The second story line, set in 2010, finds Harold White, a geeky young Holmes enthusiast, being inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars, a prestigious, invitation-only society devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes. Harold barely has had time to celebrate when he is caught up in a real mystery, the murder of Alex Cale, a leading Holmes scholar who claimed to have discovered “the Holy Grail of Sherlockian studies,’’ Doyle’s lost diary.
The fictional crime is modeled on the 2004 murder, still unsolved, of Holmes scholar Richard Lancelyn Green, after he announced that he had found Doyle’s lost diary. In “The Sherlockian,’’ Cale is discovered dead in his hotel room, strangled with his own shoelace. On the wall, the word “Elementary’’ is written, in blood. The diary is nowhere to be found.
Both tales could be a good deal more ripping. The modern story is hampered by a central character who is meant to be endearingly eccentric but who comes across as obsessive, socially inept, and unattractive. The atmospheric Victorian era story has, in Doyle, an interesting central character but the plot, involving a serial killer preying on young women suffragists, is labored and unconvincing.
Harold, a Princeton graduate, champion speed-reader, and freelance literary researcher employed in the film industry, is described as 29 years old, with a slight belly, thick eyebrows, astigmatism, and “sweaty, shivering hands.’’ Plus he wears a cheap suit and a deerstalker. Heroes don’t have to be perfect — Holmes himself was famously flawed — but this one is creepy. Harold is thrown together with Sarah Lindsay, an enigmatic young woman who claims to be a reporter, and the two are drawn into an international quest for the diary and for Cale’s murderer. There is a singular lack of chemistry between the two, not just sexual chemistry, but any kind of rapport.
