David Stuart Davies is certainly a very brave man, for with The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Veiled Detective he has produced a radical re-imagining of the Sherlockian world of Arthur Conan Doyle that is sure to polarize fans of the world’s greatest consulting detective. Sherlock Holmes, as created by Conan Doyle, has inspired a loyalty and devotion among readers that is quite unrivalled. It is hard to imagine any other fictional character who still receives fan mail and requests for assistance at his fictional home address more than a hundred years after his fictional self would have died. However, the Holmes canon is not completely sacred as there are a great number of novels and short stories written that seek to plug the gaps in Holmes’ life as chronicled by Conan Doyle. Indeed, over the years, Sherlock Holmes has found himself thrust into all manner of scrapes, with his adventures ranging from fighting Dracula to playing a role in The Prisoner of Zenda to preventing a Martian invasion. But the bravery from David Stuart Davies lies in the fact that with The Veiled Detective he has gone far beyond the accepted grounds of pastiche by offering a story wherein the characters involved are so radically different from those of Conan Doyle that their exploits cast doubt onto and subvert all of the canonical Sherlock Holmes works.

The Veiled Detective opens in Afghanistan in 1880 as army medic John H. Walker is treating wounded soldiers. Realising that there is nothing he can do for the remaining wounded men save for making them comfortable until death comes, Walker despairs of the conflict and abandons his field hospital to slope off quietly and get drunk. Walker ends up drinking even more than he intended and is discovered in a stupor the next morning by his commanding officer. Having been found to have abandoned his post and allowed fellow soldiers to die, Walker is first imprisoned in a hellish military prison and then given a dishonourable discharge from the army and sent back to England in disgrace. On the voyage home Walker is snubbed by his fellow passengers as word of his disgrace has got out and he comes to realise that there is no decent, respectable future awaiting him in England. Walker eventually finds an ally in Captain Reed, a self-confessed thief who was also dishonourably discharged from the army. Reed proposes that Walker could serve some nebulous role in his business organisation and, glad to have any prospects at all, Walker quickly agrees. It is when Walker is back in England that the radical alterations made by David Stuart Davies to the world of Sherlock Holmes are confirmed. It emerges that Captain Reed is a trusted lieutenant of Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, and that Moriarty has a very special role in mind for Walker.

A young Sherlock Holmes has recently arrived in London and has begun to prove troublesome to Moriarty. Although Holmes has interfered in several of his schemes, Moriarty has not failed to recognise Holmes’ intellect and finds the idea of a worthy adversary to be quite appealing. Instead of killing Holmes and so removing his threat completely, Moriarty wishes to keep him under observation and to only take extreme measures if absolutely necessary. Walker is therefore to be renamed Watson and dispatched to become the friend and roommate of Sherlock Holmes. Watson (as he must now be known) is initially reluctant to take part in such a deception but eventually realises that he has no choice. A meeting is engineered between Watson and Holmes and the two ultimately agree to lodge together at 221B Baker Street. Not even their Baker Street residence is straightforward in The Veiled Detective however as the residence is subsidised (without Holmes’ knowledge of course) by Moriarty and even Mrs Watson is not what she seems.

Once Holmes and Watson are established at Baker Street, David Stuart Davies switches to a slightly safer track as he has them become embroiled in several cases which, although altered in minor ways, are recognisable from the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. After a fairly detailed rehash of A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson are taken on a whistle-stop tour of several other recognisable Holmes adventures including The Sign of Four, The Greek Interpreter and The Final Problem. The elements and sequences borrowed from these stories will be instantly recognisable to those who have read the original Sherlock Holmes tales although they have been tweaked to accommodate the alternative world of Holmes envisioned by David Stuart Davies and to allow his ultimate goal to unfold.

The Veiled Detective is a very hard book to decide upon. The story is well written and there are no major quibbles regarding David Stuart Davies’ recreation of the period and spirit of the original Holmes stories. It is the characterisations that pose the problem. Watson as Walker, the deserter and spy, is hard to stomach even though he is shown to be ultimately an honourable man. Watson is an extremely well-loved character and the perfect foil for the abrasive, cold Holmes and so it is very difficult to countenance him as a deceiver, as less than the man created by Conan Doyle. Mrs Watson and Mycroft Holmes also suffer from their re-imagining so that they are somehow diminished as characters. Although his interpretation of Sherlock Holmes himself is the most true to the character created by Conan Doyle, David Stuart Davies suffers from the fact that his story demands an instant bond of friendship forms between the genius at deciphering human characters that is Holmes and the cuckoo in the nest that is Watson. It just doesn’t quite gel.

Then again, the adventures that Holmes and Watson embark upon are intriguing, there is a good pace and level of tension about their exploits that pulls the reader along with them. David Stuart Davies has an engaging writing style and clearly an in-depth knowledge of and love for the world of Sherlock Holmes. He has successfully merged together several well-known stories to create one coherent narrative that provides an interesting backdrop to the new relationship between Holmes and Watson.

Ultimately, The Veiled Detective is clearly not going to please everyone. While the story itself is good and an interesting if quick read, the new interpretations of such classic characters are bound to prove hard to swallow for fans of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

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