A Study in Honor: A Very Different Holmes and Watson Story
As a character of canon, Sherlock Holmes is not typically one to dwell in realms of fantasy, preferring logic and deduction. The Dr. John Watson of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories certainly never dabbled in science fiction writing, even if his retellings of Holmes’ investigations smack more of fiction than the great detective might prefer.
A Study in Honor: A Novel
Paperback $15.99
A Study in Honor: A Novel
In Stock Online
Paperback $15.99
A Study in Honor, Beth Bernobich’s first novel under the Claire O’Dell pseudonym, is a Holes and Watson story, but it’s not about Sherlock Holmes or John Watson. In this alternate near-future thriller (can you call it “alternate” if its trauma seems so true to life?), the Holmes and Watson are Sara and Janet—the same sort of mismatched pairing, updated for a modern, diverse, and turbulent world.
A Study in Honor, Beth Bernobich’s first novel under the Claire O’Dell pseudonym, is a Holes and Watson story, but it’s not about Sherlock Holmes or John Watson. In this alternate near-future thriller (can you call it “alternate” if its trauma seems so true to life?), the Holmes and Watson are Sara and Janet—the same sort of mismatched pairing, updated for a modern, diverse, and turbulent world.
This is not a Sherlock Holmes retelling. Instead, O’Dell has crafted an adventure for the 21st century, a raw, wounded time that requires a main character as torn asunder as the environment around her.
This is Watson’s story, from start to finish. Watson has always served as the scribe for Holmesian adventures; his—and it has almost always been his—voice permeates every story in the Doyle canon, and most of the homages that followed. Holmes is always the star: ever-faithful Watson records the brilliance, the arrogance, and the eccentricities of the alien-like savant with whom he shares rooms.
Things play out differently in A Study in Honor, though Dr. Janet Watson does fit the standard mold: she is a wounded war veteran, having lost her left arm in the New Civil War, still being waged an unspecified but limited number of years from our present day. She has all the signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder present, if undiagnosed, in every version of Watson, even if her war wound—her limb has been replaced with an outmoded mechanical one—is more definitively placed than her namesake’s.
Other Watsons have displayed this kind of unsteadiness, but Janet has more dimensions. She is a woman, for one thing—and a queer, black woman at that. For a story set in a post-Trump American landscape in which the country fights battles through its center with New Confederacy insurrectionists, a black female war veteran is a crucial choice to explore a conflict that cuts scathingly close to current events.
This Watson alternates between defeated and defiant. She throws punches at her therapist. She mourns the loss of a physical dexterity with a mind that still possesses precise intellectual acuity. She is a soldier of sorrow, even as she serves as an angel of mercy in the low-rung medical technician job she’s able to land at a VA hospital.
Discarded by her country and humbled by her circumstances, she meets her Holmes, as otherworldly (and aggravating) as ever, in the form of a techno-savvy, queer woman of color. Sara Holmes is elegant, capable, and enigmatic, but her entrance to the story does not shift the focus from Watson, even as their chemistry crackles and combusts.
The relationship between these two is more intimate than the one Doyle wrote; O’Dell allows the natural attraction and delicate camaraderie between them to exist without ever forcing the skeptical, wounded Janet to see the mercurial Sara as a true love interest.
That kind of romance, forced and endlessly unhealthy, would muddy the waters of what is a taut thriller with a mystery that originates with Watson: her work as a med tech is far below her skills and education, but in the endless series of veterans she doctors each day, she encounters a patient death she can’t explain—a death without reason.
Uncovering that reason will threaten the fledgling new life Watson is creating for herself and, with the help of Holmes the covert government agent, scratch at the surface of a conspiracy that echoes from the halls of Washington, through the overcrowded waiting rooms of the V.A., to the boardrooms of the military industrial complex.
Like any good Holmes story, the mystery is compelling and complicated. What sets it apart is the equally compelling, complicated investigating pair. O’Dell’s first Holmesian outing forefronts the intersectionality of the powerful women at its center, elevating the tale in the bargain.
The game is, as they say, afoot. Hopefully, there’ll be many more to come.