A Scandalous Affair - Leonard Goldberg ****

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Watson senior is still around, if elderly (Sherlock being long gone), while Mr & Mrs Watson live at 221B Baker Street, looked after by one Miss Hudson… and there’s even a son-of-Lestrade at Scotland Yard.

The plot centres on an increasingly dubious blackmail featuring the scandalous behaviour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s granddaughter, which Joanna solves with rather more equanimity than her father, if exhibiting many of his traits. Along the way we are plunged into opium dens, a break-in to a suspect’s mansion, theatrical goings on, scientific experiments and more. Leonard Goldberg is a doctor and gives us more medical content that was the case with the original – indeed appropriate, given Watson junior like his father is a doctor (but in his case, a pathologist).

It’s a nice idea and an enjoyable light read. Goldberg is American, but puts across a good Sherlockian London vibe. The only slight problem with this is that the setting is now 1918, not Victorian England. The mode of speech feels too Victorian for the period – by 1918, it would have been rather closer to P. G. Wodehouse than Doyle. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster was in the habit of popping over to Le Touquet to play the casino, which highlights one of a few anachronisms – early on, for example, we hear that they’ve checked all the major casinos [in London] – that would have been all zero of them, as they weren’t legalised in the UK until the 1960s.

Another example of the Victorian theme lingering into the future is that we’re told there are many opium dens in London, where actually they had gone by the end of the nineteenth century. Goldberg brings in a Doyle character in opium den owner Ah Sing – he was a real person, but had died, along with his trade, well before 1900. Although Goldberg largely gives us reasonable usage of the period, some Americanisms creep in: for example, calling a barman a barkeep, a fire engine a fire truck, referring to the ground floor as the first floor and calling a bowler hat a derby. Most bizarrely ‘stoker’ is employed as the word for a poker – a usage not in the OED. Though occasionally a trifle disconcerting, these aren’t too much of an issue.

The book was compared in a write-up to Anthony Horowitz’s Holmes novel House of Silk, which also features opium dens. Horowitz is a slicker writer with an appropriate Victorian setting – I might have preferred his book as a clever piece of writing, but this is lighter, more fast paced and certainly readable.

You can buy A Scandalous Affair from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here