The game is afoot for Sherlock’s little sister

The remarkable powers of observation honed by Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, stirred my imagination way back when I was in eighth grade. I did my best to deduce people’s occupations, travels, or backgrounds from the scuff of their shoes to the ink stains on their fingertips to the way they shaved their beards. I never could duplicate the ingenious results of S.H.—perhaps because very few eighth-graders had beards to shave.

Fifty years later, I still reread all fifty-six short stories and four novels that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the iconic detective. My powers of observation and deduction still are missing, but I’ve come to admire Conan Doyle’s skills as an author as much as I admire his fictional detective’s skills of deductive reasoning.

I also have read many works by other authors related to the Holmesian universe, which is how I came to check out two of Nancy Springer’s middle grade novels about Enola Holmes, the 14-year-old strong-willed, free-spirited sister of Sherlock Holmes—The Case of the Left-Handed Lady and The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline.

Most authors writing Sherlock Holmes stories lack the ability to capture Conan Doyle’s writing style, plotting and pacing. Instead of trying to do so, Springer creates a younger sister, Enola, and lets Enola narrate her own adventures. The voice is her own.

While Enola idolizes her brother and shares many of his mental abilities, her powers are less developed. She’s 14 and still learning—and we, the readers, learn with her.

She’s also on the run from her brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft, the eldest sibling. Being a female—and a mere girl at that—of the genteel class in Victorian London of the 1880s, she’s presumed to be inferior to men in every way. The brothers—Mycroft, especially—believe Enola needs to be tamed and molded into a proper lady fit to decorate the home a titled husband with her charm, grace, and beauty. Men make all the decision and have the freedom to go where they please. Women must stay home where they belong.

Not Enola. Under a series of disguises, she establishes her own agency to find lost people or possessions, creates a fictional male boss Dr. Ragostin (who’s always away), and successfully conducts her own investigations.

In the Left-Handed Lady, not only does Enola track down the teenage Lady Cecily, presumed to have run away but in reality was kidnapped, she foils a deadly plot for anarchy and murder. In the Cryptic Crinoline, Enola deciphers a complicated and unusual code to save the Britain’s government from illicit influence and manipulation.

She also has to outwit her famous brother (who actually is proud of his little sister’s accomplishments even if he disapproves) to keep her freedom.

These stories are fun, inventive and kept my attention. I see the similarities to Sherlock, and Enola’s development of her skills, much like Sherlock would have had to do when he was 14.

What got in the way for me, especially in The Case of the Left-Handed Lady, was the emphasis on social justice. I picked up this book because I wanted to get lost in the streets of Sherlockian London with a riveting story of crime solved by deductive reasoning. I wanted escapism, not preaching.

However, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the original Sherlock Holmes stories more than a hundred years ago, they were considered lurid. The criminals in the Holmes stories came from the upper classes. The lower classes—the common people, the poor, the common laborers—often were painted as possessing greater moral character than their “betters.” So actually, the Enola Holmes stories mixing women’s rights and workers’ rights is in keeping with the spirit of the her big brother’s stories.

I did come across one “bad word,” and the stories are not “religious,” but I believe I’m going to pull a couple more Enola Holmes novels off the shelves next time I visit the library. And I’m also itching to reread Conan Doyle’s original stories.