When you get a free e-book online, you take your chances. Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. Sometimes a dog follows you home.
Honest John Churchfield by Michael Dell has fur and a wet nose.
“Honest” John is a former London bobby who now operates as a private investigator, keeping a sort of an office in the back booth of a pub. He’s jealous of the famous Sherlock Holmes, but doesn’t work very hard to compete with him. Hunting up business would eat into his valuable drinking and woman-chasing time. He’s big and strong and smart, but essentially a slob.
The book Honest John Churchfield is a collection of seven short stories about his cases. The tone is generally light.
Reading the first story, I thought the author had done some research (though not enough) into life in Victorian London. As I read the further stories I realized that, just as the hero doesn’t work very hard at his trade, the author didn’t work very hard at historical recreation. He knows enough to call cookies “biscuits,” but uses “vacation” where the English would say “holiday,” and has characters call men “guys,” which is an idiom that existed in England but wasn’t as common as it is in American speech. And (21st Century) American speech is what most of the dialogue sounds like. He also doesn’t know how to spell “Hampshire” or “Devon.”
There are many narrative peculiarities. A character in East Indian dress wears “a turban big enough to crack a walnut.” (What does that even mean?) “A disturbingly somber pall descended upon the Rasby household.” (As opposed to a cheerful pall, I guess.)
The puzzles themselves weren’t bad, I thought – except for one that involved mass mesmerism – something the Victorians probably believed in but most modern readers know better than to swallow.
All in all, Honest John Churchfield is not much recommended.