The Moor

Whenever I read books in a series, I have a simple policy: if the first book does not grab me, then there's no reason to continue reading the rest of it. But if the first book does grab me, I make an effort to read everything after it. This is especially true for series with more than three books; in general, I've noticed that such long series have high points and low points, and if I can come to the end of the series with a feeling of having encountered more highs than lows, I will gladly wait for the next installment. If not, I may decide to simply give up reading it for good.

In the case of the Mary Russell series, I enjoyed the first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, enough that I dove straight into the second one. However, A Monstrous Regiment of Women proved to be a severe disappointment, enough that I was almost reluctant to read A Letter of Mary, which was the third installment in the series. Nevertheless, keeping true to my policy, I read through it, and found it better than its predecessor, though not quite as good as the first. It was still enough, though, to restore some of my faith in this series, and so I picked up The Moor, the fourth book.

At first, the title brought to mind (in my case, anyway) visions of exotic, distant lands - mostly because I was thinking of the word “moor” with a capital, as in “Moor.” I had visions of Russell and Holmes going out of England and encountering mystery and adventure in Egypt, perhaps, or Morocco, or even in Spain, since the south of that country was an important center for Moorish culture before the Reconquista. I was, however, mistaken: the “Moor” in the title should have been read without capitals, thus referring to the cold, lonely wastes deep in the heart of England - exotic, to be sure, albeit significantly colder.

But this did not disappoint me - far from it, it rather excited me, because the word “moor” is crucial to the place-name of “Dartmoor,” and Dartmoor is the setting of what might arguably be called the most famous Holmes story: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The story begins with Russell working away on a paper at Oxford, determinedly ignoring (at first) Holmes's demands that she go to Dartmoor. A few insistent telegraphs later, Russell decides that she's had enough, throws what she can into a bag, and travels on out to meet her husband. Once there they take up residence at Lew Trenchard Manor, where Holmes has been invited by his old friend Sabine Baring-Gould to work out the mystery behind the reappearance of the Hound of the Baskervilles - or rather, something very much like it. As in The Hound of the Baskervilles, things are never as simple as they seem, and what starts out as a favor to an old friend turns into something far different, with more to do with earthly crimes than supernatural curses.

It could be that I am biased towards the more “active” of the Holmes stories, but I enjoyed this more than A Letter of Mary, and significantly more than A Monstrous Regiment of Women. While frequent walks through the moors in all weather conditions might not be as exciting as, say, chasing fugitives down the Thames in a boat (as in The Sign of Four), or even dodging potential bomb threats (as was the case in The Beekeeper's Apprentice), those meanderings through the moors, and, in particular, the people Russell encounters, are incredibly interesting to me. Some might consider all this rambling and talks of hot baths and sucking mud and moor songs entirely uninteresting, but I find them incredibly fascinating, very much in the same way Baring-Gould himself might have found them fascinating.

I will admit, however, that the descriptions do slow the pace down a bit. I refer in particular to Russell's first attempt to go across the moor on a horse, gathering information as she goes. While gathering information is indeed crucial to the solution of any mystery, and though I did enjoy the way Russell described the places and people she encountered along the way, I did think the story got bogged down in that portion. Something more exciting could have happened, and though I will not complain overmuch, I do think it could have been improved a little, just to make the plot go a bit more quickly.

Unlike with the last two novels, I do not have any particular complaints about the perpetrators and their motives for this novel, despite the presence of a red herring. But in this instance, the red herring was not as central as the one in A Letter of Mary, and hence did not interfere overmuch with my enjoyment of the story. This time around, concluding the tale, and reaching that conclusion, were not as disappointing as in the last two novels.

Despite the rather slow pace of this book, it actually approaches, in terms to my enjoyment of it, the first of the series. It's not quite as good as the first, but it does go some way towards fixing the disappointment left by the second and third books in the series. Once more I can look to the next in the series with anticipation, and hopefully, it will be closer to the first than this one was - or, dare I hope, even better.