A Study In Statecraft (The Redacted Novels Book 2)
We’ve not heard much about the older brother of the famous Baker Street detective. Mycroft is mentioned in only two of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, where it is said that he ‘is the British government’. His specialism, he says in these memoirs, is not in the ‘minutiae’, ‘the forensic area of crime’ or in ‘lying on my face with a lens to my eye’ like his famous brother, but rather in statecraft— ‘getting people to agree to what they might not otherwise agree to’.
Another difference is that brother Sherlock often acted as judge as well as detective, personally exonerating some criminals he considered worthy. Mycroft doesn’t make the decisions—he advises. Intending to leave behind a textbook on the art of diplomacy, Mycroft chronicles how he manoeuvred the belligerent nations into signing the Armistice after WWI, and how he convinced Edward VIII to abdicate.
Many of the stories are narrated by Sherlock’s biographer and crime-solving partner Dr Watson, keeping the familiar format. The flowery, verbose prose style of the time is somewhat replicated, through which the modern reader struggles, yet it does achieve a feel for the period. The ‘episodes’ weave the fictional diplomacies around real historical people, making the stories credible. Some are follow-ons from previous cases. The first case ‘An Individual of High Net Worth’ is a sequel to ‘The Beryl Coronet’, so it assumes some familiarity with the Conan Doyle stories.
There are little nods to present-day circumstances. Mycroft uncovers evidence of ‘jollifications’ at Number 10 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. He advises the Prime Minister on the ramifications of the King marrying a divorcée. The connections to our modern day are spelled out in ‘afterwords’, which I would have preferred to instead remain inferred.
