Sherlock Holmes is a Queer Black Woman

Claire O'Dell, A Study in Honor

Doctor Janet Watson lost her arm and her dignity fighting the regressivist rebels in the Second Civil War. She came to Washington, D.C., to fight for a reliable cybernetic replacement from a cash-strapped and preternaturally risk-averse Veteran's Administration. But the fight is long and expensive. So while she arm-wrestles the government, she takes a flat-sharing arrangement with the strange and enigmatic Sara Holmes.

Claire O'Dell has written several previous novels and short stories which foreground LGBTQIA+ characters, especially women. Some have won prestigious awards, and been included on year end Best-Of lists. But with this novel, she proposes something apparently new in her C.V.: updating one of genre fiction's most beloved characters in a way that moves her protagonist between eras, genders, and genres, all at once.

This novel breaks neatly into two sections. In the first, O’Dell recreates the early chapters of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, where Watson meets Holmes and unpacks his personality. O’Dell makes appropriate changes, since her viewpoint character is American, Black, a woman, and same-sex attracted. It’s also colored by her near-future dystopian setting, where bigoted rebels in America’s heartland have rebelled violently against the government, and the war drags on interminably.

Besides scene-setting, O’Dell’s purpose in these early chapters is clearly political. Just as the crumbling British Empire provides background noise for Conan Doyle’s novels, the American house divided becomes the constant context for Janet Watson’s unfolding adventures. O’Dell couches this in real-world political events: the optimism Black women like Watson felt after the 2008 presidential election, and the inevitable descent into disappointment in 2016.

The second half is where O’Dell’s story really starts cooking. To mark time while the VA dithers on providing a better cybernetic arm so she can restart her surgical career, Watson takes a job beneath her credentials at a D.C. veterans’ hospital. Working below the level doctors ordinarily see, she uncovers a pattern of soldiers returning from the front plagued with symptoms beyond ordinary PTSD. Watson takes a particular liking to one damaged soldier.

Experienced readers know, the more confidently a genre protagonist likes an incidental character, the more certainly that character will die. The traumatized, over-medicated veteran Watson makes her special project, literally keels over one morning. Strangely, all of the veteran’s lab results, medical screenings, and documentation go missing from the archives. It’s like somebody wants the veterans to go away.

Claire O'Dell

Then a stranger attacks Watson on an empty Georgetown street.

Her curiosity piqued, Sara Holmes brings her considerable influence as a shadowy government agent into Watson’s case. That proves a mixed blessing. Holmes is smart, endearing, and sometimes charismatic; she also proves to be abusive, manipulative, and often dishonest. But this mix of virtues and vices proves her magic qualification to infiltrate a conspiracy so shadowy, even Holmes can only intuit its presence by the damage it causes.

This blend of near-future dystopian science fiction, with one of literature’s most classic detectives, gives a spin on political thrillers appropriate to today’s reading audience. As a Black, queer woman, Watson has a quintessential outsider’s perspective on circumstances of power. As a veteran herself, she knows the divide between those who start wars, and those who fight them. As a doctor, she can diagnose the destruction left behind.

If you’re anything like most people, you clearly see the widening gulf between government and governed, even when the government speaks the language of everyman. This has given rise to multiple conspiracy theories lately, everything from Q-ANON to flat-earthism to, well, whatever came dribbling from the President’s twitter account today. We’re surrounded constantly by aggressive distrust between the people, and those who speak for the people.

Janet Watson understands this distrust. She simultaneously depends on the government, as her employer and the bestower of VA benefits, and sees the ways murky bureaucracy devalues human life. When that bureaucracy turns violently against her, she has only one ally, Holmes—who, despite her vocal protests of loyalty and truth, is herself an admitted government agent. Watson must choose, repeatedly, between the devil she knows and the devil she doesn’t.

Authors wanting to update Holmes and Watson aren’t new. At times, O’Dell’s narrative suggests direct influence from Moffat and Gatiss, among others. Yet despite this common currency, O’Dell’s version remains worth reading, not because we know and love the characters, but because, like all the best literature, it’s ultimately about us. We live in dystopian, post-apocalyptic times. We don’t have cybernetic arms yet. But we need someone like Sara Holmes.