Summer may not be officially over yet, but September has begun! Which means we are in the ‘Ber months, a shorthand I first saw on the internet for September, October, November and December. Also known as my very favorite stretch of the year. Fall is my very favorite season, Halloween and Christmas are my very favorite holidays, with Thanksgiving also being high on the list. There’s just so much to love about this time of year. (And just for me personally, my birthday is in November. I’m a fall girl through and through, right from the beginning.)
Sherlock Holmes has a sister. I bet you didn’t know that. Well, at least he does in the imagination of the author Nancy Springer. In the tradition of the great feminist retellings — Wide Sargasso Sea, Circe, even Wicked — Springer imagines what it would be like for the famous and esteemed detective to have a little sister, forever in his shadow. Springer also imagines what kind of mother would have given birth to the Sherlock Holmes many of us know and love. Women are not the focus of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original series and its’ film and TV adaptations. There are a couple of exceptions to that, chief among them being Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” But, by and large, they are kept in the background. In the young adult series Enola Holmes Mysteries, Nancy Springer answers the question, ‘what if the intellect and observational skills of Sherlock Holmes were attributed to a young woman instead?’ What if a young woman got to go on adventures, skirt danger, solve mysteries, and save the day?
If you’re like me, and you’re like the psychologist heroine of the Frieda Klein Series by Nicci French, you enjoy the cozy things in life. Described as setting up her home in a warren-like fashion, the sleuthing mental health practitioner loves her warm, closed-off rooms. Heat trapped in their confines. When the weather turns even colder, and I turn to British mysteries, I’m reminded of her. Although this post is not about the husband and wife team who write under the pseudonym Nicci French, I would definitely recommend their series about the unlikely but brilliant, pseudo-detective heroine. It’s good writing, with lots of twists and turns. Check out this link here for the first in the series. It would make a great TV adaptation but none so far. Speaking of which, my latest mystery watches have taken a turn for the Scottish. Starting with an excellent series about a young, brash detective solving all the crimes and breaking all the rules to do it. Instead of a young man or grizzled veteran of the force, however, it’s a young, blonde woman named Karen. Subverting the classic, renegade, macho cop stereotype, she’s not only in her twenties but making big moves in the Police Service of Scotland too. Her meal ticket is cold cases. Or, as she says in season two, the police prefer to call them “historic cases.” Much more hopeful. And she does it all with her trusty fanny pack by her side, or “bum bag,” as the Scots would say. Karen’s adventures are based on a series of books by Val McDermid. From my research, it appears there are significant differences between the novels and the TV adaptation. The first time Karen Pirie shows up is in a book called The Distant Echo, but she’s not the protagonist, she strides determinedly in at the end of it. It’s as if the character was so determined to become the heroine of her own story, the author had no choice but to comply.
