The House Of Silk

a quotation of three or four words. Once a year they visit the Reichenbach Falls and dress up as their favourite characters. They are not eccentrics or fanatics but they are fairly extreme and they can be found all over the world.
    This essay is, in part, adapted from the talk I gave that night. And it seemed important to me to reassure them that I was not going to play fast and loose with their beloved creation. Part of this was commercial good sense. If you annoy the core enthusiasts, you’re going to make enemies you don’t need. I have had contact with several estates – Tintin, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming – and know this to be true. But I was more swayed by a sense of personal responsibility. I liked Sherlock Holmes much too much to want to muck him up.
    And so I set out the ten rules which I would have beside me as I wrote
The House of Silk
– and here they are again. If you’ve read the book, you can judge for yourself how well they were kept and, indeed, if they were worth keeping.

    1. No over-the-top action. I’ve already touched on this – but after writing nine Alex Rider novels, this was the most difficult, the most exasperating piece of self-restraint. It’s difficult to think of a modern thriller without gun-fights and car chases. We all know that Holmes is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman and occasionally carries a firearm. But the original stories have a cerebral, even sedentary feel to them. My image of Holmes is in his study, in front of the fire – not escaping from circular saws or diving six storeys into the River Thames. All that I can leave to Robert Downey Jnr.
The House of Silk
has disguises. There are expeditions to Bluegate Fields, to Vauxhall and to the slums of Boston … but I hope I have managed to avoid the genre-crossing extremes which, though enjoyable, might best be described as Indiana Holmes. I have to admit, though, that I was quite pleased to be able to sneak in the brief coach chase at the end.

    2. No women. Of course it was tempting to create a romantic lead, to give Holmes a love interest. But re-reading the short stories before I began work, I came almost immediately upon that famous sentence – ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman’ – and knew at once that it would have been madness to try and create another Irene Adler. I did briefly think of bringing Irene back (I believe she appears in the second Holmes movie) but I felt somehow it would have been taking a liberty and anyway Watson had already set the seal on that subject: ‘All emotions and that one (love) particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.’

    3. This is very much related to rule number two. There would be no gay references either overt or implied in the relationship between Holmes and Watson. This was hinted at in Billy Wilder’s film,
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
which has a scene with Watson tangled up with dancers from the Bolshoi ballet. But it is of course silly and wrong – although I did have an advantage, being a modern writer, in that I was able to examine some aspects of the sexual mores of Victorian England in a way that Doyle could not.

    4. No walk-on appearances by famous people. The American writer, Nicholas Meyer put Holmes together with Freud in his 1974 novel,
The Seven Percent Solution
. Billy Wilder had Queen Victoria. I’ve heard that one Doyle pastiche even has Holmes meeting Hitler! But for me the power of the books is that they largely create a world of their own with very little reference to contemporary affairs. Holmes quotes Goethe, Flaubert, Petrarch, Poe and Winwood Reade but even his most august clients – The King of Scandinavia or Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein tend to be fictitious. This seemed to me to be a good rule so I followed it too.

    5. No drugs – at least, none to be taken by Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes now has a reputation for being something of a cocaine fiend, it’s only in
The Sign of Four
that we meet him when he is actually taking the drug. I was very nervous of doing any post-modern take on Holmes and it struck me that to have him ravaged by cocaine would only detract from the story-telling. I knew that drugs would play a part in the story – I wanted to describe an opium den because Holmes had never actually visited one – but drug addiction was out.

    6. Do the research. Try to get the details right. It’s