★★★★★ The perfect palate cleansers

The Enola Holmes Mysteries

Nancy Springer

The Enola Holmes Mysteries reproduces the six short Enola Holmes mystery novels published by Nancy Springer between 2006 and 2010. They recount one year in the life of Enola Holmes, younger sister of famous detective Sherlock Holmes, from her fourteenth to her fifteenth birthday. Most of the story takes place in London, and for most of the year Enola is in hiding, so as not to be put in a finishing school by her brothers Sherlock and Mycroft. Enola sets herself up in business as a "Scientific Perditorian" -- one who finds lost persons and things. The six mysteries (which I have reviewed separately) mostly concern missing persons.

And they are tremendous fun! On finishing the last, I had that all-too-rare feeling of sorrow at finishing a good book and knowing that I would never again be able to read it for the first time. I have been using them as palate cleansers between heavier works. Robert Galbraith's (AKA J.K. Rowling's) The Running Grave and Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities Trilogy are very good books, but they are long and serious works that leave a reader (or me, at least) tired -- in need of refreshment. An Enola Holmes mystery is the perfect dessert.

If you are expecting novels in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, don't. Conan Doyle, a Victorian writing for his fellow Victorians, doesn't remark on things that are unremarkable to him. To Springer, a 21st-century American writer writing for the 21st century, there is much in Victorian London worthy of remark. To me the Enola Holmes novels feel Dickensian, although with more of a feminine perspective than Dickens. As mysteries they are somewhat lacking, since Enola often solves her mysteries by a combination of code-breaking and improbable coincidence. Although they are Young Adult novels, there is no romance whatsoever. (Being one whose intellectual development arrested at the age of seven, I still eschew the mushy stuff, so the absence of sticky YA romance was a recommendation.)

It will be very clear when you read book 6, The Case of the Disappearing Duchess, that it is intended as an conclusion to the series. However, an Enola Holmes movie (which I have not seen) was released in 2020, and since then a new Enola Holmes short story, Enola Holmes and the Boy in Buttons, and three new novels have appeared, as well as a second movie. I certainly intend to read the new story and novels.

Some reviewers undervalue pure fun. I am not one of them. Hence my five-star rating of the series.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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