Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau

/ Alex Good

This is a follow-up to Guy Adams’s first Holmes pastiche The Breath of God. It takes a very similar approach, drawing in a grab-bag of fictional characters from the pulp fiction of the time while telling a slam-bang, highly cinematic (sometimes even cartoonish) action story that climaxes in subterranean London (in The Breath of God the subway system, here the sewers).

As the title indicates, the jumping-off point is H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. It seems the not-so-good doctor might still be alive and practicing his dark arts somewhere in London, as a string of grisly deaths have been occurring, with the victims appearing to have been mauled by animals. Things are complicated somewhat because it turns out that the British government had been funding Moreau, and his experiments had progressed to the point where he was no longer just putting together his creatures through vivisection but had invented a serum that triggered rapid evolution from the human form to various other species. “Darwinism haunts our steps in these matters,” Holmes opines.

One can’t call this new process much of an improvement, or less cruel, or even more plausible, but it is something different anyway. It also leads Watson to a humorous reflection: “What manner of creature would Holmes become if exposed to such a concoction – a swollen brain hovering over a pair of massive, tobacco-hardened lungs? The thought of such a beast, despite the serious context, could not help but make me smile.” I got a chuckle out of it too.

Among the team assembled to fight the new Moreau and his mongrel army are Professor Challenger from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Lindenbrook from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Abner Perry from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, and Professor Cavor from Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. When you throw in all the nods to the plot of The Island of Doctor Moreau and a lot of fan service commentary on the Holmes canon (Watson even kicks things off by answering some readers’ FAQs), you have a book that should feel a lot more meta. That it plays so well as what Adams describes as “a bit of pulp fun” is testament to his sure hand with the material. It’s thrilling and comical by turns, and while never taking itself too seriously also never makes fun of our heroes. For a while Holmes takes over narrative duties and he speaks with just the sort of arrogant, superior voice you’d expect, though without slipping into parody.

So it’s wilder and woollier than anything in the canon, but I thought it a successful blend of a contemporary storytelling style with an affection for the nineteenth-century sources. Adams likes to do his own thing with these characters and I’m happy to let him.

Holmes index

17 thoughts on “Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau”

  1. I can see where these would be fun, but do you think half the fun is recognizing the older characters from other classic authors? I wonder if this would work so well for readers who haven’t read the old stuff…

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    • Very, very rapid evolution. So technically if you think of evolution as a population changing over time through selective breeding then it’s not evolution. But it takes that process and speeds it up by way of a super serum.

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      • Oh no, he’s been funded by the government because they want to use the serum to create a race of super soldiers, able to withstand extreme cold, go without food or water, resistant to disease, super strength, etc. He does this by making humans quickly evolve along the lines taken by other species. But it’s also a bit more complicated than that because Moreau’s work is taken over by someone else.

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