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Dreaming Spies: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

3/5. Another Russell/Holmes book of the usual formula – going back in to fill in a previous gap in the timeline with an international adventure which, in the middle of the book, catches up to narrator-standard-time in England.

Eh, you know, the charm is wearing off here.

Things I am in this series for: (1) the picture of a marriage of two very smart, very independent people who love each other, but do not need each other and they both know it; (2) Holmes's disguises; (3) partnership; (4) cleverness.

Things Laurie R. King is in this series for, these days: (1) Cultural tourism (Japan, this time); (2) set pieces.

This was competent, and I am bored. More clever sleuths loving each other but living their own lives, less travelog, please.

Pirate King by Laurie R. King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So this is Laurie R. King writing a book about fictional Mary Russell who has written another memoir of an adventure with Sherlock Holmes, this one about the time she went undercover as an assistant to a crew making a silent movie about a crew making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance.



By all rights, you should need to diagram out the layers of narrative and meta narrative, but you don’t. As usual, King passes but lightly over these points, and in fact pauses briefly to make fun of critical readings of narrative and identity constructs.



No, basically, this is a romp from Portugal to Morocco, with real pirates and fake pirates and a lot of actresses and a parrot. Don’t bother hoping for a classic mystery, or anything more than a desultory and deliberately silly bit of plot frippery. These aren’t critiques, mind you. I mean, this book thinks it is somewhat more hilarious and charming than I thought it was, but it was pleasingly diverting. There just isn’t much besides the frippery, and a definite lack of Holmes. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is not my Sherlock Holmes. He is hilariously functional, just for starters.





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The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hmm, this is making me think about series structure.

Translation: I actually read this book in late April/early May, which is not so long ago as the crow lives, but which is roughly twenty years in law school finals time. So I forgot most of the things I actually thought about the book. Shut up.

This is book nine of a series, and part one of an inset duology. And the thing is, I love series fiction. My absolute favorite books are actually favorite series, because there’s just so much more room to make a universe I want to devote brainspace to. And when you read as fast as I do (hint: like a jackrabbit) a series can be like a long, perfect road when you know you won’t stop if you don’t have to, and thank God there’s lots, so you don’t.

So I love development and momentum and nonlinear series orders and series with a plan. This series, as a general body, has all those things.

This book, though. It’s really good, actually, all conspiracies and uncertain loyalties, and a subtly running thread about Russell trusting her instincts. But if I had read it a year ago when it came out, without the direct sequel in hand? *shakes head*. It’s not the cliffhanger, though there is one. It’s that it’s only half a story in the spiritual sense on top of the literal. I got to the end of this book, and thought, “yeah, cliffhanger, whatever, but why do I feel like I was going hand-over-hand along a rope that suddenly got cut?”

I think it was because this book is only half the story, thematically. There’s some beautiful work done here on the back of the surrealist art movement, talking about madness and sanity, but it doesn’t really connect up until you read the sequel. This is a book about madness, that is a book about – well, about a kind of sanity. And if I’d waited a year, I’d be rating both books much lower because I remember a lot of things, but I wouldn’t have remembered my exact place in this pattern.

So a clever, unusual series structure, potentially defeated by publishing schedules. News at 11.

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