The Dark Water: The Strange Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell #3

by David Pirie

In a literary tour de force worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, author David Pirie brings his rich familiarity with both the Doyle biography and the Sherlock Holmes canon to a mystifying Victorian tale of vengeance and villainy. The howling man on the heath, a gothic asylum, the walking dead, the legendary witch of Dunwich-perils lurk in every turn of the page throughout this ingenious pastiche, as increasingly bizarre encounters challenge the deductive powers of young Doyle and his mentor, the pioneering criminal investigator Dr. Joseph Bell.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, British Literature, Victorian, 19th Century

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

David Pirie was a journalist and film critic before he became a screenwriter. Just a few of his numerous credits are the BAFTA nominated adaptation for the BBC of The Woman in White and his collaboration with Lars Von Trier on the script of the Oscar nominated film Breaking the Waves. David Pirie lives in Somerset.

Reviews

[Cookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dies ist Teil 3 und der Abschluss der Krimireihe um die "Vorfahren" von Sherlock Holmes: David Pirie lässt nämlich Holmes-Erschaffer Arthur Conan Doyle mit Dr. Joseph Bell, der Vorbild für Holmes war, auf Verbrecherjagd gehen. Die beiden sind so dicht an Holmes und Watson, dass man beim Lesen immer mal wieder vergisst, dass das hier keine Sherlock-Holmes-Geschichte ist. Dieses Mal jagen sie noch immer nach dem Erzfeind Cream (Moriarty much) und die Jagd führt sie nach Dunwich, wo die Dorfbewohner glauben, dass ein alter Hexenfluch hinter mysteriösen Todesfällen steckt.


Ich hab die Atmosphäre geliebt, es liest sich wirklich wie eine Geschichte von Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Es war teilweise auch ganz schön gruselig und blutig. Ein schöner Abschluss der Reihe, der mich dazu auch noch aus einer Leseflaute geholt hat (danke!)

[Ariadne Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Dark Water is volume three in the series following Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell. This series doesn't lend itself well to just dipping in, so if you want to try it I recommend starting with The Patient's Eyes.

A good mystery with satisfying twists and turns. But the relationship between Doyle and Bell just didn't work for me. It hasn't changed and grown since the first book. There doesn't seem to much affection between them. They don't feel like friends or mentor/mente or even comrades. They sort of grudgingly work next to each other and very rarely with each other which dulled my enjoyment. The Dark Water and the whole series are pretty dark and really could have used that as a counterpoint.

[Aleshanee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Etwas langwieriger Einstieg, dann aber sehr spannend mit vielen falschen Fährten ;)
Ein gelungener Abschluss der Reihe!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not what I imagined, but I have no complaints. The title came up when I was trolling through a library catalog for books on "Sherlock Holmes". It's not about him, nor is there any specific mention of him in the entire book. On the other hand, this is an action-filled adventure staring Professor Dr. Joseph Bell (MD) and Arthur Conan Doyle, MD. "Who?" do you ask? Bell is the real-world archetype used to create Sherlock Holmes and ACD is the man who created him and his "Boswell", John H. Watson, MD.

ACD was a student of Dr. Bell in Medical School. They had certain true-life adventures with a murderous individual. This book is the third in a series (I have not read the previous two) that takes those real-life events and draws them out into a fast-paced series of accounts. While the pattern is not exactly that of Holmes and Watson (Doyle has several specific episodes apart from Bell), it is a "Mystery" in which they attempt to solve crimes. A whole series of crimes perpetrated by this arch-enemy who appears to drag ordinary men and women into his plots with exasperating ease. Unlike Moriarty who had legions of followers organized into a criminal organization, the antagonist of this book ensnares and recruits on an individual basis. He does not sit like a spider at the center of a web, but acts in the first person.

Without having read the previous two entries, I cannot say how fast-and-loose the author may have played with the true tragic facts that occurred before this volume. However, on its own merits this is a very engaging tale. If the three primaries were Messrs "Foo", "Goo", and "Moo" it would be just as engaging. Only a few minor references in the epilogue would need to be deleted. One assumes that the author has done some research into the "core" tale of the witch of Dunwich (England - it has nothing to do with H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror") rather than just making it up. Although a large part of the book is concerned with it, I haven't done any fact-checking and ultimately it does not matter. This is a well-written, emotional roller coaster that "rings true".

If you were expecting a story just like a Holmes story, then you might feel a bit disappointed. Certainly there is evil afoot and detection, but the relationship of the two and the way the story is told marks it as something apart. The author makes an effort to bring in the Holmes-like skills: such as, personal history at-a-glance, chemistry, a willingness to be a judge, a man of action, and a brilliant cryptographer. But read it for its own sake and consider the familiarity of the future writer to be an added benefit.

My conjectures on what the story contained had more to do with how ACD decided and did create his original Holmes tale - obviously something that has nothing to do with this book. I was basing that merely on the sub-title, "The Strange Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes", which is why the catalog search turned it up, also. Once I knew what I had I was happy to read along and I hope you will be, too. I'm going to be looking for its predecessors. (Not that I wouldn't mind reading a book that covered the imagined topic!)

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third Arthur Conan Doyle book (and last? I'm inclined to say it's not a trilogy now, but I can't find any information about future books online) isn't as focused as the second one was. Although the case that Bell and Doyle take on in a superstitious village is directly related to their search for the villain Cream, it seems tangential until the end. I've really enjoyed reading all three books, but the strength in plotting and pacing does seem to go up and down.

[EmBe · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Pirie macht aus den historischen Gestalten Arthur Conan Doyle und Joseph Bell literarische Figuten. Wer sich mit Sherlock Holmes und seinem Schöpfer auskennt, weiß, dass der Medizin-Professor Joseph Bell das Vorbild für Holmes hinsichtlich der forensischen Methoden war. Er war wirklich einer der Dozenten von Doyle an der Universität von Edinburgh. Die Serie suggeriert clever, dass die beiden, Doyle und Bell, ähnlich verzwickte Kriminalfälle zu lösen hatten, und das diese dann quasi als Vorlagen für die Sherlock Holmes-Geschichten dienten. Denn es gibt in dieser Buch-Serie, die auf einer von Pirie konzipierten TV-Serie beruht, mit Cream auch ein möderisches Genie, modern gesprochen einen Serien-Killer, der hinter allen Fällen steckt, und der sich so als Moriarty-Vorlage anbietet. Insgesamt ist "Die Hexe von Dunwich" spannende, gut recherchierte Krimikost, gut eingepasst in der Diktion und dem Setting in die vorgebliche Entstehungszeit. Der verzwickte Kriminal-Fall kann sich mit anderen SH-Geschichten durchaus messen. Aber auch etwas enttäuschend. Denn noch ist kein richtiger Abschluss gefunden. Und da dies eigentlich kein für die Öffentlichkeit bestimmter Bericht ist, hätte der Autor mehr wagen können. Die Einarbeitung der Sage von der Hexe von Dunwich, die auch im titel genannt wird, löst Erwartungen in Richtung mehr Unheimliches aus, die dann nicht eingelöst werden.

[Alma (retirement at last) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel is narrated as if by a Victorian gentleman called Arthur Conan Doyle and so the language may seem a little affected to readers of more modern fiction. It is, however, a very intriguing murder mystery with many gruesome murders committed as if for fun by the perpetrator. The infamous narrator is helped by his side-kick, another famous doctor called Dr Bell from Edinburgh. The chase the known murderer from Wiltshire to London and on to the South East coast, always one step behind him. Frustration abounds but the deduction of why each murder is committed is largely solved through the clues that Dr Bell works out. This resonates with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. A great page-turner and a very entertaining read.

[Brigitte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Habe mich wohl etwas satt gehört an den Geschichten, so ging es mir auch mit den Sherlock Holmes Romanen.

Gut vorgelesen (wie immer), jedoch dieser allwissende Professor Bell nervt, der alle anderen immer nur als Stichwortgeber benutzt.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Holmes Pastische

David Pirie’s The Dark Water: The Strange Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes closes his fascinating trilogy about the young Arthur Conan Doyle and his legendary mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, with a resonance that goes far beyond mere detective fiction.

If the first two novels (The Patient’s Eyes and The Night Calls) created the bones and blood of this Gothic universe, The Dark Water is its soul — brooding, weary, and strangely beautiful in its melancholy. Pirie doesn’t simply write pastiche; he writes an origin myth of reason, of how deduction itself might have been forged in the crucible of human darkness. This isn’t a comfortable story. It’s a story of how genius grows teeth — how the clean, logical brilliance we later see in Holmes was first touched by madness, guilt, and moral exhaustion.

From the first pages, Pirie’s language rolls like dark water itself — slow, cold, and deep. He immerses us in the Scotland of Doyle’s apprenticeship, where the light of science meets the long shadows of superstition. Bell, as ever, stands like a statue of Enlightenment rationality, cutting through illusion with his scalpel-like mind. Doyle, still in his youth, is both awed and frightened by that clarity. The world they move through is sickly and strange — morgues, asylums, laboratories — places where Pirie mixes history and hallucination so fluidly that you start doubting your own senses, just like Doyle does. The result is not a simple detective novel but a meditation on how knowledge itself can corrupt and consume.

What Pirie does, perhaps better than anyone else who has ever written a Holmes pastiche, is to humanize deduction. Sherlock Holmes, in Conan Doyle’s stories, often appears as something inhumanly perfect — the mind that never trembles, the machine that out-reasons everyone else. Pirie reverses that myth. His Dr. Bell is almost too sharp, his intelligence almost unbearable in its precision. And Doyle, the future creator of Holmes, begins to sense the cost of such clarity. To see too much is to lose innocence. The Gothic mood isn’t merely atmospheric decoration here — it’s the psychological landscape of what it feels like to think too hard, to know too much, to stare too long into what others look away from.

There’s a recurring motif of sight and blindness throughout the novel — from the fog-choked streets of Edinburgh to the unblinking stare of corpses in the anatomy lab. Pirie plays with this tension brilliantly. Doyle and Bell are always looking — observing, noting, deducing — but in doing so, they are also haunted by what they see. Rationality doesn’t cleanse the world; it exposes its ugliness in cruel detail. Pirie seems to ask: what does it do to a man to be right all the time? To see patterns in every shadow? To understand evil so precisely that it begins to mirror your own reflection?

The case at the heart of The Dark Water isn’t so much a puzzle to be solved as it is a psychological test. Pirie deliberately slows down the mechanics of the mystery, allowing the dread to seep in drop by drop. The villainy here isn’t cartoonish; it’s quiet, systemic, wrapped in civility. As with the earlier novels, Pirie uses real historical anxieties — the rise of criminology, the new science of psychiatry, the growing unease with moral relativism — to make his fiction feel eerily plausible. This isn’t Holmes the superhero; this is Holmes in utero, born out of moral nausea and intellectual overdrive.

The emotional core of the novel lies in the relationship between Bell and Doyle — a bond that swings between mentorship and manipulation, admiration and terror. Pirie paints Bell as an unsettling mixture of moral rigidity and emotional opacity. He is both father figure and god — the kind of man whose intellect demands worship. Doyle’s love for Bell is mingled with fear, and that ambivalence drives the whole narrative. Their dialogues feel like chess matches between logic and empathy. Bell cuts Doyle’s sentimentality apart like a specimen; Doyle resists by clinging to the possibility of goodness in human beings. In a sense, The Dark Water is also a philosophical debate — reason versus faith, dissection versus feeling.

And that’s what makes the novel’s title so hauntingly apt. “The dark water” isn’t just the literal sea, or the murky setting that recurs in Pirie’s work — it’s the metaphorical depth beneath reason. It’s where the clean reflections of the mind are swallowed by something older, something irrational and primal. Doyle, like a scientist of the soul, keeps trying to reach for the light, but the darkness is magnetic. The more he learns from Bell, the more he realizes that the method of deduction is also a form of possession. You don’t control it; it controls you. Every time he “solves” something, a piece of him dies.

Pirie’s prose, elegant and slightly archaic, channels Victorian restraint with modern psychological precision. His narrative voice — written as Doyle’s memoir — captures that strange 19th-century mixture of decorum and hysteria. The result is immersive, even hypnotic. You can almost smell the damp stone corridors of the hospital, hear the scratch of Bell’s quill, feel the exhaustion of a young doctor chasing logic through moral chaos. The book also brims with subtle intertextual nods: a scene where Doyle first hears of a “consulting detective,” a fleeting mention of a violin, a reflection on cocaine use — all these are ghosts of Holmes to come, whispers of what Doyle will one day transmute into art.

But Pirie is cleverer than simple homage. He’s constructing an argument: that Holmes was never just a character — he was a defense mechanism. That Doyle’s later fiction, with its tidy conclusions and moral clarity, was an attempt to exorcise the trauma of real evil he experienced as a young man. The detective’s rationalism is not a celebration of logic but a shield against despair. In The Dark Water, you see the cracks in that shield forming — Doyle’s moral compass faltering, his faith tested, his admiration for Bell turning into dread. It’s like watching a myth being born and broken at the same time.

What stands out is Pirie’s command of tone. He never lets the story descend into pulp sensationalism. Even when dealing with murder and madness, his focus remains on the emotional and ethical consequences. There’s restraint in his horror — a kind of literary modesty that makes the terror more effective. And there’s always this undercurrent of sadness, as if Pirie himself mourns the loss of simplicity that comes with knowledge. The further Doyle travels into Bell’s world, the more he realizes that deduction isn’t just a technique — it’s a way of seeing that isolates you from everyone else. That loneliness — cold, intellectual, and absolute — is the seed of Holmes’s personality.

By the final chapters, the line between reality and imagination blurs almost completely. Doyle begins to sense that Bell’s teachings have created something monstrous inside him — a new form of perception that he can’t turn off. The Gothic merges with the psychological here: the ghosts are not supernatural, they’re mental, born of over-observation. Pirie’s Edinburgh becomes an externalization of Doyle’s mind — a city of fog and reflection, where every shadow seems to contain an idea, every corpse a riddle. When Doyle finally begins to write, it feels less like inspiration and more like exorcism.

Reading The Dark Water after the previous two novels gives you an incredible sense of thematic closure. The Patient’s Eyes was about awakening — Doyle’s introduction to the world of forensic reason and human cruelty. The Night Calls was about corruption — how that reason can deform morality. And The Dark Water is about consequence — the emotional toll of knowing too much. Together, they form an arc of intellectual damnation, the story of a young man whose brilliance is also his curse. If you imagine this trilogy as the true backstory to the Holmes myth, then what Conan Doyle gave us in the Strand Magazine were not detective stories, but redemption attempts — tidy endings written by a man who had seen chaos and needed to impose order on it.

There’s also a political layer that hums quietly beneath Pirie’s prose. The late-Victorian world he paints is trembling with anxiety — empire, disease, scientific upheaval, social reform. In that turbulence, Bell’s and Doyle’s obsession with order makes sense. They’re trying to find rational patterns in a collapsing universe. That’s what makes Pirie’s trilogy so contemporary in spirit. In our own age of algorithmic logic and surveillance, the obsession with deduction feels eerily familiar. We too live in a world where we know too much, where clarity has become its own kind of horror. Pirie’s “dark water” flows right into the present.

What elevates the book even higher is its psychological realism. Doyle’s internal monologue is full of guilt, repression, and barely disguised awe for Bell. Their relationship anticipates the dynamics of Freud and Jung — the student haunted by the genius of his mentor, destined to rebel but never to escape. There’s something almost romantic in Doyle’s fascination, and Pirie doesn’t shy away from that complexity. The novel becomes an elegy for intellectual intimacy — how closeness of minds can become a form of possession, and how love, in its highest and most dangerous form, can disguise itself as imitation.

By the end, when Doyle begins to glimpse the fictional shape of what will become Sherlock Holmes, there’s both triumph and tragedy in the moment. Pirie doesn’t let it play as epiphany — it’s exhaustion. The detective figure isn’t born out of creativity but out of necessity. It’s Doyle’s way of managing the unbearable — of turning horror into structure, chaos into logic. The very act of creating Holmes is an act of self-preservation. That’s what makes The Dark Water such a powerful and haunting finale: it reframes Holmes not as a symbol of pure intellect, but as a wound turned into myth.

Stylistically, Pirie remains one of the few writers who can make historical fiction feel both authentic and psychologically modern. His Victorian world breathes — the diction, the rhythm, the moral temperature of the prose all feel earned, not imitated. You don’t get the sense of a writer playing dress-up in the 19th century; you get the sense of a writer living there, reporting from the heart of its unease. Every gesture, every hesitation, every flicker of moral discomfort feels perfectly tuned.

And that’s why The Dark Water, while less flashy than modern Sherlock reinventions like The House of Silk or the BBC’s Sherlock, actually cuts much deeper. It’s not interested in the performance of genius; it’s interested in the pain that creates it. Pirie’s trilogy isn’t a celebration of Holmes — it’s a lament for Doyle. It asks what it costs to create an ideal of reason so powerful that it haunts you for the rest of your life.

When you close the book, you’re left not with the satisfaction of a solved case but with a strange ache — the ache of understanding too much. And that, I think, is Pirie’s ultimate triumph. In turning the creator of Holmes into a character haunted by his own invention, Pirie completes a perfect circle: fiction reflecting back on its maker, logic consuming its source. The water remains dark, and deep, and endlessly reflective — just like the mind it mirrors.

The Dark Water stands, then, as one of the finest works in the modern Holmes pastiche tradition — not because it imitates Doyle, but because it interrogates him.

It understands that the true mystery was never in the crimes Holmes solved, but in the man who had to invent Holmes to make sense of a broken world. David Pirie gives us that story — grim, beautiful, and profoundly human — and in doing so, he turns deduction itself into tragedy.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this book. I have read other books with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the main character before and really enjoyed them. I always think it is fun to see him put into situations like his creation Sherlock Holmes. It kind of shows how an author pulls ideas from real life experiences. That being said I just couldn’t get into this book. It became a chore to read and I struggled to move through this.

My problem with this book was the story. It took forever for any type of action to get going. The methodical steps that Doyle and Bell would take to get to their deductions were dull and took forever to connect the dots. This book could have been cut in half and maybe I would have enjoyed this more.

This book clearly wasn’t my taste but there were some good points about this book. I really liked the authors writing style. He blended his story into the flow and feel of a Sherlock Holmes story. I just wish it would have flowed better and gotten to the point a bit faster. I also liked the characters, Doyle and Bell were developed well.

I don’t have much to say about this book, the writer has talent I just think he missed a bit with this book. I was so bored that by the halfway point I didn’t care how it ended I just wanted it to end. I don’t like to write non favorable reviews, but I have to be honest in my feeling for a book. This was not for me and I am glad it is behind me.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third book in Pirie's series about Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell. Unfortunately, I haven't read the first book. When I read the second book, I thought it was mildly interesting and enjoyable, but I wasn't really impressed. Well, either Mr. Pirie greatly improved, or I just didn't give his book sufficient attention, because this novel was excellent. Doyle and Bell, in their Watson and Holmes roles, continue to pursue the serial killer who has haunted them for the last several years. I really do not want to give too many details of the story away, though, so I won't offer any summary past that.

I must comment on the writing, however. The author does an excellent job in creating a compelling and terror filled environment without detailed explanations. Many or most authors writing this story would resolve to give long, horrific descriptions of the terrible things that the serial killer (who shall remain nameless) has done. However, Pirie does an excellent job of setting a mood that allows him to communicate horror without unnecessary description. It really is quite impressive. And the story is so involving that upon finishing the book I was yelling and gesticulating for five minutes. Excellent book.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end of game, or was it merely the end-game? This third volume of "Murder Rooms" trilogy keeps the reader as well the protagonists (Dr. Joseph Bell, and Arthur Conan Doyle) on a tight leash till the end, with the shadow of Doyle's nemesis lurking at every unseen corner and unknown angle. I have to admit that towards the end of the book, the author had succeeded in making me rather paranoid and that had revealed a few things before their 'official' exposure caused by Dr. Bell, (e.g. the asylum-proprietor's role, the identity of Charlotte Jephord's lover, etc.). The book does not echo many other Sherlockian adventures (still hidden in the mist of future), except "The Final Problem". It is obviously well-written, slightly superior to "The Night Calls", and yet somewhat lesser than "The Patient's Eyes".

The biggest point of regret is that the series had suddenly ended with this volume, and the matter of the 'Dead Time' (tantalisingly mentioned by the author) was never revealed.

Read this book, only after exhausting the two previous volumes, and preferably in a stormy night, since the book is indeed very dark, and very gothic!

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich bin immer noch etwas angespisst, ob des sehr schleppenden Starts dieses Buches. Klar man musste ja den Cliffhanger des letzten Buches aufklären - und es ist immer noch eine Romanversion eines BBC Miniserie. In sofern verstehe ich das seltsame Timing. Die ersten 150 Seiten sind also eher de Fortsetzung von Die Zeichen der Furcht: Aus den dunklen Anfängen von Sherlock Holmes bevor es zur eigentlichen Geschichte der Hexe von Dunwich geht. Der Fall der Hexe an sich hätte von mir eine 4 Sterne Bewertungen verdient, wenn es nicht etwas lieblos auf 300 Seiten geklatscht wäre. Nein also, man kann fast froh sein, dass die Serie hier ein Ende findet.
Dr. Joseph Bell hätte ich jedenfalls nicht länger ertragen.

[Cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plus minus. Overall, interesting plot and characters, but the flow was somehow lacking. Some of the classic holmes-ian erratic movements were more choppy than erratic. Some of the conversation seemed stilted, even for the time period. There were intriguing elements, but lack of overall cohesion. Where Doyle is perhaps supposed to come across as intense, he is merely melancholy, to the point of being a bit annoying and blind. Some elements were predictable. There were a few turns of events towards the end that were surprising and good. I might try another, and I am curious as to the actual events of Doyle's life, but not my favorite writing.

[Jonathan K (Max Outlier) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this for several reasons, the most important of which is the POV narrative. In other words, while I've read stories with new characters that took place after the rise of Sherlock and spins on stories Doyle never wrote, this is the first where the POV storyteller is Doyle himself where he's playing the Dr. Watson role along side Dr. Bell, who is obviously the model for Sherlock.. Well done, plenty of surprises and could make a good film too.

[Elizabeth (Miss Eliza) · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Special Content only on my blog, Strange and Random Happenstance, during Sherlocked. (October - December 2015)

Arthur Conan Doyle's nemesis has returned to England. He and Dr. Bell have made it their life's work to capture this man, Dr. Neill Cream, and see him pay for his crimes, not the least of which is murdering Elspeth, Conan Doyle's fiance. Yet Conan Doyle didn't expect Cream to strike first, kidnapping the would-be author and holding him hostage while heavily drugged. But Conan Doyle miraculously escapes, and thanks to some help in the unlikeliest of places, he reunites with Dr. Bell in Edinburgh. They retrace Cream's steps through England, where he is using the name Dr. Mere, and realize that this murderous man is in desperate need of funds. Dr. Bell starts going over everything that Conan Doyle remembers of his incarceration and Cream's mention of the sea seems to coincide with a suspicious disappearance of a wealthy man in the town of Dunwich. Sir Thomas Jefford had just inherited a house in Dunwich, The Glebe, when he disappeared. His friends thought it was a joke, but locals believe it is tied up in the legend of the Witch of Dunwich Heath, which Jefford was planning on writing about. Conan Doyle and Bell set out for this remote village on the Eastern Coast and slowly start to piece together what has happened. But soon there are not just dealing with a disappearance, but deaths. Murder! Can they separate facts from fiction and catch Cream before he has a chance to escape their grasp once more?

Recently I was having a conversation with one of my friends about people who rate books on Goodreads when they haven't finished them. We were in total accord that it's unfair to the book and the author. To give a star rating that is factored into the overall rating for something you couldn't be bothered to finish skews the results. You either finish the book and rate it or abandon it, there is no middle ground. This then morphed into a discussion on when do you give up on a book. Do you give it fifty pages, a hundred pages, what? When do you know in your gut that enough is enough? When do you know that you can't make it to the end and have the satisfaction of adding your two cents on Goodreads? I'm a masochist, because I can really count on one hand the number of books I have actually given up on. I'm in it for the long haul, no matter what. Rage reading, incentives, whatever it takes, I WILL finish that book. The reason I bring this up now, other than the wacky serendipity that made these two events happen within days of each other, is that if I was the type of person to actually give up on books, well, The Dark Water would have been abandoned early. Yet you will notice that in the end I really liked it. I mean, I REALLY liked it. So how long did it take for me to get into it? 123 pages. This just proves that there is no magical page number at which you should abandon hope. A book with a disjointed and awkward start can click from one page to the next and become a true page-turner. Plus, it's always nice to have your patience rewarded, it's awkward when the book goes the other way, ie, to the dogs.

The Dark Water is actually the third book in David Pirie's series about Dr. Joseph Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle. While I didn't actually know this when I bought the book, before reading it I looked up the summaries to the first two books, The Patient's Eyes and The Night Calls, and realized that they sounded very familiar. See, this series actually didn't start out as books, but as a television show, Murder Rooms, therefore doing the opposite of most adaptations out there. 'The Patient's Eyes' was the first episode after the pilot, while the pilot became The Night Calls. While I think 'The Patient's Eyes' is one of the strongest episodes, the pilot isn't of the highest quality, so I figured I'd be safe just skipping to the new story. Because that is what I was really excited about. I was sad when Murder Rooms was cancelled and here, with this book, it felt like the axe hadn't fallen. Yet upon starting The Dark Water there were all these mentions to things I hadn't heard about, little stories that didn't line up with the show. References or asides I just didn't get. This could in fact be one of the reasons it took me 123 pages to get into the book. It was just a weird experience, like hearing a story you've heard a hundred times but with key points changed for no perceptible reason. I almost felt as if the books took place in a parallel dimension to the television series. You knew enough about the world to get around but it was just that little bit off to be disconcerting. Therefore, given the chance to do this over, I would read the first two books first, because maybe it would make those first 123 pages interesting.

But then again... I think not. The reason those first 123 pages don't work is because of Cream. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream is an historically interesting person; a Scottish-Canadian serial killer known as the Lambeth Poisoner who tried to claim the victims of Jack the Ripper as his own. So we have historical precedence of his evil deeds and ways. But, despite this book being fiction, the sheer unlikelihood of his ever crossing paths with Conan Doyle, nine years his junior, let alone becoming his arch-nemesis just strains credulity. Add to that the whole lovelorn Conan Doyle who lost his first love at the hands of Cream and we're in absurd penny dreadful territory. While there's a disconnect between the fictional Conan Doyle and the actual, artistic license allows a little freedom, but taking Cream and forcing him into the role of Moriarty to Conan Doyle's Holmes... it just doesn't work. And not just the fact that Bell is the true Holmes of this narrative. It's fun seeing the little hints of how life became fictionalized in Conan Doyle's stories, but this is too heavy handed. Too obvious. Cream is taking Moriarty too far, especially at the end. Subtlety is needed to make this conceit believable. Subtlety and just enough reality. Cream is too over the top. Too theatrical. His kidnapping of Conan Doyle and holding him hostage is so overly dramatic and also tedious that it bogs down the first two sections of the book. It's not until Cream disappears offstage that the book starts to work. If it wasn't for Cream this could be a near perfect book, but alas, it isn't. Also, is there anyone else that thinks the name Cream doesn't inspire terror?

Getting beyond Cream and into the history of the small English town of Dunwich captivated me. Dunwich is a small coastal town on the eastern coast of England that was mentioned in the Doomsday book. Much of the town has been lost to coastal erosion and now lives under the sea. They have stories that you can still hear the bells of the churches under the water calling you. This locale brought with it the haunting atmosphere that made The Hound of the Baskervilles so memorable and easily Conan Doyle's greatest story in the Sherlock Holmes canon. There's something about desolate and bleak settings that just up the Gothic impact of a mystery and make me all the more invested in it. It's the haunting landscape of Cornwall coupled with her writing that makes Daphne Du Maurier so memorable. Her writing wouldn't have had the same impact set anywhere else. Plus she had a symbiotic relationship between her and the land that makes me think if it wasn't for Cornwall who knows if she would ever have really written anything memorable. That is what Dunwich does for The Dark Water. The town becomes a reflection of the story and becomes a character in it's own right. The treacherous walks along the cliffs where even holy landmarks to God were destroyed by the forces of nature sends a frisson of excitement through me just thinking about it again. The wind and the rain which might be a detriment anywhere else here become a real danger. Now I'm not saying I ever want to go there, but the way this book transported me there, it feels like I've already been.

Yet Dunwich wouldn't have had the impact unless it was coupled with the mythology and folklore that surround the town, and not just the ghostly bells. The way "The Wylde Hunt at Dunwich" and the Witch of Dunwich Heath not only added an otherworldly element to the story but spread fear and cleverly concealed the real killer is the beating heart of this book. I have always been fascinated by the idea that Fairy Tales may be real and that mythology and folklore must have some basis in fact. I love how Dr. Bell instantly sees through these scare tactics, such as the howling man roaming the moors, but realizes the importance of these stories and the effect they will have on the surrounding community if they are believed. He works backward, from the stories that have survived, knowing that they have a grounding in reality. He is able to find how seemingly impossible deaths were accomplished by using the truth within the story. But it's not just the ability to use these stories to catch a killer, but the stories themselves that give you a glimpse into the past. You get a mini history of this small community through their folktales. Regional folktales are the way history has been passed down through the generations. You learn more about an area and it's past from it's stories than from some staid history written to set the record straight. Plus let us not forget that in his old age Conan Doyle set more store in fairies and folklore than in his own writing. Fairy Tales are just history and mystery coming together, and in this instance they are used to catch a killer.

[Nancy I · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the last of Pirie's trilogy featuring Dr. Joseph Bell, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and Arthur Conan Doyle. It starts off where the second ends, and it is so much like the second, that at first one wonders if they may have read this one, but no, just a page or two more and one knows it is a different book entirely. Bell and Doyle continue on their quest to track down Cream, a former fellow med student of Doyle's. They take off to Dunwich, a small seaside town, much of which has been eroded by the waves of the North Sea. Here, setting out to solve a disappearance, followed by other murders, they are convinced they are on the right trail. Many twists and turns are included, as was as, of course, impossible escapes. All of which make for a good read. And yes, although published in 2006, it's a surprise that Pirie has not followed up with a fourth along the same lines. Guess his time as a screenwriter, film producer, and film critic has left no time for mystery writing.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to confess right at the start that I love novels that play on the Sherlock Holmes story, so I was delighted to read “The Dark Water,” which purports to be “The Strange Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes.” David Pirie constructs his story—a very convoluted story at that—by making Arthur Conan Doyle the protagonist in this piece and including echoes and tidbits from the Homes corpus. And he does it very well, indeed. I would give this novel 4.5 stars.
Doyle here serves in the place of Dr. Watson, the important sidekick who depends on a greater logical mind than his own, in this case, the mind of Dr. Joseph Bell, the Holmes-like figure in the story. Moriarity in this proto-story is Thomas Cream, alias Dr. Mere, but while Mere is clearly pitting his talents against those of Bell, he seems to have a particular animus against Doyle, whom he captures, tortures, and nearly kills. And anyone connected to Doyle, from his love Elizabeth (whom Mere murdered before the start of the story) to anyone who helps or befriends him, is liable to be killed as well, which makes the story both terrifying and melancholy. Anything that Doyle or Bell do is likely to trigger more murder (though usually staged to look like an accident).
The characters are true to their progenitors, with Doyle often not recognizing what Bell’s plans are, and Mere, until the end, seems to be one or two steps ahead of the pair no matter what they do. Mere’s background seems to be more like Jack the Ripper’s in that his main pleasure comes in killing women, especially prostitutes, but he is a monstrously cruel villain to everyone who gets in his way. In this story, he has returned to England after a lengthy absence and is in need of money to fuel his revenge plans against Bell and Doyle (who thwarted him earlier and sent him packing to North America). The plot has many twists and turns, including Doyle’s initial capture and escape, travel to various places that Mere might be, a mysterious witch’s cottage and pond (whose owner is missing), puzzles of various kinds, hidden rooms, and more. The story is dramatic, tightly woven, and exciting (the I-can’t-put-this-down kind of exciting), and worth the time.
“The Dark Water” is a great read for plot lovers, Holmes lovers, and puzzle lovers. For those who know the Holmes corpus, it’s fun to see how various episodes or people are incorporated into this story. Its feel is nineteenth-century gloom with a sprinkle of hope situated in Doyle and Bell, who will move heaven and earth to defeat evil incarnate.

[Mark Luongo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting page turner that in this case has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the "Dr. Watson role " and participating in the cases of his mentor Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh. Story reads well with many twists and turns and a Moriarty-like adversary intent on deadly mischief. I'll stop before I say too much.
The windswept English seacoast (late 19th Century) along the North Sea is the setting and if you weren't chilly enough (it's January as I write this) the description of the flurries, the rain, wind, dark nights and the crashing waves are enough to chill your bones further. Brrrr!

[Outlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a fan of the BBC version of these offerings from David Pirie, but this tale was never brought to the screen, and it would be nice to see it made. it's a follow-on story from the story used for "Dr Bell & Mr Doyle" with the return of the villain, Dr Thomas Neill Cream who once again wreaks havoc on Doyle and his many victims - a truly dastardly character for Dr Bell to hunt down. I do like that Pirie mixes the real-life characters and crimes with the fiction he creates. It's a pity there are only 3 titles listed on the subject from this author.

[BRT · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was indeed a very "strange beginning" for the novel. It opens with Arthur Conan Doyle being held drugged & captive by a mysterious evil psychopath. Doyle escapes and goes to see his friend Dr. Bell, purportedly the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. What follows is a lengthy and complicated search for the psychopath during which Dr. Bell proves to be the ultimate Holmes, eerie intellect & rude behavior to the max. Good read.

[Cindy Segal]

Not good

It is very rare for me to not finish a book. I am one third of the .way through this & have yet to see the observational and deductive skills that Dr. Bell taught his student, Arthur Doyle, in the classroom. Those skills of diagnosing illness that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later used as a basis for.Sherlock Holmes.
The writing is OK but the story is going nowhere and I tried to keep reading but could not.

[Cecilia Rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doyle returns to narrated a mystery that references:
The Speckled Band and The Final Problem.
Set in Edinburgh and in the town of Dunwich,
Pirie's style echoes Doyle, while having a unique
voice.
Anyone who has read H.P. Lovecraft may recognize the town's
name, as he used it as a title for a short story: The Dunwich Horror.

[Victoria M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5, this was a surprisingly interesting novel involving the back story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Bell is the prototype of the famous fictional detective, who doesn’t make an appearance at all. Rather gruesome in places, but clever.

[A.J. Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had previously read "The Patient's Eyes" in this series, and I enjoyed this entry as well. Joseph Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle pursue serial killer Thomas Neill Cream [a real person like Bell and Doyle] to remote Dunwich and finally catch up to him.

[Margaret Gordon-Espe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grisly, but a page-turner

I loved the old-fashioned diction and style of this book. I felt as though I were reading a book written in the 1880's.

[Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific mystery reminiscent of the "Hounds of the Baskerville". A bit more graphic and dark that the author's previous novels. Very fun read!!

[ATM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the Dr. Bell characterization. There were a lot of twists and turns which kept me reading. It is quite gory. I didn’t read the other two books (didn’t know about them until I was almost done with this one), but not sure it mattered. I had to keep reminding myself “ this is the beginning of Sherlock, this is the beginning of Sherlock...”

[Anna Bergmark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange beginnings? So it says. A strange ending? Well, possibly. But the strangest thing of all - the journey itself!

A leads to B. I understand. B leads to C. Yeah, I get it. C leads to D. Sure, I'm still... No. No wait. How did the story end up here, in THIS place, with THESE people?

It's a meandering river indeed. You flow with it just fine for awhile, but after the umpteenth bend you start feeling disorientated and the starting point is completely lost to you. Confusion follows. You read on, but without any deeper understanding of the intrigue. (Without even a shallow one, truth be told.) But alright. The doom and gloom atmosphere is well executed and the writing in general is solid enough. So...

3 lukewarm and slightly annoying stars.

[Marco · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is -by far- better than #1 and #2. I actually liked it ;)
This is a dark story about Mr. Doyle and Mr. Bell. The riddles and mysteries are quite nice and not only to keep the great Bell busy (the reader has just enough clues to solve it). It even contains a polyalphabetic cipher!
Mr. Bell does what Mr. Bell does: he solves things without much attention for people (as long as it is rational...). Mr Doyle feels like he is not really a part of the solution to this mystery and gets a little frustrated. So, the characters finally get 'characteristics' :) It's nicely done!

But... because there is always a but... most of the story takes place in Dunwich in the late nineteenth century. The story is based on (parts of) the legend of the witch. Sure, this legend has a longer history (just like any other town has its legends). But, the Dunwich legend did not got this famous intil 1929, when H.P. Lovecraft published his version of The Dunwich Horror The Dunwich Horror and Others (based on multiple legends and one of the core stories of the Chtulhy Mythos), which I really like.

So... the verdict: 4 stars; nice work David Pirie!