The Mary Russell Companion (7 page)

Veronica Beaconsfield
(“Ronnie”) is one of the few friends mentioned in the Memoirs.  The two meet on Russell’s first day at university, when she takes one look at the shy new undergraduate and drags her into Oxford’s wartime amateur dramatics (Russell being satisfyingly tall and therefore ideal for male roles, despite her long hair).  Some years later, Ronnie shows her friend a possible alternative to life in the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, when she introduces Russell to Margery Childe.

Patrick Mason
is the manager on Mary Russell’s Sussex farm, a middle-aged man who had a deep affection for Russell’s mother, Judith—and thus for the daughter.  He is often bemused by Russell’s antics, but is ever willing to lend a hand.

Characters known to the outside world

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett
was employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency (whose motto is, “We Never Sleep”) despite battling tuberculosis his entire life.  In 1924, he was in San Francisco (a very damp city, for this man with lung problems) and beginning his writing career, trying to support a wife and child by selling short stories to the early “pulp” magazine,
Black Mask
. 

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould
(
The Moor
) was a “squarson”—squire/parson—whose estate bordered Dartmoor.  He was indeed “a true and unexpected British eccentric: an academic romancer, a gullible skeptic, a man both cold and passionate” (as it says in King’s afterward to
The Moor
).   Baring-Gould lived in what he proclaimed to be an “Elizabethan manor house”, despite having designed and built the better part of it himself, in the hamlet of Lewtrenchard.  There he collected (and often blithely rewrote) folk-songs, ministered to his parishioners, and produced a steady stream of books—bodice-ripper novels; lives of the saints as thoroughly invented as his house; a natural history of were-wolves; and guides to his beloved moorland—in order to support his large family and the parish at large.  He lived in Lewtrenchard when Arthur Conan Doyle toured Dartmoor, although there is no indication that the two met.  Nor is it commonly realized that Baring-Gould was godfather to Sherlock Holmes, although his grandson, W. S. Baring-Gould, later borrowed heavily from details in Sabine’s autobiography as he composed his own imaginative biography, this one of Sherlock Holmes.

A myriad of other
important historical individuals appear throughout the Memoirs, particularly as Russell and Holmes extend their scope past the shores of the United Kingdom. 
Edmund Allenby
,
Herbert Samuel
,
T. E. Lawrence
and others show up in
O Jerusalem
, as do
Hubert Lyautey
and the brothers
Abd el Krim
in
Garment of Shadows
.  Fernando Pessoa (
Pirate King
) is, amazingly enough, not a fictional character.

Other characters prove slightly more enigmatic:
Kimball O’Hara
himself, for example, is certainly a historical personage, although whether or not he ever walked in a corporate body is a matter for debate.  So, too, with
Lord Peter Wimsey
, whose existence may be well testified to in the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, but about whom
Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage
is oddly silent.

The Memoirs: a note

Each of the twelve main volumes (and the half-volume of
Beekeeping for Beginners
) have their own page on the Laurie R. King website, with lengthy excerpts, links to videos, discussion questions, recommended reading, and various pertinent remarks.  Here, shorter excerpts are given, and Laurie’s remarks focus on some key element of each book, making no attempt at synopsis or overall evaluation.  Miss Russell firmly believes that each reader must make his or her own evaluation.

The titles are organized according to their publication date, not necessarily the date of the events they describe. 

One

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice;

With Some Notes Upon the Segregation of the Queen

(One of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association’s
100 Best Novels of the Century
)

Russellisms

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.

**

“When faced with the unthinkable,” I said shakily, “one chooses the merely impossible.”

**

I held up a pair of scarlet satin sandals with four-inch heels and tried to imagine Holmes in them.

All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir

Britain: Sussex, London, Bristol, Cardiff, Wales, Oxford

Palestine (Israel): Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Jericho, Sea of Galilee, Plains of Esdraelon, Acre

(See the
Maps chapter
for details.)

Laurie’s Remarks

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
was the first of the Russell memoirs to see light of day, in 1994.  As explained earlier (see below chapter, The Mystery of the Memoirs) it and all subsequent volumes are classified as novels, “written by” Laurie R. King, a conundrum acknowledged in the preface to the Memoir.

When we first see the two central protagonists, Sherlock Holmes is not at all sure about this young person who first steps on him, then insults him, and goes on to tell him rather more about himself than he chose to acknowledge.  (Holmes’ rather different version of their meeting is found in the short story,  “Beekeeping for Beginners.”)

Nonetheless, he decides to harness this young and voracious mind to the discipline of his trade, teaching her all he knows and watching with bemusement—and some alarm—as she grows beyond the status of student into a full-fledged partner.

Certain themes enter the Russell memoirs with this first introduction.  Beekeeping, certainly, that being what Conan Doyle has declared to be Holmes’ primary interest in his Sussex retirement.  This book plays on a mixed analogy of “queen” images: Russell’s initial scorn for the bees that permit themselves to be enslaved; Holmes’ fascination with how the social realities of the hive-box illuminate the swarms of the city (particularly the criminal swarms) in which he spent so much of his life.  Then, in the game of chess she and Holmes play against an unseen enemy, Russell the pawn is transformed into a queen. And drawing on the vocabulary of beekeeping once again, Holmes must segregate his young apprentice-turned-partner in order to solve this dangerous case.

Because
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
lays the ground for what comes after, a detailed Annotation of the opening chapters is included here.

The Annotated Beekeeper’s Apprentice

(Notes by Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie R. King)

One

Two Shabby Figures

             
The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island.
[1]

Mary Russell, nose in a book (Tamra Arnold)

I was fifteen
[2]
when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs,
[3]
and nearly stepped on him. In my defence I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.
[4]
In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes
[5]
(to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person.

Gorse bush

It was a cool, sunny day in early April, and the book was by Virgil.
[6]
I had set out at dawn from the silent farmhouse, chosen a different direction from my usual—in this case southeasterly, towards the sea—and had spent the intervening hours wrestling with Latin verbs, climbing unconsciously over stone walls, and unthinkingly circling hedge rows, and would probably not have noticed the sea until I stepped off one of the chalk cliffs
[7]
into it.