A Genderflipped Holmes and Watson Ride Again in The Hound of Justice
Holmes and Watson reimaginings are practically their own subgenre these days. Arthur Conan Doyle’s infamous detective and his trusty doctor companion have been through the fictional wringer, staring down just about every scenario two characters can encounter (notably, Dracula, Cthulhu, aliens, and, on multiple occasions, Jack the Ripper).
After more than a century, you’d think we’d be bored with the duo.
The Hound of Justice: A Novel
Paperback $17.99
The Hound of Justice: A Novel
In Stock Online
Paperback $17.99
You’d think that, but writers keep surprising us with variations on the form, none more so than Claire O’Dell does in the Janet Watson Chronicles, which introduced the most modern incarnations of Holmes and Watson to date in last year’s A Study in Honor, featuring the quintessentially beleaguered Dr. Janet Watson and the mercurial Sara Holmes, two queer black women navigating a tumultuous near future.
You’d think that, but writers keep surprising us with variations on the form, none more so than Claire O’Dell does in the Janet Watson Chronicles, which introduced the most modern incarnations of Holmes and Watson to date in last year’s A Study in Honor, featuring the quintessentially beleaguered Dr. Janet Watson and the mercurial Sara Holmes, two queer black women navigating a tumultuous near future.
The game is afoot once more in the sequel, The Hound of Justice. You can tell from the titles that O’Dell is having fun playing around in Conan Doyle’s universe, extracting the essence of the characters and their adventures and modifying them to fit today’s reality—as chaotic and turbulent as ever, but also much more attuned to matters of racial, sexual, and gender diversity.
Janet Watson is world-weary yet strong, a wounded war veteran and an expert surgeon—just like her predecessor. Sara Holmes is an obnoxious genius who doles out only enough details of her plans to perplex and infuriate—just like her namesake. This perfectly imperfect pairing works as much today as it did in the 1880s, and certainly does so again in Hound, which returns us to an alt-21st century America fractured by a new Civil War. The action picks up shortly after Study left off, in the fallout from a fight with the nefarious pharmaceutical mogul Nadine Adler.
Now at Georgetown University Hospital, Watson wrestles with her new, suped-up prosthetic arm and attempts to return to the surgical rotation. At home, she navigates the sullen moods of Holmes, whose recent rogue behavior has seen her placed on leave by whichever shadowy government agency she works for.
Life isn’t normal. Politics are still volatile. Watson herself is at the beginning of her journey of self-(re)discovery. But the world is returning to a certain rhythm. Until the explosion, that is.
A Study in Honor: A Novel
Paperback $15.99
A Study in Honor: A Novel
In Stock Online
Paperback $15.99
As Watson peruses a new bookstore and considers a new romance with the woman who owns it, everything changes: the Brotherhood of Redemption, a terrorist faction within the New Confederacy, turns the world upside down with a series of bombing intended to mark and mar the inauguration of a new president.
As Watson peruses a new bookstore and considers a new romance with the woman who owns it, everything changes: the Brotherhood of Redemption, a terrorist faction within the New Confederacy, turns the world upside down with a series of bombing intended to mark and mar the inauguration of a new president.
The attacks serve as a catalyst for both Watson and Holmes. The former springs into action caring for the wounded; the latter begins an investigation into the terror cell that takes her deep into New Confederacy territory.
The atrocities also usher into the series a welcome narrative addition: Micha Holmes. This is O’Dell’s take on the enigmatic elder Holmes, Mycroft. With Sara’s adventures taking her “off-screen” for a large stretches of the novel, her cousin Micha serves as a suitable and suitably frustrating foil for the more matter-of-fact Janet. The two embark into enemy-territory on a road trip to assist Sara with her investigation, which is on the brink of uncovering a much larger conspiracy. The action along the way is tense, vivid, and tightly plotted; as she did in A Study in Honor, O’Dell proves her deftness at barreling the plot forward while nimbly rendering her central characters’ emotions.
Throughout her adventures with the Holmeses, Watson has her own struggles to deal with. There is the matter of her arm, a foreign object she must learn to wield as flesh and blood in order to return to her calling and rediscover her self-confidence. At the hospital, she is plagued by internal politics, professional jealousies, and a string of unusual deaths. Trouble brews at home, too, as O’Dell introduces more of the greater Watson family—a family Janet all but abandoned when she enlisted in the military. Time has not mended all wounds. Even as Janet chases a New Confederacy plot, her loyalty is torn between the siren’s call of Sara Holmes in need in Oklahoma and the guilt associated with a grandmother in decline at the family homestead in Georgia.
The Hound of Justice is a story of resistance, to be sure, but it’s also the story of the real human costs of putting everything on the line. It’s also a compelling mystery, at the center of which is a Watson with the same loyalty and curiosity as the original, but with an identity and outlook far more reflective of the times in which she (and we) live.