Responding to Mycroft's display of oilskin-bound possessions, evidently the property of a missing British spy, Russell asks her brother-in-law: "This doesn't have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?"
The couple are on the trail of - believe it or not - Rudyard Kipling's own stellar creation.
In The Game, this series' seventh installment (after Justice Hall, 2002), the year 1924 has just begun and the reader is packed off in vintage style to India alongside Russell and Holmes, at the behest of the latter's ill elder brother, Mycroft, who holds membership in a shadowy government agency. (Much to the shock of Sherlockian purists, King has the pair already wed at the beginning of 1996's A Letter of Mary.) Although King never loses sight of the eccentric consulting sleuth's rapacious intellect and fabled orneriness - two of the qualities that every Holmes fan has come to expect - she has lifted Arthur Conan Doyle's premier protagonist from the dusty pages of literary history and made him a flesh-and-blood figure.
Who'd have thought it would take a 20th-century woman to flesh out the crusty, taciturn, yet oh-so-well beloved figure of Sherlock Holmes, himself essentially a 19th-century man? Of course, I am referring here not only to the talented King but also to her most imaginative creation, Mary Russell, the liberated, half-American Jewish woman who, over the course of several evocative books so far (beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice, 1994), has breathed freshness and new life into Holmes' legendary persona.īorn at the turn of the last century, and only a precocious 15 years old on the occasion of her fateful first meeting with the Great Detective (who was then 54 and languishing in semi-retirement, keeping bees on England's Sussex Downs), Mary Russell has gone on to win not just Holmes' admiration, but his well-guarded old heart as well.
0 kommentar(er)
