Short Story Wednesday: "A Scandal in Brooklyn" by Lauren Wilkinson

 

The description of this story at Goodreads starts out with...

"A classic Holmesian detective untangles a locked-room mystery with a very modern twist in this venomously diverting short story by Lauren Wilkinson, the Washington Post bestselling author of American Spy."

But to be honest, I really did not connect the story to a Holmes pastiche until I was at least halfway through reading it. That might be because I haven't read that much fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I have read very few pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The title of the story and a super-intelligent protagonist named "Irene Adler" does point in that direction. There are other connections. Bees figure into the story. There is a character named Shinwell Johnson (which I only remembered from the TV series Elementary).

The setup:

Irene Adler requests that Tommy Diaz, the narrator of the story, meet her and her friend Priya, whose husband has been missing for four days. The husband works for a large multinational tech corporation and had been part of a secret project before his disappearance. Due to Irene's connections with the owner of the corporation (the owner is her husband and they are negotiating a divorce), Irene, Priya, Tommy are able to gain admission to the warehouse where the project is taking place. Almost immediately after they arrive, Priya's husband is found dead in a room set up to look like a clearing the woods.

My Thoughts:

• I think if this had not been a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, I would have dismissed it as too long (46 pages), too many characters that I could not keep track of, and no real depth to the plot. On the other hand, it was not boring, the solution to the puzzle was clever, and clues were supplied; but it was all solved too quickly at the end. 
• The reader is just dropped into the story; the back story of the main characters was too sparse. More information on how Tony and Irene met or previously worked together might have smoothed the way for me. I can see that a series of these stories which each included a little more background or development of the main characters could work well but this story by itself was lacking.
• The story is full of technology and AI references; I think it's possible that younger readers would enjoy this story more than I did (although I usually enjoy stories with AI characters).  
• I really need to read more Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and some pastiches in short story form.

This short story was published in 2022 by Amazon Original Stories. I read the story because I was familiar with the author, Lauren Wilkinson, and I enjoyed her espionage thriller, American Spy, in 2019. In addition to being a spy fiction story, it is an exploration of family dynamics and influences, and how the past shapes us.