The House Of Silk

course, the last person you expected. The guilty party claims innocence. Cue the flashback. Poirot is proved right. Everyone goes home.
    All of which is actually completely irrelevant to Sherlock Holmes because Doyle’s approach was completely different. Take, for example, the twelve stories which make up the collection with the title
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. No fewer than nine of these contain no murder. Even more remarkably, three of the stories –
A Case of Identity, The Noble Bachelor
and
The Twisted Lip
– don’t even contain a crime. Throughout the canon, there is a remarkable shortage of red herrings and suspects. One of the two favourite stories that I mentioned,
The Dying Detective
, is virtually a two-hander. In one story, the killer is a horse. In another, it’s a jellyfish. Even more oddly, if you look at the four novels, three of them –
A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear
and to a lesser extent
The Hound of the Baskervilles
even manage to lose sight of the detective, transporting us to Utah, to Vermissa and to Dartmoor.
    If you were to ask what has made Sherlock Holmes the most successful and best loved detective of all time, I would argue that it is not in fact the crimes or the mysteries. It seems to me that the appeal of the books has much more to do with character, the friendship of Holmes and Watson, the extraordinary and very rich world they inhabit and the genuine and often under-rated excellence of Conan Doyle’s writing, a touch melodramatic at times but still very much in the tradition of gothic romance. When I was asked to write
The House of Silk
, I realised that this would be the key. I had to become invisible. I had to find that extraordinary, authentic voice.
    And the first two challenges were immediately apparent. The first one was the length. My publishers, Orion Books, had requested a novel of between 90,000 and 100,000 words (the final length was around 94,000) – big enough to seem like value for money on an airport stand. But actually, this goes quite against the spirit of Doyle’s originals which barely run to half that length. The very nature of a Sherlock Holmes story is that the narrative has a slightly silky feel. The chapters are short and to the point. Characters are not described at any great length and even Victorian London is economically sketched in. Nor are there any major action sequences as such. A boat chase down the River Thames, yes. A midnight encounter with a hell hound on the moors. But these are singular occurrences. The greater part of the novels take place in closed rooms … hardly ideal for a modern audience and certainly of no interest to any circling Hollywood producers (well, it’s just a thought).
    The other challenge was the title. Modern novels, particularly the sort of bestseller than Orion had in mind, have to shout loud on a crowded shelf. Doyle, although he had an uncanny eye for what the market wanted, was less troubled by such commercial pressures.
The Sign of Four
is a perfect title and many of the short stories have the same gentle elegance:
The Problem of Thor Bridge
or
The Golden Pince-nez
. Although titles for the Alex Rider books were always a bit of a struggle, I decided on
The House of Silk
at a very early stage. It just felt right.
    I should also add that the plot of the book came very quickly. In fact, by the end of my original meeting, when I hadn’t even accepted the commission, most of it was in place. This is very rare for me and helped persuade me that I should go ahead. Writing the book was also an intense pleasure and I hope I won’t sound arrogant when I say that I think it is my best work. I am not superstitious by nature but Doyle, of course, was a confirmed spiritualist and before I began writing
The House of Silk
, I went out and bought an old Holmes edition which he had personally signed. It was with me the whole time and that tiny, neat signature became something of a talisman for me. I even felt occasionally (or was tempted to feel) that Doyle was in some way watching over me, guiding my hand. This may sound completely ridiculous but it’s just how it was.
    By a strange coincidence, I was invited to give a talk to the Sherlock Holmes society in the House of Commons while I was writing the book and it was then – December 2010 – that I announced it for the first time. I can’t say they were completely overwhelmed. These people take Holmes very seriously. They can recognise a short story from