Dark Arts, Dark Acts
1940. Sherlock Holmes is a secret government asset. Tasked by Foreign Office Minister “Rab” Butler to negotiate the mutual exchange of POWs, he travels with Watson across war-torn Europe to find that the German Foreign Minister Goebbels will only agree to the transfer if Holmes will investigate serial attacks on women on the S-Bahn, Berlin’s surface suburban railway.
Holmes discovers something which leads the pair to Moscow and the facilitation of treaties which keep Britain afloat in the war. When Holmes leaves Berlin, he suggests a strategy to the local police so they may solve the railway murders by themselves. These now become irrelevant to Holmes’s and Watson’s roles as alliance makers in the greater war game.
The weight of historical facts dramatised into dialogue drags an unbalanced plot. We are asked to believe that our octogenarian duo travel incessantly, both upon and beneath train seats. They speak with the same voice, perhaps from having lived together so long. Holmes’s intellectual specialness is conveyed by asking mundane questions; his experimentation is vague and mainly off-stage.
Readers who enjoy learning diplomatic history through fiction will undoubtedly learn some here; but readers who enjoy following Holmes in a hands-on investigation based on forensic analysis of evidence will be disappointed.
