The Spider's Web (Sherlock Holmes) by Philip Purser-Hallard

The Spider's Web (Sherlock Holmes) Reviews

• 
  Stephen Robert Collins

  I am really Wilde about this Holmes. The whole book is Oscar Wilde the difference twists is all about the plays of Wilde and the famous line 'A handbag' is hell lot of the book.
  He gives you notes that end telling you about the plays he took each part of the book from. If are true Fan of The Importance of Being Earnest you love this delightful book.
  But would point out that is only 284 pages and not 400p as Goodreads says.
• 
  Margaret

  Sherlock Holmes and John Watson investigate a murder at a society party - but the host and his family and friends are more concerned with the inconvenience than finding the killer. As Holmes and Watson delve deeper they begin to uncover secrets that people would far rather were forgotten.
  
  The joy of this book is the fact that the author has seamlessly woven Arthur Conan Doyle's characters into the world of Oscar Wilde. The society family is the Moncrieff's: the family from "The Importance of Being Earnest". Other Oscar Wilde characters flow in and out of the story.
  
  Philip Purser-Hallard has a deliciously Wildean turn of phrase. I found myself laughing out loud more than once during the course of my reading.
  
  "The Spider's Web" is a delectable concoction of a book. Light and fizzy on the tongue, but so very satisfying.
  
  A fabulous, fun, 5-Star read. Highly recommended.
• 
  Connie

  'Come, Watson! The game is afoot, and we must hound it to its very extinction!'
  The Spider's Web is another fab Sherlock Holmes story from Philip Purser - Hallard. The cast of characters are a nod to Oscar Wilde.
• 
  David

  There seem to be two kinds of Holmes pastiches: those which are built around an original mystery and those which drop Holmes and Watson into the middle of a pre-existing story, allowing them to interact with other fictional characters or actual people who could have been contemporaries of the detective and his companion. The latter are rarely—if ever—successful; in the worst of them, Holmes and Watson simply sit back and watch the events of someone else’s better written novel or story unfold. Even those that strive for originality, however, tend to wear out the joke quickly.
  
  The Spider’s Web is no exception to this. In this case, Purser-Hallard has the detecting duo interact with the characters of a few of Oscar Wilde’s plays, and your enjoyment of the story may well depend on your familiarity with and fondness for those works. I found it to be dull and pointless.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  Sherlock Holmes meets The Importance Of Being Earnest; the sort of idea so attractive one can't help wanting to avoid it. But whereas most writers presumptuous enough to attempt it would have perpetrated some galumphing horror, Purser-Hallard has always had a gift for pulling off audacious crossovers, whether that be the City Of The Saved in which every era of humanity's dead mingle, or the Devices trilogy he built on a unified field theory of British mythology. Similarly, he knows here that he has to go big or go home, so it's not just Ernest, Algernon and their brides borrowed from Wilde; the novel opens with Holmes deducing Lord Arthur Savile's crime, and goes on to throw in characters from An Ideal Husband, A Woman Of No Importance and Lady Windermere's Fan within its opening act. A sequence which implies an omission, of course, and one which is subsequently acknowledged, though obviously I wouldn't be so unsporting as to give away in what capacity.
  
  Are PPH's paradoxes and witticisms up there with Wilde's? Of course not, but then whose are? And for the most part they're certainly not disastrous. He also remembers the easily forgotten detail – and this applies to pastiches of plenty of other quotable authors too* – that the dialogue does have to work as dialogue too, revealing character and moving scenes forward, rather than just being lines in the author's style traded back and forth. So when Ernest says "Since a man may not flirt with his wife, Mrs Teville, he is left with no choice but to flirt without her", I bridled on multiple counts – and was then glad to see the sentiment straight away rebuffed. As for the Conan Doyle side of the equation, well, there I've not read all of the originals, but consider Purser-Hallard's Holmes perfect in that I can hear every line as uttered by the one true Holmes, Jeremy Brett. Indeed, there's even an appearance here by Langdale Pike, never seen in person in Doyle, but wonderfully incarnated in the Brett series by Peter Wyngarde. This does also mean that Watson is a little too useful for my tastes, but again that accords with the Brett, whose one significant flaw** was that they'd sometimes de-jam Watson, even at the cost of making Holmes more fallible. Still, I can forgive that for the little details, like Watson doing his best to suppress his outrage when Pike calls Sherlock by his first name, something which Watson indignantly notes he has himself only done when it was necessary to distinguish Sherlock from Mycroft.
  
  The real point of the exercise, though, is not simply to recreate the work of two contemporaries whose books we can still read should the mood take us, but to mingle them. And this is where we get the scenes which justify the enterprise, as Holmes the seeker after truth attempts to negotiate interactions with a set who, even if they were to do anything so downmarket as to speak the unvarnished truth, at least have the decency to make it sound as though they're doing nothing of the sort. The finest examples come whenever Holmes comes up against Lady Bracknell, though Watson notes a sneaking suspicion that Holmes might secretly quite appreciate for once not being the one dominating the room. I was a little surprised that the book didn't use the greater latitude afforded by the 21st century to make some of the subtext definitely present in Wilde, and arguably in Doyle, into text: even though the case begins with the apparent murder of Bunbury, quite what that alias may previously have obscured is pointedly left unaddressed. There are, admittedly, the pictures in Pike's rooms, of "slender young men enacting scenes from classical myth or Christian martyrology, in what must have been a comfortably warm climate", and one rather forward reader of Watson's accounts asking whether Holmes has lady friends, or if his interests lie in another direction. I also boggled a little when the Marquess of Queensberry was mentioned, wondering how differently his life must have run without a Wilde at whom to direct illiterate invective. But that and a few groanworthy lines are about as far as the novel dances towards the openly meta; well, except perhaps when Cecily remarks that "I do not believe I have met any literary characters before."
  
  If I have a reservation, it would be that – a feeling that the book could have been something really special if it had taken its conceit as the starting point for a dance far beyond the fourth wall. And once we're properly enmeshed in the case of the Spider's Web, there were inevitably moments of re-covered ground when I remembered why I've always preferred Holmes in short stories. But I appreciate that there is probably a larger market for reasonably faithful Holmes homage than for the loopily experimental version I would have liked. Considered within that field, though, this is a good one. Plus, it does relate to things outside itself sufficiently to feel like more than mere Victorian re-enactment: when Lady Bracknell declares that "A perfectly successful inquiry would be one which elicited no information at all. It would do nothing to imperil the established order, yet satisfy all concerned that nothing more could have been done", one can't but ruefully conclude that she would still go far in the British establishment today.
  
  *Wilde himself made the observation regarding people who think they're quoting Shakespeare's own sentiments when they reference Hamlet's thoughts on art, which are in turn given while Hamlet is pretending to be mad. Yet a century on, you still get people who think they're being smart attributing 'To thine own self be true' to 'Shakespeare', rather than noting it as a line given by Shakespeare to the hypocrite and general arsehole Polonius.
  **Its one ongoing flaw, anyway. Other small botherations, such as Irene Adler's perm, or moving the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle off my birthday, were at least contained within a single episode.
• 
  Leo H

  Great stuff, Purser-Hallard integrates Oscar Wilde characters into a Sherlock Holmes mystery seamlessly, and writes them in a recognisably Wildean fashion. I struggled a little bit with remembering every character and their relationship with everyone else, but that's more of a Me problem. I've already got PP-H's next Sherlock Holmes book, can't wait to read it.
• 
  Barbara

  On one of these groups, I heard about a TV show that ran for one season several years ago. The show was called "Dickensian" and was basically a murder mystery/melodrama that brought characters from several of Dickens' books into one "universe." It was an ingenious idea, IMHO, and worked really.well - I was sorry they didn't do more seasons.
  In The Spider's Web, Purser-Hallard attempts something similar when he has Holmes and Watson investigating a nefarious plot, with victims and suspects taken from some of Oscar Wilde's plays. The Wildean characters are fairly well "novelized" and spout the expected epigrams, but somehow it just doesn't jell. The plot is tedious, not terribly interesting despite the Wilde cast and my feeling was that the ambition was greater than the ability to pull it off.
  But - I gave it a fairly high rating for one reason: Purser-Hallard is one of the few writers of Holmes pastiches I've come across - and I have read scores of them - who does a very solid job of imitating Doyle's writing style. So many pastiches are good stories in themselves but I never believe Doyle could have written them because the authors have style and not substance. "The Spider's Web" might lack something in substance for me, but the author got the style down and I give him credit for that.
• 
  David D. Knapp, Ph.D.

  As I've mentioned in numerous reviews, I'm a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes - both the original Arthur Conan Doyle canon and the numerous pastiches that have been written by other authors over the years. That includes the Titan Books series, of which this is one.
  
  The reality is that some of the pastiches I read are so good they easily could pass as one of Conan Doyle's creations. Others, however, just don't capture the voice, feel, plot, setting, etc. of the original canon works.
  
  Like his "The Vanishing Man" (which I recently read and reviewed) this effort by Philip Purser-Hallard falls somewhere in between...albeit closer to being canon worthy than that work.
  
  The author again did a terrific job of capturing the voice, feel, and setting of Conan Doyle's original canon. For me, how a pastiche presents Holmes' and Watson's dialogue goes a long way in determining how good it is. And that dialogue was spot on throughout this pastiche.
  
  I also liked that the surrounding characters in this work were a tribute to the great Oscar Wilde - a homage Mr. Purser-Hallard openly acknowledged in the Author's Notes. Like Wilde, Purser-Hallard skewers the English aristocracy in a delightfully vicious manner, one I believe Mr. Wilde would have appreciated. (Although it's been years since I've read the great author's works - something I'm committed to rectifying in 2022 after reading this book.)
  
  But as was the case with "The Vanishing Man," the one area that DIDN'T ring true was the plot. As you know, I never go into plot details in these reviews to avoid spoilers. However, I will say that the novel's plot was once again exceptionally complicated - well beyond anything Conan Doyle wrote. It wasn't AS complicated and hard to follow as that of "The Vanishing Man," but I still found myself struggling at times to keep track of the myriad characters, their histories together, and their contributions to the overall plot.
  
  Despite this plot flaw, the book was an entertaining and enjoyable read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that Mr Purser-Hallard will write other pastiches. If he does, I definitely will read them.
• 
  Lucy

  I've had this out from the library for so long and I finally got around to it! This book is about someone who has a spider's web of blackmail and the author brings in several characters from Oscar Wilde's novels as the suspects and supporting cast (it does make me want to read/reread the novels mentioned).
  
  A man falls from the balcony of a house where various members of the gentry are having a party and none of them seem to be concerned about his death. When it comes out that blackmail is involved, Holmes really has his work cut out for him as everyone tries to cover it up, only for it to come out at random times.
  
  I really enjoyed this Sherlock Holmes' novel. The details of the plot unfolded in a very well-paced manner and I enjoyed keeping up with Watson and Holmes as they tried to figure out what was going on. I did guess the blackmailer before the end as details came out about how they were getting their money but I think that's a mark of a good mystery because it was a small but important detail, and it was obvious that Holmes knew what they were but couldn't get the proof. Having the murderer and the blackmailer be two different people made things interesting and I enjoyed how they were confronted in the end.
  
  That said, I think I missed out on something as I haven't read all of Wilde's books and the one I had read, I didn't remember enough of to really connect the characters. Maybe I'll reread this in the future but likely not.
  
  4 stars!
  
• 
  Calvin Daniels

  The first 100ish pages are the most tedious, boring, uninteresting Holmes read among a fairly extensive collection. I might rate it a 2 based on any book earning one for merely the effort of an author to pen it, and one point because Holmes book. The story was worth no additional points.
  
  Then the book picked up speed and over the final 180 pages a truly web of a crime plot was created and of course solved. The final pages a 4.
  
  But a 3 with a huge warning that the start is a slog is best overall score I can offer.
• 
  Kathy Randol

  5 STARS! FANTASTIC SH & WATSON
  
  
  I've read a couple of SH books and I never finished them. They were not by this author. Thought I would give it a try, I'm glad I did,
  This was very well written along with the characters being believed throughout the story.
  Kept me guessing who the villain was.
  I'll be reading more from this wonderful author who has an exceptional mind for storytelling.
• 
  Amy

  Great mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde!
  Very enjoyable!
• 
  Lawrence

  
  https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2020/1...
• 
  Bert Fechner

  When it comes to Sherlock Holmes adaptations and re-imaginings they fall into one of two categories, either they tell an entirely new story or they fit Sherlock Holmes into an already existing one (i.e. Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula, Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulu,etc.) and as outlandish and unbelievable as these stories can be they can also be very well done. (I'm personally a big fan of Neil Gaimans "A Study in Emerald" that has an amazing twist) This story falls into the latter category and while the story itself isn't an over the top or exaggerated one it is a pre-existing one. "What if Sherlock Holmes were in the Importance of being Earnest?" Maybe my interest would be higher if I were familiar with the original work (I've never seen nor read it, though I do know Oscar Wilde and noticed the subtle nods to The Picture of Dorian Gray and using the word "Gaol") but I just was not interested in this story and found myself struggling to push through. I found the resolution a bit unrealistic and not like Holmes at all. Having devoured everything written on Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle I wanted more and kept looking, to my delight there are actually countless adaptations, some good, some not so much. While everything I've read concerning the character post-Doyle really succeeds in tone, none have made me feel as shocked as the original stories. For me, SH is at its best when it lays everything out in front of you and you have all the pieces yet still can't make a picture of the puzzle until Holmes reveals it all in the end and you're left dumbstruck thinking to yourself "of course, it's so simple" Once you know it's actually really quite simple. Like a magic trick, and that- for me- is the magic of Sherlock Holmes.
• 
  Charles Oberonn

  Another Holmes pastiche I didn't realize was a crossover until the very end. This one to the works of Oscar Wilde, which I never read. And I probably never will read, because his characters are as depicted in this novel, they're extremely annoying (probably on purpose, but annoying still).
  
  For the novel itself, it is much longer than it needs to be. The first 4/5 of it are a chore to read through, full of padding and aimless wandering about circling around the main point of the plot. I think now it was probably to show off the Wilde characters, but like I said before, I found them annoying and not particularly interesting.
  
  After the discovery of the main scheme behind the events of the novel things pick up and get interesting, and at this point the novel is good if not great. But it goes too fast and is gone too soon to give way to an epilogue is that once again longer than it needs to be.
  
  Overall, I'd skip this one. Maybe if it was rewritten to be like a third of the length and without the meandering scenes of aristocrats arguing.
• 
  Terry Kroenung

  Interesting and well-done, for the most part, though there are bits of over-explaining bits of research the author really wanted the reader to know, pertinent or not. Very Steampunky for a Holmes imitation.
• 
  Chris

  I tried to like this, but not being a fan of “the importance of being earnest” the whole thing left me feeling flat. Abandoned at chapter 7
• 
  Bill Barrett

  I really enjoyed this book.