I think I found Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, completely by accident, while searching for some book — any book — about Sherlock Holmes.
(My last years in high school were the height of my Sherlock Holmes obsession. Once I had read Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical mysteries a hundred times, I started looking for other ways to spend time in Holmes’ Victorian London. I spent my free time trolling used and new bookstores for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, amassing a sizable collection for someone with no employment whatsoever.)
Once I cracked open the book, its first sentence electrified me.
“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.”
I walked while reading (still do). I was a teenager. And I very much wanted to meet Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Mary Russell and I already had a great deal in common, and I hadn’t even finished the first paragraph.
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is the first of eight (so far) books in the Mary Russell series, in which Ms. King creates a really compelling alternate version of Sherlock Holmes. The books are fascinating and wonderfully researched, describing the end of the Victorian era and the rise of the Roaring Twenties, ranging from London to Palestine to my own native San Francisco. Mary Russell is unquestionably the main character, and she holds her own against the great detective.
Mary Russell has been described elsewhere as a partner finally worthy of Sherlock Holmes. She’s brilliant in her own right, and doesn’t exist merely as a foil for Holmes’ intellect. By the second book in King’s series, she has her own nascent career as a scholar in religious studies. To me, she seemed to be the grown-up equivalent of the little girl heroines I had loved – both smart and sensible, and taking guff from absolutely no one. Russell had moxie.
She could shoot straight, too.
I fell so in love with Mary Russell that I did something I have only done once: I wrote Laurie R. King to tell her so.
It’s funny – I was writing college applications at the time, probably, asserting to various officers of admission that I wanted to be an international lawyer or an activist or the President.
I wrote Ms. King the truth – that I wanted to become a writer. And she wrote me back, and encouraged me to try.
I’m still trying.
Each time a new Mary Russell book has been published, over the last fifteen years, I’ve connected with one of my favorite heroines of all time – and the reminder to get back to writing heroines of my own. I’m still giddy, remembering that Ms. King took the time to write me, remembering that even famous writers are real people who sit down and wrestle the blank page, remembering that even as a bewildered teenager this was my dream.
I’ve taken the plunge now, and it’s often discouraging and even a little frightening, but it’s nice to know my teenaged self would actually approve.
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