characters - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Sherlock_Holmes_characters</a></p>
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<p>We’d be lost without our cantankerous curmudgeon. ;)</p>
<p>Grammatical errors, typos, misspellings, etc. used to drive me mad, but I’ve become a little more “zen” about them over the years. Still, there are times when I want to knock some copy editor upside the head. I used to think e-books were more prone to sloppy editing, but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I read The House of Silk on my kindle, and both Edgar Allan Poe and Pissarro are spelled correctly (but are misspelled in my library hard copy). So somewhere along the line, those errors were caught and corrected. It’s hard to know if they actually originated with Horowitz.</p>
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<p>Wow, interesting. Good to know!</p>
<p>Way back when in college I did an internship at Houghton-Mifflin in Boston. I was editing text books. I assume someone was checking up after me, but who really knows…</p>
<p>And once upon a time copy-editors worked in a room together instead of alone at home on computers so even if you didn’t know the answer you could ask some else who did. For example in one of her last books Madeline L’Engle had someone driving a car with seatbelts in an era when that was highly unlikely. Not everyone in the room had to be an expert, you’d just look up and ask the room, “Hey would a Rambler station wagon have had seat belts in 19xx?” and someone would have known the answer.</p>
<p>Back to Holmes… what did people think about the supernatural aspect of the Hound of the Baskervilles? It’s my least favorite aspect of the story - horror is sooo not my genre! But it was amusing to see how it was all done.</p>
<p>The supernatural and Victorians seem to go hand in hand. In Possession we had seances as we did in The Luminaries. The supernatural plays a part in Jane Eyre and - again - The Luminaries. Those just off the top of my head (using the CC book club as springboard). Conan Doyle gives the supernatural a down-to-earth explanation here.</p>
<p>As for Poe’s Dupin:</p>
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<p>It seems to me that the supernatural piece of The Hound of the Baskervilles was just a teaser to attract (and/or satirize) Victorian readers. Unlike Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, there is no lingering sense of the supernatural, nothing that defies explanation. Holmes explains everything away rationally–the glow-in-the-dark devil dog is just a big, angry hound with phosphorus smeared on his fur. (But I did enjoy the spookiness of the moors, even if there weren’t really any demons out there.)</p>
<p>Just popping in to say I didn’t finish the books in time. I read more than half of The House of Silk, and as other have mentioned I missed the "humor " I’ve come to enjoy watching The PBS series. I put the book down many times and wasn’t too enthused to get back to it. Not a good sign. </p>
<p>Yesterday, while trying to plod through the book, I glanced at many comments here ( couldn’t resist) about " child molestarion" and realized I didn’t want to travel the journey with this author, if that was where this is going.
So, as the Sharks say ( shark tank reference my new addiction ) “I’m out” …
But, will follow the discussion, which is always enlightening. </p>