I began my notes on Jefferey Deaver’s “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman” by saying I wasn’t sure to include it in this index because it wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes story. “Art in the Blood” by Laura Caldwell is from the same anthology (In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, edited by King and Klinger) and it’s much the same, also being set in contemporary Manhattan with characters who are inspired by the canon but without Holmes. And though I thought it quite well written, it didn’t hit the mark for me.
The main character is an art dealer named Drew Dekalb VanWerden who finds out that someone has swapped a famous painting he’d just sold with a forgery, something that will destroy his reputation if the switch is ever discovered. That reputation is of being “the Sherlock Holmes of the art world,” a title granted by the press due to his skill at detecting a counterfeit. At first Dekalb rejects the idea that he could have been party to such a fraud, but after an inspection of the painting, which involves a bit of high-society comedy set in a fashionable apartment, he realizes that the claims are true.
What has happened is that a former lover of his, a young man named Benjamin (“Binny”) Moriarty, has pulled the swap, angry at how Dekalb had mistaken his love for Dekalb with mere social climbing. All of which results in a violent climax and the Sherlock Holmes of the art world landing in prison, where he gives lectures on old masters.
It’s a good read, but I didn’t see much of a connection to the canon aside from the names. Was Doyle’s Holmes, with his trained eye for physical detail like traces of tobacco or footprints, so poor a judge of character? That would be an interesting point to make, certainly arguable anyway, but I don’t think Caldwell does more than glance at it on her way.
