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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I think this is one of the slighter Holmes stories, and it’s one that Doyle himself ranked near “the bottom of the list.” A British aristo, the Lord Robert St. Simon, gets married but his bride pulls a runner as soon as they get home from the wedding. It turns out she was already married back in America to a man she thought was dead, but who had secretly appeared to her at the church. Since she still loved him, she ditched her new husband, who then went to Holmes, asking him to investigate and figure out what the heck just happened.

It’s not much of a challenge for Holmes, and what sticks in the mind is the moral judgment on display. Holmes doesn’t care for St. Simon from the get-go, treating him as a pompous ass in need of being taken down a peg or three. Indeed the intake interview basically just involves Holmes laughing and mocking him repeatedly, though it isn’t clear what’s so foolish about him, aside from his dress, which is only “careful to the verge of foppishness.” And what’s wrong with that?

The dislike clearly goes deeper than what’s registered by Holmes. Doyle seemed to have something in for the dregs of the British aristocracy, and made St. Simon into the standard-bearer for his class, being a poor fellow with a fancy title out to wed an American heiress. Which is true on the face of it, but again St. Simon doesn’t seem like he’s just a mercenary prig. And I’m honestly at a loss to explain the way he’s treated at the end. Does Holmes really think it likely that St Simon will join the newly reunited couple in a celebratory dinner? I don’t think that’s possible, which means the fancy meal was prepared as another form of mockery. But doesn’t St. Simon deserve to feel hard done by? I felt more than a little sympathy for him, as the typical ending of having lovers reunited is achieved very much at his expense and I don’t see where he’s done anything wrong.

The plot is again driven by a backstory set in a wild, foreign land, in this case the American West in the 1880s. And that link to America adds something to Doyle’s critique of England’s ruling class. As Holmes puts it at the end of the story: “It is always a joy to meet an American . . . for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a Minister in fargone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

A nice thought, foreshadowing the mostly rhetorical “special relationship.” But wouldn’t the marriage of St. Simon to Hatty Doran have better dramatized the consummation devoutly to be wished? And if so, why was Doyle so against it?

Holmes index