- Paperback: 292 pages
- Publisher: Foolscap & Quill (23 Dec 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0971855250
- ISBN-13: 978-0971855250
- Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 2.3 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,199,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Crack in the Lens
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Product Description
Product Description
If someone had asked Sherlock Holmes later in the year, there is little doubt that he would have said his life began that spring day in 1871 when he met Violet Rushdale upon the moors and ended in the winter some months distant. His mother would have disputed the former claim, and many, both friend and foe, would come to deny the latter. Yet what happened that year nearly cost him his life and his sanity, and strongly influenced the man he was to become. It is well known that the toughest steel that makes the sharpest swords must be plunged into the fire, then beaten and reshaped. So it is as well with the best and wisest of men.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When you open the pages of this book, you are immediately swept away by the grandeur of its literary equivalent of Cinemascope settings replete with cold winds that rush through the moors even in the dullest of sunlit days. Then brick by brick the narrative begins to build. You meet the Family Holmes including Mycroft, the parents and even the practically never mentioned third brother. Who even knew there was a third brother? Your main character of a young Sherlock Holmes has yet to harness his boyish energy until he meets the forerunner to a latter day Irene Adler. This book, The Crack In the Lens by Darlene Cypser is as plausible a portal into the legend that has become Sherlock Holmes as any before it. Slowly as you read every meticulously selected word, turn of a phrase or lush description of England back in the day reminds us with innate warmth why books will always be superior to film, television and the Internet. It is your mind's eye that translates these worlds into your own frame of reference.
Once you are sucked into the daily routine of the young Holmes, you begin to wonder briefly how this mundane life would ever transform our hero into the world's greatest consulting detective. It is when you are thoroughly lulled into complacency that the shadow of The Professor appears. Yes, that professor, James Moriarity darkens the life of the young Holmes and almost at once begins to seek to control and manipulate the boy to his own ends. Flashes of brillance in their burgeoning adversarial relationship provide the reader with a rooting interest. Yet each time Sherlock responds Moriarity raises the stakes.
But Adolescent Holmes is more preoccupied by a lass on his father's property than in jousting with the professor who continues to take evey opportunity to break the spirit of the boy. And then one day, he goes too far. A desperate Moriarity blindly led by the rage in his soul against the youth he cannot make subserviant makes a truly fatal mistake that earns him the enmity of the young Sherlock Holmes who brings his considerable skills to the battle of wills and prevails. But at what cost?
Does he achieve merely a Pyhrric victory? Will their paths ever cross again?
I shall leave that for you, dear reader to discern. I will admit to being a bit teary eyed at the ultimate ending. Not only is this book worth your time, it is worth a weekend by the fireplace, by the seashore, an airport terminal, jury duty or recovering from having your gall bladder removed. Worth your money, worth your time.
Once you are sucked into the daily routine of the young Holmes, you begin to wonder briefly how this mundane life would ever transform our hero into the world's greatest consulting detective. It is when you are thoroughly lulled into complacency that the shadow of The Professor appears. Yes, that professor, James Moriarity darkens the life of the young Holmes and almost at once begins to seek to control and manipulate the boy to his own ends. Flashes of brillance in their burgeoning adversarial relationship provide the reader with a rooting interest. Yet each time Sherlock responds Moriarity raises the stakes.
But Adolescent Holmes is more preoccupied by a lass on his father's property than in jousting with the professor who continues to take evey opportunity to break the spirit of the boy. And then one day, he goes too far. A desperate Moriarity blindly led by the rage in his soul against the youth he cannot make subserviant makes a truly fatal mistake that earns him the enmity of the young Sherlock Holmes who brings his considerable skills to the battle of wills and prevails. But at what cost?
Does he achieve merely a Pyhrric victory? Will their paths ever cross again?
I shall leave that for you, dear reader to discern. I will admit to being a bit teary eyed at the ultimate ending. Not only is this book worth your time, it is worth a weekend by the fireplace, by the seashore, an airport terminal, jury duty or recovering from having your gall bladder removed. Worth your money, worth your time.
Format:Kindle Edition
Details of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes' early life are sketchy in the novels and short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Filling in this gap with stories of what Holmes' early life might have been has turned into a small cottage industry, with books and even a movie, Barry Levinson's 1985 film "Young Sherlock Holmes". I hesitate to call this fan fiction because, unrestrained by copyright law (the Holmes stories are now in the public domain), authors of these works aren't limited to passing the stories amongst each other. Those with skill and ambition can aim for a much larger audience. With "The Crack in the Lens," we have the first of a series telling the story of Sherlock's early life as envisioned by one Holmes fan.
It has been forever since I've read any of Conan Doyle's books, but the character of Holmes is ingrained in my memory (as I think it is in many readers, at least of my generation and earlier). Spotting the glimmerings of what Holmes would become in Cypser's take on his early years was easy, although I expect more avid fans would notice even more. In this installment, Holmes falls in love for the first time and first crosses swords with Professor Moriarty. He learns a lot about human nature and how people present different aspects of themselves to different people. The last is also at the root of a mystery that Holmes attempts to unravel as he uses the just-forming logical deduction skills that will be his stock-in-trade as he grows older.
Although this book has some issues with typos and proofing (roughly one error per the equivalent of ten printed pages), I found it entertaining in spite of this. A must read for the diehard Holmes fan or anyone interested in one take on Holmes' beginnings.
**Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
It has been forever since I've read any of Conan Doyle's books, but the character of Holmes is ingrained in my memory (as I think it is in many readers, at least of my generation and earlier). Spotting the glimmerings of what Holmes would become in Cypser's take on his early years was easy, although I expect more avid fans would notice even more. In this installment, Holmes falls in love for the first time and first crosses swords with Professor Moriarty. He learns a lot about human nature and how people present different aspects of themselves to different people. The last is also at the root of a mystery that Holmes attempts to unravel as he uses the just-forming logical deduction skills that will be his stock-in-trade as he grows older.
Although this book has some issues with typos and proofing (roughly one error per the equivalent of ten printed pages), I found it entertaining in spite of this. A must read for the diehard Holmes fan or anyone interested in one take on Holmes' beginnings.
**Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
Format:Paperback
Darlene Cypser has pulled off an amazing conjuring trick with The Crack in the Lens, writing an original Sherlock Holmes story that is in no way a Sherlock Holmes story and that owes more to Emily Brontė than Arthur Conan Doyle.
Cypser's novel introduces us to 17-year-old Sherlock, happy to have returned to his Yorkshire home. He is the youngest son of the forbidding squire, Siger Holmes, with older brothers Mycroft and Sherrinford. His father considered him a delicate child who suffered from pneumonia growing up and has little faith in the young man he is about to be. Siger Holmes hopes his son will enter university and train to be an engineer, a suitable profession for a youngest son who would not inherit the family estate. And to that end Siger Holmes has engaged a professor of mathematics who will tutor -- and torture -- the boy.
But at first young Sherlock is simply happy to be home and free to roam the moors. Of course it's on the moors that he meets Violet Rushdale, daughter of one of his father's tenant farmers. It's a star-crossed match: the squire's son and the daughter of a tenant who's fallen to drink and is behind in the rent after the death of his wife. And of course being star crossed, the attraction is irresistable and one day after Sherlock and Violet slip and fall in freezing water and seek shelter in a prehistoric hut and ... well, as I said, The Crack in the Lens is more Brontė than Doyle and young Sherlock is not the misogynist of Watson's years.
One of the most amazing parts of Cypser's conjuring trick is that it's so simple. Boy meets girl, boy is denied girl through the machinations of his tutor, girl denies boy thinking it best for him and ultimately boy loses girl, which I don't think is a spoiler because every woman reader who has ever felt for him knows he had a tragic past. If I can offer any criticism, it's that Sherlock must prove himself impossibly obtuse when confronted by Violet's denial. It's like those times Watson is confronted by Holmes in disguise and you can't believe the good doctor can be so easily fooled. But the misapprehension is important to the story and after all, young Sherlock is only seventeen, not wise in matters of love and also suffering under the slanders his tutor has laid before Siger Holmes.
Cypser's restraint is also admirable in not making too many winking nods to Sherlock's future as the great detective, with few in jokes I noticed other than a plausible relation to another great Doyle creation and many foreshadowings to Holmes' skill at boxing and fencing and his affinity with the working classes and children. I'm sure there are other Holmesian nods that Cypser has added that I have missed in my Watsonian clumsiness, but I think they are subtle.
Cypser has also created one of the great sick bed scenes of all times, rivaling anything from Austen, Brontė or Dumas and her forging of the detective Holmes from the crucible of young Sherlock's despair makes The Crack in the Lens has made a lasting impression on me.
Cypser's novel introduces us to 17-year-old Sherlock, happy to have returned to his Yorkshire home. He is the youngest son of the forbidding squire, Siger Holmes, with older brothers Mycroft and Sherrinford. His father considered him a delicate child who suffered from pneumonia growing up and has little faith in the young man he is about to be. Siger Holmes hopes his son will enter university and train to be an engineer, a suitable profession for a youngest son who would not inherit the family estate. And to that end Siger Holmes has engaged a professor of mathematics who will tutor -- and torture -- the boy.
But at first young Sherlock is simply happy to be home and free to roam the moors. Of course it's on the moors that he meets Violet Rushdale, daughter of one of his father's tenant farmers. It's a star-crossed match: the squire's son and the daughter of a tenant who's fallen to drink and is behind in the rent after the death of his wife. And of course being star crossed, the attraction is irresistable and one day after Sherlock and Violet slip and fall in freezing water and seek shelter in a prehistoric hut and ... well, as I said, The Crack in the Lens is more Brontė than Doyle and young Sherlock is not the misogynist of Watson's years.
One of the most amazing parts of Cypser's conjuring trick is that it's so simple. Boy meets girl, boy is denied girl through the machinations of his tutor, girl denies boy thinking it best for him and ultimately boy loses girl, which I don't think is a spoiler because every woman reader who has ever felt for him knows he had a tragic past. If I can offer any criticism, it's that Sherlock must prove himself impossibly obtuse when confronted by Violet's denial. It's like those times Watson is confronted by Holmes in disguise and you can't believe the good doctor can be so easily fooled. But the misapprehension is important to the story and after all, young Sherlock is only seventeen, not wise in matters of love and also suffering under the slanders his tutor has laid before Siger Holmes.
Cypser's restraint is also admirable in not making too many winking nods to Sherlock's future as the great detective, with few in jokes I noticed other than a plausible relation to another great Doyle creation and many foreshadowings to Holmes' skill at boxing and fencing and his affinity with the working classes and children. I'm sure there are other Holmesian nods that Cypser has added that I have missed in my Watsonian clumsiness, but I think they are subtle.
Cypser has also created one of the great sick bed scenes of all times, rivaling anything from Austen, Brontė or Dumas and her forging of the detective Holmes from the crucible of young Sherlock's despair makes The Crack in the Lens has made a lasting impression on me.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
First in a new series on Sherlockgrowing to adulthood
This book is the first of a series of novels which Ms. Cypser is planning to describe Sherlock's life through University and his early career as a detective. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Philip K. Jones
Unconvincing and dull romance (**Contains spoilers**)
I wanted so much to like this because even though Cypser's ideas about young Holmes differ wildly from mine (especially since many of her ideas are based on Baring-Gould's; I'm... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Sebastian Moran
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