the angel of the crows by katherine addison

On one level, as a Sherlock Holmes fan since childhood, I enjoyed this book immensely. Along the way, Crow becomes obsessed with the murderer whom the press christens Jack the Ripper.

Over the next few months they deal with a panoply of cases which bear a distinct resemblance to some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest Sherlock Holmes hits, ranging from The Hound of the Baskervilles to “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” Mary Morstan is a trained, licensed clairvoyant Moriarty is a vampire. Cashiered, permanently injured, perilously close to broke, Doyle jumps at the chance to take lodgings with a tolerant flatmate, in this case an angel called Crow. Doyle is discharged from the Imperial Armed Forces after being injured by one of the Fallen in Afghanistan.

The novel is The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison, and it’s a very alternate take on Sherlock (which was itself of course a very particular take on Sherlock Holmes): it reverses Moffat and Gattis’s contemporary twist by setting itself in the Victorian era Sherlock is an angel (yes, really), Watson is a hellhound, and both of them are evidently genderqueer.īut I’m still getting ahead of myself. Professional novelists-Hugo Award nominees, even!-are publishing their Sherlock wingfic and admitting it in print. The Archive of Our Own won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work the previous year and chaos reigns.

The angel of the crows by katherine addison