Laurie R. King
Bantam, © 2016
Short story (56 pages)
Ebook borrowed from library
The Marriage of Mary Russell is worth reading if you like the series; otherwise, don’t bother. All the enjoyment in this story depends on knowing the characters and understanding their relationships, since there’s no mystery and not much plot to speak of (it’s a very short story.) The best entry point to the series remains The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the entertaining and well-plotted first novel, which I heartily recommend to any Sherlock Holmes or mystery fans who have been living under a rock for the past 20 years.
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There was a time when this was my favourite series, when I waited breathlessly for the next installment, read it through several times from the library, then bought it instantly when it came out in paperback. When I was eighteen, in my first year of university, and my mother was dying, I bought the newly-released Justice Hall for myself, the first time I ever bought a book new in hardcover. For the distraction, pleasure, and comfort it offered me during the worst weeks of my life, the series will always have a place in my heart.
Somewhat ironically, it was also Justice Hall that first cooled my enthusiasm for the series, when I first noticed some of the fundamental flaws in the mystery’s plotting (not, I hasten to add, on my first or even my fifth read, such is the pleasure of King’s writing, but eventually.) As much as the books can be entertaining, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and O Jerusalem are the only ones I still love with the wholehearted enthusiasm of my pre-teen years, when my best friend and I, after devouring A Letter of Mary, taught ourselves the Greek alphabet from its chapter titles and used it to write secret messages (why yes, we are this series’s core demographic, now that you mention it.)
I was also never very enthusiastic about the romantic relationship between Russell and Holmes. Its advent in A Monstrous Regiment of Women was something I found shocking and mildly upsetting at the time, and while I came to appreciate it more in successive novels, I can’t say I was burning to know how the ceremony itself came off. As ever, I enjoyed Russell’s narration, and the mild absurdity of the events amused me, but I don’t find Holmes and Russell at their best in the short form. They’re far more entertaining with a meaty plot and a fascinating mystery to investigate, something the short form doesn’t allow. I appreciated that King kept them in character and kept the romance, such as it was, to the small, quiet gestures and the things left unsaid (not that I expected anything less from her.) The Marriage of Mary Russell won’t set the world on fire, but it’s a pleasant addition to the Russell corpus, and a nice appetizer before I dig into The Murder of Mary Russell, the latest novel in the series.
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