SOME DANGER INVOLVED by WILL THOMAS (Historical Fiction/Crime)

 The Nine-Second Review

Title: Some Danger Involved

Author: Will Thomas

Genre: Historical Ficiton/Crime

Recommend: Yes

Summary: Victorian England detectives vs anti-Semitic terrorism.

Full Review

Premise

What if Sherlock Holmes was not a character, but a species? What if we had another Sherlock Holmes?

    The appeal of Sherlock Holmes is that Holmes is a brilliant detective, and John Watson is a sort of amiable lump he drags around behind him. Because Watson narrates the stories, we share his total ignorance of what the hell is going on. As the story goes on, we theorize about what the solution is going to be, just as Watson does. At the end of the story, Sherlock essentially grades our test, going over the mystery step by step and answering all of our questions.

    The Holmes stories are brilliant in their way. Their solutions are absurd, but they follow a certain internal logic that makes them incredibly appealing. The relationship of their two characters is near perfect. If one thing keeps them out of the hands of modern readers, it is their dense, old-fashioned Posh English language.

    Enter Will Thomas. In 2004, Will Thomas wrote Some Danger Involved, the first of the Barker and Llewelyn mysteries. Barker is a huge, muscular, pious, taciturn, Scottish detective in England in the late 1800s. Thomas Llewelyn is his slow-witted but eager sidekick. The two characters are simply a rehash of Holmes and Watson, but they are an appealing and well-done rehash. Like a television sitcom, Some Danger Involved does not pretend to be original, and so it gets away with a lack of originality.

    The story is fast-paced and written in simple, contemporary language, though with some old-fashioned language and slang. For this reason they're a good on-ramp to Holmes and Watson. You can get the same plots out of these stories as you'd get from a Sherlock Holmes, but without having to penetrate the Victorian mumbo-jumbo.

Plot

The plot is so bog-standard for a mystery/thriller that I almost feel I could leave this section blank and let you fill it in. A Jewish immigrant named Louis Pokrzywa (pronounced po-SHEE-vuh) has been beaten and murdered. Next to his corpse is the Bible verse Psalm 22:14 

                "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in                 the midst of my bowels."

    The note also attributes the murder to a terrorist group called "The Anti-Semite league." Barker and Llewelyn are employed by Sir Moses Montefiore (a real man who really existed in real life!) to solve this murder and bring its perpetrators to justice.

    The actual play-by-play of the plot, I won't spoil. Barker and Llewelyn stroll through London, interrogating witnesses. If there's one huge difference between Sherlock and Watson and Barker and Llewelyn, it is that Sherlock always gets his clues from bits of physical evidence. The shape of a knife wound, the size of a footprint, a smudge of make-up or cigarette ash. Barker gets all his clues from people. He is a talker, and even more a listener. Between them, Barker and Llewelyn talk to maybe twenty different people who either knew the deceased or else had a grudge against him.

Characters

    The novel's strongest point is the gallery of side characters Barker and Llewelyn get involved with. Barker's favorite Chinese restaurant owner, Ho, his butler Jacob "Mac" Macabbee, his cartoonishly aggressive dog Bodhidharma (called "Harm,") and his alcoholic clerk Jenkins are all memorable and enjoyable. The witnesses, too, are well-written, including the dozen or so Jews who knew the deceased. The solemn Rabbi Mocatta, the nutty Rebbe Schlomo, the cheerfully lazy Ira Moskovitz, the rude intelligence of Israel Zangwill. Will Thomas sketches a variety of distinctly Jewish characters without ever resorting to stereotype, except possibly in the case of Rabbi and Mrs. Mocatta, who hew a little too close to stern Jewish sitcom parents. 

    This isn't to say the book is all talk, either. There's a considerable amount of violent action. Sword-fights, knife-fights, fist-fights, fights with bits of wood and broken glass, and some gunplay. You're never more than twenty pages, backward or forward, from a fight scene.

    In fact, if I have one criticism of the novel, it is Will Thomas's tendency to turn everything into a fight scene in a way that feels juvenile and sometimes tasteless. Without getting into spoiler-y specifics, a very real and very serious scene of racially motivated violence occurs toward the end of the novel, and is written with the tone of a Loony Tunes episode. One gets the same feeling, reading this novel, as one does watching Captain America punch up some Nazi-themed supervillain. Sure, the author's heart is in the right place, but one can't help but feel that the source material has been made too silly.

    Nonetheless, the book is loads of fun. Will Thomas has written several sequels, all of which stand on their own and can be read in any order. There is continuity, but each novel assumes you haven't read the previous installments. If you're looking for something light and fluffy with a mystery deep enough to sink your teeth into, Some Danger Involved is for you.