The Crack in the Lens [Paperback]

This book is the first of a series of novels which Ms. Cypser is planning to describe Sherlock's life through University and his early career as a detective.

In contrast to a number of recent Sherlockian efforts, this book was written and edited by a professional. I found only one trivial error, although I am sure there are a few more. The writing is clear and direct, with prose that evokes the Yorkshire Dales and the people who have lived there from time out of mind. For a while I found myself recalling the first seasons of the series, "All Creatures, Great and Small" with it lovely scenery and wonderful characters.

The story is sad, with Sherlock going through a late adolescence and having to cope with a very demanding tutor, one Professor James Moriarty. We are introduced to Mycroft and to their older brother, Sherrinford as well as to Squire Siger and Mrs. Holmes. The wild and lovely scenery is a backdrop for a tale of madness, love and deceit with a few side trips into the normal world of family and friends. Sherlock's sickly childhood and family relations are explored in some depth as part of coming to understand his nature.

There are several questions left unanswered, but I suspect that the author has a few more facts to pass along at opportune times. Certain actions by Squire Holmes and Professor Moriarty require explanation, and the futures of several introduced characters leave room for growth and development. The story ends with a recapitulation of the events in "The Gloria Scott" that put Sherlock firmly on path to be the world's first consulting detective.

This is not a happy book nor is it light reading. It is a tale about forging a boy into a man, as one heats, pounds, tempers and quenches steel. It took me several sittings and I read it in the dead of Winter, a bad time to face snow in the fells and bitterness in the heart. This is a book that provides explanations for some of the odd qualities we have all remarked in the Master. Those qualities could not have come easily or pleasantly.

Reviewed by: Philip K. Jones, January, 2011

The Crack in the Lens

Darlene Cypser has pulled off an amazing conjuring trick with The Crack in the Lens, writing an original Sherlock Holmes story that is in no way a Sherlock Holmes story and that owes more to Emily Brontë than Arthur Conan Doyle.

Cypser's novel introduces us to 17-year-old Sherlock, happy to have returned to his Yorkshire home. He is the youngest son of the forbidding squire, Siger Holmes, with older brothers Mycroft and Sherrinford. His father considered him a delicate child who suffered from pneumonia growing up and has little faith in the young man he is about to be. Siger Holmes hopes his son will enter university and train to be an engineer, a suitable profession for a youngest son who would not inherit the family estate. And to that end Siger Holmes has engaged a professor of mathematics who will tutor -- and torture -- the boy.

But at first young Sherlock is simply happy to be home and free to roam the moors. Of course it's on the moors that he meets Violet Rushdale, daughter of one of his father's tenant farmers. It's a star-crossed match: the squire's son and the daughter of a tenant who's fallen to drink and is behind in the rent after the death of his wife. And of course being star crossed, the attraction is irresistable and one day after Sherlock and Violet slip and fall in freezing water and seek shelter in a prehistoric hut and ... well, as I said, The Crack in the Lens is more Brontë than Doyle and young Sherlock is not the misogynist of Watson's years.

One of the most amazing parts of Cypser's conjuring trick is that it's so simple. Boy meets girl, boy is denied girl through the machinations of his tutor, girl denies boy thinking it best for him and ultimately boy loses girl, which I don't think is a spoiler because every woman reader who has ever felt for him knows he had a tragic past. If I can offer any criticism, it's that Sherlock must prove himself impossibly obtuse when confronted by Violet's denial. It's like those times Watson is confronted by Holmes in disguise and you can't believe the good doctor can be so easily fooled. But the misapprehension is important to the story and after all, young Sherlock is only seventeen, not wise in matters of love and also suffering under the slanders his tutor has laid before Siger Holmes.

Cypser's restraint is also admirable in not making too many winking nods to Sherlock's future as the great detective, with few in jokes I noticed other than a plausible relation to another great Doyle creation and many foreshadowings to Holmes' skill at boxing and fencing and his affinity with the working classes and children. I'm sure there are other Holmesian nods that Cypser has added that I have missed in my Watsonian clumsiness, but I think they are subtle.

Cypser has also created one of the great sick bed scenes of all times, rivaling anything from Austen, Brontë or Dumas and her forging of the detective Holmes from the crucible of young Sherlock's despair makes The Crack in the Lens has made a lasting impression on me.

The author has done a wonderful job of "filling-in the background" of Sherlock Holmes. She has taken the few known facts about Holmes's youth, embellished them with the suppositions of other authors (William Baring-Gould, for one), and added an engrossing narritive that tells us of his tragic lost love and his first crossing of wills with Professor Morarity. The story is engrossing and the pace makes it difficult to put this one down until finished.

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