The Detective of the Great White North

Twenty years ago, if someone had told me that Minnesota would someday be the most Sherlockian state in America, I would have cocked my head, squinted one eye, stared hard at them with the remaining eye, and gone, “Huh?”

But with one of the world’s best Sherlockian collections housed at the University of Minnesota, one of the world’s oldest continuing Sherlockian societies centered in that same state, and Larry Millett creating a new American Holmes mythos, the evidence is pouring in. Minnesota has got to be the most Sherlockian state in America these days.

When Larry Millett wrote his first tale of Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, I was very skeptical. Some of the great travesties of Holmes fiction have had to do with Sherlock visiting the states, and the past few years had not seen much good work in any new Holmes fiction. Laurie King’s promising start had wandered off on its own agenda, and the rest was just so dull. There was no way Sherlock Holmes visiting the territory of the movie Fargo was going to work.

But sometimes a challenge brings out the best in people, and that seemed to be the case with Millett and Holmes. It wasn’t perfect, but Holmes was acting like Holmes. And he was even clever, the way Holmes is supposed to be. (The first rule of teaching an old dog new tricks . . . be smarter than the dog. It’s sad seeing a true Watson trying to write a clever Holmes.) The backdrop of historical Minnesota provided detail and color, but it didn’t stop the master of detection from doing his thing. Even with the success of Red Demon, however, the idea of an ongoing series of Holmes constantly popping up in Minnesota still seemed a bit too strange to work.

Now comes Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, the second of Larry Millet’s Holmes works. Holmes gets to work in an urban setting this time, gets a colorful rival, and spends a heckuva lot of time building a ship in a bottle. And you know what? Millett pulls it off again.

The writer of any Holmes tale has to walk a very fine line. Holmes has to do things he didn’t do in the original stories, just to keep it interesting. But the things he does still have to be in character, extrapolated from what we already know of him. Millett’s Holmes works on his ship in a bottle while thinking, tours the seamy underbelly of Chicago, and doesn’t use the phrase “once you have eliminated the impossible . . .” even once.

Some of the best fun in Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders comes from watching Holmes go head-to-head with Minneapolis detective (and bartender) Shadwell Rafferty. The English detective and his American counterpart have distinctively different styles of working, yet parallel each other in a nice little bit of competitive investigation. Both men have their triumphs and failures as the case moves along, but neither’s presence seems to ruin the reader’s enjoyment of the other. One even has to wonder if the charismatic Shadwell Rafferty won’t soon be appearing in a novel or two of his own.

There’s crime, as full of horror and evil as needs a Sherlock Holmes to fight it. There’s regional and historical color galore. There’s even a footnote or five, for those who love informational tid-bits with small numbers in front of them. And while Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders isn’t Doyle, it’s certainly Millett, and that’s turning out to be a pretty good thing.

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And now, the answer to the magic question: why is the editor-in-chief plugging this book in his intro column, instead of letting Don Hobbs handle it in a “Mini-Review”? Could it be that the publishers sent me a free copy and I’m too tight-fisted to let Don have it? Could it be that the head of this publication can be bought for a simple hard-cover book? Or that he’s too lazy to write a proper intro column?

Who really knows?

— The Editor-in-Chief