Watson, elderly and alone – "Two marriages, three children, seven grandchildren, a successful career in medicine and the Order of Merit" – sets out to recount one of their early adventures together, on a case so monstrous and shocking he has had to consign his written account to his solicitors' vaults for 100 years. And to whom much is given, of him shall much be required … It is, as its cover proudly declares, "the new Sherlock Holmes novel".
But The House of Silk is in a class of its own: Horowitz's novel is the first Sherlock Holmes addition to have been written with the endorsement of the Conan Doyle estate. Naturally, some of these non-Doylean adventures are better than others: Julian Symons's ingenious A Three Pipe Problem (1975) is unjustly forgotten, the BBC's recent Sherlock rightly praised. And then there are the many profane writings, films, and TV and radio shows based on, inspired by or otherwise deriving from the originals, ranging from the early Ellery Queen-edited The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944) to the movie The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother (1975), with a star turn by Rumpole-to-be Leo McKern as Moriarty. There are many other books and stories that vie for inclusion, most significantly the many apocryphal writings by Arthur Conan Doyle himself not among the sacred 60: plays, commentaries, self-parodies and pre- and sub-Holmesian detectives. Anthony Horowitz is not, of course, the first to add to the Holmesian canon – the 56 short cases and four novels first collected together and published as The Complete Sherlock Holmes in 1930. The world's greatest private consulting detective returns to solve another case.
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