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the complete review - fiction

The West End Horror

by
Nicholas Meyer

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : a rather tepid Sherlock Holmes investigation

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "In short order we meet Gilbert and Sullivan, Ellen Terry, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry Irving, D'Oyly Carte and Frank Harris. And a sparkling company they make, well worth the price of admission, which is more than can be said for the guys playing Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade, who frequently sound like refugees from a Sesame Street production of Cookie Monster of the Baskervilles. (...) Unless one treats the undertaking as a form of re-creation, the whole thing comes to resemble a stupefying kind of demonic possession, with unconscious parody the result, as it is here." - L.J.Davis, The New Republic
  
  
• "Meyer works hard -- very hard -- at establishing the ambience of London in the 1890 s. He works even harder at the literary style established by the authentic Watson manuscripts as passed to posterity by A. Conan Doyle. Here he meets only with varied success. The trouble is that Meyer has no trouble with the exterior manifestations of the eccentric who was known as Sherlock Holmes, but he is largely content with those surface manifestations, seldom getting down to the real man. (I)f Meyer has never really hit the Holmesian essence, he has made a brave try. The West End Horror is a pleasant entertainment. " - Newgate Callendar, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Mr Meyer has elected to compound his folly with yet another Sherlock Holmes story, incidentally involving real-life people such as Shaw, Henry Irving, Bram Stoker and a number of others. Though the plot is slightly less puerile than in the previous book, the pastiche of Watson's style is as inept as ever." - Edmund Crispin, Sunday Times
  
  
• "The West End Horror seems promising at first. (...) No amount of huffing about a "crime so monstrous that it threatened to blot the nineteenth century and alter the course of history" can disguise Meyer's evident lack of interest in the whole affair. So he, too, falls back on shock." - Paul Gray, Time

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Nicholas Meyer enjoyed considerable success with his Sherlock Holmes- (and Sigmund Freud-) novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and in The West End Horror he takes another stab at adding to the Holmes-casefile, presenting it as A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D., with a Foreword by 'editor' Meyer explaining how he came to get the manuscript and the condition he found it in, as well as his attempts to date it ("certainly after 1905", with his hunch that it: "was set down sometime after the First World War and before Holmes's death, in 1929").
       The action takes place in March, 1895, in London's theater-milieu, with Holmes drawn into the case by no one less than George Bernard Shaw -- who hadn't made much of a name for himself as a dramatist yet, still earning more (but not much) as a theater critic. Shaw wants Holmes to investigate the death of one Jonathan McCarthy -- a much disliked critic (and blackmailer). McCarthy had been stabbed -- but managed to pull a volume of Shakespeare from his bookshelf before dying, Romeo and Juliet. Soon enough there is a second murder as well, clearly by the same hand.
       The police soon have their man, or at least someone they think they can easily hold responsible but, of course, as Holmes tells Watson as he continues to investigate: "Things are not so simple as I had at first supposed".
       In the course of their investigations, Holmes and Watson encounter various notables of the time -- Oscar Wilde, just back from his ill-fated swearing out of a complaint against the Marquess of Queensberry; Gilbert and Sullivan; D'Oyly Carte; Frank Harris; and Bram Stoker. Unfortunately, Meyer doesn't do much with these characters -- Wilde provides some information, for example, but on the whole seems rather wasted (though the timing -- just after he made his official complaint -- does allow Shaw and Harris to worry about him, knowing that he has set himself up for disaster).
       Along the way, Holmes and Watson also are, separately, assaulted, after a fashion -- forced to drink something by an unidentifiable assailant, but otherwise unharmed -- and they are not the only ones. And a final bizarre turn sees what amounts to the medical examiner acting very strangely when he takes charge of the corpses of the murder victims -- actions which make quite clear at least some of what is behind all this.
       It's a creative scenario Meyer suggests, though it seems a highly unlikely and unrealistic one in many of its details, and his heart doesn't seem fully in it. Such a preposterous sequence of events needs to be fleshed out considerably more to seem at all convincing -- and, also, more interesting. As is, Meyer largely seems satisfied with his name-dropping, a bit of theatrical atmosphere, and a touch of the exotic. Among the few scenes of some suspense have Holmes and Watson balanced outside Bram Stoker's window as the author scribbles away at his famous novel, and even there their escape seems rather forced.
       There's some fun in the exchanges with the famous figures and the plot and what's behind the murders is all quite elaborate, but on the whole The West End Horror is fairly weak entertainment. The potential -- with the characters and ideas Meyer introduces -- is there, but he doesn't do nearly enough with them.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 July 2026

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Links:

• Archipoche publicity page

• The Cannibal Lecteur (French)
• Digital Bibliophilia
• Kevin's Corner
• With Love, S.H.

• Official site

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction
• See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Nicholas Meyer was born in 1945.

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© 2026 the complete review

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