The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr

One of the more spectacular episodes in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots was the murder of her Italian “secretary,” David Rizzio, (who more was a musician and companion) by a group of nobles, led by Lord Darnley. They burst in on Mary and Rizzio, dragged out Rizzio, and stabbed him to death (stabbing him over fifty times). Darnley himself was later killed in mysterious fashion. If you tour Holyroodhouse, the royal residence in Edinburgh, and site of Rizzio’s murder, the tour guides will tell you all about it.

This grisly historical incident forms the background to Caleb Carr’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The Italian Secretary. Two men are killed at Holyroodhouse, stabbed over fifty times. Mycroft Holmes, working for the Queen, calls in Sherlock and Doctor Watson to look into the case. Holmes and Watson travel to Edinburgh to sort through what at first appears to be political intrigue but which they soon discover has a much tawdrier source.

The novel has a number of good moments. Carr does a credible job with the characters of Holmes and Watson, who are believable and interesting in his hands. The setting is well done – one gets a feel for the gloom of the western tower of Holyroodhouse as it must have been more than a century ago, before it became quite the tourist destination that it is today. He also does a good job of painting the historical background, such that it hangs over all the actions in the novel.

The story itself is interesting enough, with several misdirections and a number of tense moments. Holmes’s methodology is interesting, as always, and the mystery is enough to sustain the story most of the way, though by about two-thirds of the way through, it’s pretty apparent how it’s all going to end. So, in the end, it remains an enjoyable enough novel, but one that also feels like it is less than it ought to be. The paperback is 320 pages long, and the story really doesn’t merit that. It would probably have packed more punch as a 125-page short novel, but unfortunately there really isn’t a market for that sort of thing these days, so, even hard Carr wanted to keep it to that length, he probably couldn’t have.

The last few pages – where Watson seems to see a ghost – also seem a bit out of place (and don’t really fit the feel of a Sherlock Holmes story, despite Arthur Conan Doyle’s personal obsession with spiritualism later in his life). Moreover, the story is over at this point, and this is just a coda of sorts. It could also have been better left out.

It’s worth reading if you have a few hours to spare and you’re a Holmes fan, though there are better recent Holmes novels.