My response to The Web Weaver followed a bell curve. I started off not liking it much. It was wordy, and not in a lively or inventive way. I guess you could say it was written more “in the style” of Conan Doyle than in a modern voice, but the fact is Doyle was in a number of stylistic respects a surprisingly modern writer, and rarely dull. Sam Siciliano seems to be channeling more the spirit of a nineteenth-century potboiler. In any event, the result is that this is a 400-page pastiche and going that long is definitely not the Doyle style. Though it is typical of Siciliano’s Holmes novels.

I did start getting into it though, and through the middle sections I can say I was enjoying it. Watson is missing and narrative duties are split between another medical pair: Holmes’s cousin Dr. Henry Vernier and Henry’s wife Michelle, who is also a doctor. Together they are presented as an ideal couple, to the point (or past it) where you grow tired of how they keep going on about how much they love each other. They’re too good to be true.

Since he’s not around to defend himself, Watson is dismissed as a fantasist whose tales of Holmes are mostly made up. It seems real detective work is dull, routine stuff, and Holmes is bored by it. He wants a challenge and wishes he had a Moriarty (one of Watson’s fictional inventions) for him to match wits with.

Holmes is also miffed that Watson presents him as a cold-hearted automaton where he is really a passionate man of feeling. Perhaps to prove him wrong, our hero falls in love with Violet Wheelwright, a married woman threatened by a gypsy curse. Violet is stuck in a loveless marriage to a brute who is deathly afraid of spiders. Nevertheless, she is good-looking and even plays the violin and chess as well as Holmes. Though with regard to the latter accomplishment I had to wonder how well that was. In one game with Holmes she surprises him with a checkmate, which is something that doesn’t happen to good chess players, who always see the game several moves ahead (or in depth). They (good chess players) usually know well in advance when a position is lost.

Then my enjoyment faded at the end. The thing is, I was pretty sure I knew who was behind everything with over 100 pages left to go, and their motive turned out to be even worse than I thought. The hero/villain is a social justice warrior, fighting the Victorian class system as well as the patriarchy. And this view is endorsed by Michelle, who is sympathetic with such a “view of life” and a crusade against “the self-importance and self-righteousness of Victorian England.” (Did people living even in late Victorian England think of themselves as living in “Victorian England”? I’m not sure.) Michelle even offers an exoneration to the web weaver: “Your goal was a worth one, although you took . . . the wrong path.” And: “Your decency is what drove you to your crimes. What more is decency than the desire for justice and the hatred of injustice? Your acts came more from an excess of decency rather than a lack of virtue.”

This sounds awful, like Prince Andrew saying his hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein was “colored by my tendency to be too honorable.” Talking in this manner goes back at least as far as Warren Hastings being astonished at his own moderation in not enriching himself more with Indian loot. It’s rarely convincing, and it isn’t here. And yet it seems a position Siciliano wants us to sympathize with. I felt uncomfortable about that.

It’s a book that Siciliano put a lot into. I think too much. Some of it was interesting, especially in the middle stretches where I was still wondering what was going on, but it didn’t come together very well. The subplot about the bogus oil company is a good example. It was interesting and led to some pithy observations (“All in all, the higher classes of society are more gullible than the lower ones”) and made interesting connections to our own time, but it felt like the web weaver was probably biting off more than they could chew. Then I didn’t like the ending, and the romance between Sherlock and Violet didn’t feel right at all. A lot of the Further Adventures err on the side of being too light and whimsical, but I wanted more of that here. This is altogether too heavy a case.

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