Night Watch

November 5, 2001
With an ingenuous dismissal of other Sherlock Holmes pastiches as, well, mere pastiches, Kendrick sets about a taut reworking of the venerable "locked room" mystery. His tale of murder in the cathedral, he insists, is genuine: a lost account from the one true chronicler, Dr. Watson. Kendrick also dusts off another of sleuthdom's icons, Father Brown. The mix works. Though the narrative voice little evokes that of the Good Doctor, Kendrick knows and respects his source materials. A cleric himself, he also knows church history. Not only does he use little remembered figures (such as the heretic Pelagius) and events (such as the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893), but he integrates them so well with the mystery that the reader pores over the historical minutiae for possible clues. Representatives from each of the world's major religions gather secretly in a London church to plan for an important ecumenical conference; then one of them murders his Anglican host—in most unholy fashion. Holmes and Father Brown have but one night to solve the grizzly murder, aided by such stalwarts as Inspector Lestrade and Mycroft Holmes. In the light of the past century's history and, particularly, recent events, there is a profoundly tragic aspect to Kendrick's plotting and his roster of suspects—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu and Islamic—who join together in the hope of establishing common ground. A century later, such vision seems all but trampled under.