At the top of the card within the plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored – blank.
Henry James knew immediately the more general meaning of what the hearts signified. He had no clue as to what the empty heart or the single line of print below the letters – a single sentence that looked to have been added by a typewriting machine – might mean.She was murdered.
What a great premise Dan Simmons devised for The Fifth Heart: Pairing up the unlikely duo of Henry James and Sherlock Holmes, the two travel to America, after a chance meeting in Paris, in order to solve a mystery; and after leisurely hobnobbing for a few weeks with the elite in Washington D.C., the action moves to a propulsive conclusion at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The premise is amazing – and Simmons makes wonderful use of his setting and characters to provide both a compelling detective story and an in-depth exploration of the time and place – but there was something kind of off in this overall experience for me. Simmons dangles some metaphysical questions that are never properly resolved to my satisfaction, and he does quite a bit of ironic breaking of the fourth wall by the book's narrator that, if it has a point, went over my head. Overall though, despite feeling a bit too long (six hundred pages is a lot for a Holmesian whodunit), this was consistently entertaining and very often funny.
In the rainy March of 1893, for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story), the London-based American author Henry James decided to spend his April 15 birthday in Paris and there, on or before his birthday, commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine at night.So the book opens, and just as Henry James is about to fling himself into the Seine, he notices another man in the shadows – a form he recognises as the great Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes – and although James attempts to slink away quietly, Holmes catches him up, confessing that self-murder had been on his own mind. It would seem that Holmes had recently come to the conclusion that he must be a fictional character (that blasted Dr. Watson and his narrative inconsistencies), but running into Henry James – who happens to be a very good friend of all of the principles in Holmes' only open case – prompts the detective to book a crossing to America and insist that the writer accompany him. And despite blustery protest and an insistence on distaste for Holmes and his line of work, James accompanies Holmes to America, participating in the detective's deceitful cover story in introducing him to his own oldest and dearest friends. Read as a straight Sherlock Holmes mystery, there is a satisfying amount of Meerschaum pipes, deerstalker caps, and a crying out of, “The game is afoot!”
But it's not by whim that Simmons sets this Sherlock Holmes mystery in the United States – the author uses the setting to make a lot of unflattering commentary on his home country. The Washington elite who host James and Holmes throw dinner parties at which the conversation features chauvinism, antisemitism, and white supremacy (particularly skewering the image of a young Theodore Roosevelt). Even Sherlock Holmes himself exposes the menace of mass German immigration to America as they were known to harbour socialist beliefs and embraced anarchic methods. Actual (and fictional) characters abound in these pages, and I wondered at the treatment that Simmons gave to everyone from Clover Adams (whose actual suicide in 1885 is reframed as a homicide case for Holmes here; the she was murdered of the calling card seems pretty tasteless in light of her actual existence) to Mark Twain (who is shown both lamenting his weakness in giving Huckleberry Finn a happy ending and casually using the “n-word”). The streets of America are filled with lowerclass white thugs, corrupt policemen, or sometimes, despite a narrator who professes to despise the coincidences in H. Ryder Haggard-type adventure tales, one might encounter old friends or allies who arrive in the nick of time to rescue one from a spot of trouble.
Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”And as for the narrator: I didn't get this intermittent breaking of the fourth wall (from his first explanation that he doesn't like it, either, when POV shifts between two characters, to beginning the epilogue with, “Henry James hated epilogues...I feel much the same way – as you may also – but this one is here and we have to deal with it”). If it was meant to be clever or significant, I didn't get it. Also, this narrative is broken into four parts, and in a way, it seems like each part is being told by a different narrator. Maybe the first and fourth were meant to be by the same person – these parts are separated into chapters which are simply numbered – but the second part has chapters which are numbered and then titled with a phrase from the chapter that follows, and the third part has chapters that are numbered and then titled with the chapter's date and time. And what is a little weird is that small details can be revealed in each part that repeat something revealed earlier, but stated as though we are learning it for the first time (it's always small and inconsequential things, but done often enough to make me think I'm meant to notice). And in the third part, the narrative is filled with errors: I first noticed a spelling mistake (which I didn't mark because, whatever, it happens), and then I noticed that, curiously (and again, I didn't mark the specifics, but it was something like this), a word was written like “heavy-handed” in one line of dialogue and then repeated back immediately as “heavyhanded”. Small things, but weird. But then Sherlock Holmes – whom we are told a couple of times earlier likes to punctuate his dramatic statements by flipping his black scarf over his shoulder – now throws his red scarf over his shoulder, and later someone mentions the assassination attempt that was made on Queen Elizabeth in 1888. I reckon these mistakes were put in to flag that this is obviously a different (inferior?) writer from the other parts, but for what purpose, I can't fathom.
As for the writing, it was sometimes funny:
There were only the three of them in the canvas-walled blacksmith shop – Holmes, the tall man with the big knife, and the tall man's body odor. Holmes stayed silent, the man with the knife stared at him without speaking, and the stench spoke for itself.And sometimes it revealed Simmons' need for commentary:
“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”And what was the most disappointing is that the metaphysical thread – Sherlock Holmes trying to discover whether or not he actually exists – didn't resolve to my satisfaction. I liked the part where Mark Twain explains to Holmes what Henry James' older brother, William, wrote about identity and consciousness and the difference between “I” and “me” – and I further admired Simmons' decision to put Henry and Sherlock together as they both, as successful as they were, lived under the shadows of their older brothers, William and Mycroft – and I wanted more of that.
I don't think that The Fifth Heart needed to be six hundred pages, but despite what may read as a long list of complaints here, I did enjoy the mystery and respect the amount of research Simmons must have engaged in – not only to bring to life nineteenth century America, but to believably bring to life both Sherlock Holmes and Henry James. And it's not like I don't have the time right now for long books...
