Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale is a weird book. A romance drama about a time traveler falling in love with Sherlock Holmes, which starts to pick up more high-stakes and adventure elements in the second half... it's a lot of things at once. And all those things are okay, but it left me with one question: why was this published as a Faction Paradox book? Looking at its history, it was originally written as a standalone with no connection to Doctor Who in any capacity, and the Faction Paradox version is a later rewrite. It was then published again as a standalone with the Factiony elements removed, and the fact that it's been published three times with the Faction Paradox version sandwiched awkwardly in the middle is perhaps a testament to how well it fits into this franchise in general.
That's where my disconnect with this book lies. Not to do with it being good or bad – though it's certainly not without its flaws – but in the fact that it makes no attempt to have a thematic, worldbuilding, or genre connection with the rest of the book series it's been published in. Warlords of Utopia was a mess, but it felt like a Faction book purely in how it went for the grand-scale scifi. This Town Will Never Let Us Go was small-scale and contained, but it felt like a Faction book because its themes, of ritual and the power of ideas and cultural stagnation, matched up perfectly with the themes of Faction Paradox lore. This? Well, the villain is backed by the Celestis, something that's mentioned on a single page, and he's generally kind of occult-ish and wants to fuck up the timeline for whatever reason, but that's about where the interesting time travel aspects end. You could easily give the villain another motivation and say the main character was just a visitor from a faraway country who had somehow heard of Holmes, and the actual plot wouldn't have to be changed that much. And sure, the plot did at least become more grand-stakes and tense in the last third or so, and included scraps of horror, occult, and scifi here and there, but frankly I'd been so worn down by the sex scenes and romance drama that I kind of neglected to care. So when I give this book a low-to-middling score, it's less to do with its quality and more how I simply couldn't connect with it personally. It's not what I came to this series for. More than annoyed, it just left me confused – never before has the Mad Norwegian Press line of Faction Paradox books felt as much like a hodgepodge of random vaguely scifi-ish books as it does with this installment.
As much as I claim it's simply not to my taste, there's a few bits worth mentioning that did genuinely bother me. The prose is fine but occasionally makes bizarre comparisons or word choices that totally take you out of it, and the dialogue has its strange moments as well. The main character needs a lot more personality definition than she has, and the on-again-off-again pattern of her relationship with Sherlock feels quite repetitive and lacking in depth. Sherlock Holmes himself never really has a proper character arc to make him more likeable, so much as the book just stops giving him as many classist, racist, and generally rude comments to make as the plot moves along. (And on the note of racism, let's not get too much into the topic of "China Crow", a character who's portrayed as a scummy, leery, very Asian-looking guy. He has epicanthic folds, guys, he must be evil!!) Oh, and, Kelly Hale has a weird fascination with sexual assault and also homosexuality, and neither topic is quite handled with the finesse it demands.
But like, aside from the genuinely problematic elements, and the fact that I personally found some aspects of it underbaked, it's largely a perfectly competent novel. I'm sure this is a great book if you're generally a fan of Sherlock Holmes and/or women's romance drama novels. Or just if you're Kelly Hale. And after all, lots of people on Goodreads seem to like it, and a screenplay version almost won an international awards contest, so who am I to judge? It's just not to my taste, and that's fine. I'm sure for some people, this is a deeply engrossing and exciting tale. Just don't talk to me about China Crow. Or that one brief scene near the start where Sherlock gets way too into visualizing a p-do/necrophile's actions. Or any time I had to read about Sherlock Holmes's thickening member and musky armpits and how "manfully" he does things and so on.
Is this just what happens when you let Americans write for Doctor Who???
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