Book Review: The Whole Art of Detection by Lyndsey Faye

I am SO impressed by Lyndsay Faye’s ability to write Sherlock Holmes in a spot-on Conan Doyle voice… I absolutely loved her first book to do so (Dust and Shadow) and have been eagerly awaiting the next. When I saw this one come up on NetGalley, I could not wait to request it. I was so excited, I didn’t even notice that it was a book of short stories and not another novel… Oh dear. As a general rule I do not like short stories. I find them frustrating, lacking the depth of character and plot development that draws me in to a book. The original Holmes stories are some of the rare exceptions to this rule, but even the best short stories are, to my mind, often less interesting than even weaker novels.

This set of stories feels EXACTLY like you’d want a series of Holmes stories to feel – the voice is authentic, the characters are true, the stories play out like you expect them to (that’s not to call them predictable, my any means, but rather to make the point that they are written so true-to-form that they feel like original Holmes rather than a 21st century addition to the genre). The problem for me is that they’re short stories – not the stories themselves. I just cannot get into a whole book of short stories, even when they’re as well developed and presented as these. Even the original stories can only be taken in short doses for me; these were much the same. At this time, I haven’t even finished them all (to be perfectly honest), because I have to intersperse shorts with “real” longer stories or I find myself losing interest – even when the stories are masterfully handled, as these are.

So, if you like the original Holmes short stories – which were, of course, the majority of what Conan Doyle wrote – you should most definitely pick this set up. If you haven’t read any of the originals yet, I would suggest starting there mostly for backstory, although you probably don’t really *need* to in order to read these, since Holmesiana is so much a part of the popular imagination…