I have not read much Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m pretty sure I read Hound of the Baskervilles when I was a teen, and maybe A Study in Scarlet? But I’ve never been an aficionado.

Which makes it all the stranger that I have consumed a lot of Holmes adaptations. The Downey Jr films; the Cumberbatch show; Enola Holmes, The Irregulars, and even the not-very-good Holmes & Daughter. And then there’s the books. I have read many of the Laurie R King Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes books; I pine for the next in Malka Older’s Mossa & Pleiti series. Which brings me to Robert Jackson Bennett.

I had not heard of these books until the Hugo packet this year. And when I started The Tainted Cup I was a bit dubious, because I really haven’t been in the mood for gung-ho fantasy complete with made-up words for quite a while. But I persisted, because the characters were intriguing enough that I wanted to see what they were up to. And then the world grew on me – an empire shoring itself up against incursions from mindless oceanic leviathans (one assumes? I can’t tell whether that is going to get undercut later in the series), and one key way they do that is by changing some of its citizens: to have better reflexes, or more acute senses, or… other things.

And it didn’t take long for me to realise that Din and Ana are Watson and Holmes analogues. He is new to the justice job, struggling to find his place. She is weird, with bursts of manic energy and a delight in music and a desire of illegal drugs and an astonishing ability to put clues together. I mean, it’s not exactly subtle. And it’s an absolute delight. And you don’t need to know about Holmes and Watson to enjoy their interplay – it’s just an added amusement – because Bennett writes compelling characters and intriguing mysteries, and develops a world that stands by itself.

In fact I enjoyed The Tainted Cup enough that then I went and found A Drop of Corruption at the library, and I read it in a day and I have no regrets about that. Interestingly, the library has catalogued it as a mystery – I can only imagine what someone would think if they picked it up expecting something like Thursday Murder Club or a James Patterson. Anyway, it’s another gripping mystery in another part of the empire, and we learn more about how the empire works (and it’s not completely a “we love empire” story, either), and – happily – we finally learn a bit more about Ana, whose role and being are themselves mysterious. I assume Bennett has plans for more Din and Ana; certainly I will continue to read them.