The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is a homage to both Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraftian fantasy. The book is told as a memoir written by Captain John Wyndham, who finds lodging with a sorceress and named Ms. Shaharazad Hass. The Mysterious Letter is their first case together.

The reader is dropped into the world of Captain John Wyndham. Everything takes place in a multi-dimensional, multi-timeline, multiverse world, with a roughly steampunk Victorian aesthetic. Ms. Haas is approached by a friend, and by “friend” I mean “ex-lover and mortal enemy,” which describes a surprising number of people in Ms. Haas’ life. This friend, Miss Eirene Viola, asks Ms. Haas to find out who is blackmailing Eirebe. The detecting that ensues includes, but is not limited to, a ball, a shark attack, various attacks both magical and mundane, and a lot of tea.

Watching this gender-flipped, fantasy Holmes tribute play out is a lot of fun, but it’s more “fantasy” than “Holmes.” Sherlock Holmes could solve a mystery without leaving his room (sometimes) and is focused entirely on intellect. Haas travels all over the place engaging in one adventure after another in search of clues. Sherlock Holmes famously said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” In contrast, Haas declares, “When you’ve eliminated the possible, all that remains is the impossible, and I find that so much more satisfying to work with.”

Much of the charm of the book comes from the narration. It is narrated in first-person, past tense by Wyndham. Wyndham is concerned with propriety, so he sometimes edits dialogue, as in the following:

Ms. Haas moved her mouth close to my ear. “I cannot believe I engaged in connubial activities with this gentleman. But I suppose I was very young.”

As a matter of record, I should add that the words “engaged,” “connubial,” “activities,” and “gentleman,” were not, in actuality, used by Ms. Haas at this juncture, but I have taken some licence in representing her use of language in order to protect the sensibilities of my readers.

Wyndham goes on to describe all manner of bloodcurdling events with sangfroid. He likes to give exposition, but his editor objects:

Before I proceed with the central thrust of the narrative, it behooves me to ensure that the reader has an adequate understanding of the history behind the lost and marvellous place to which we now journeyed. My editor is not in agreement with me on this matter and has requested on several occasions that I excise these elucidating passages in favor of scenes of a more sensational or salacious nature. For those among you who share my editor’s predilections, please rest assured that following this necessary digression there shall be a sequence in which we fight a shark, another in which we are suspected of murder, and a third in which we are drawn into intercourse with several members of the city’s vile criminal underworld.

Meanwhile, Haas is a fascinating character. She is powerful but bored. She is the queen of witty and scathing comeback. She uses drugs in what should be lethal amounts and dies several times throughout the book, incidents which she seems to regard as mere inconveniences. She is gleefully amoral, although Wyndham serves as her morality pet. She is messy, she is impulsive, and she dresses sometimes in dresses, sometimes in trousers, and sometimes in very little. She does whatever she wants to do when she wants to do it.

I do want to tell readers that Haas is bisexual or pansexual, which is great, and also very promiscuous, which is also great BUT which does play into a harmful stereotype about bisexuals (they are often described as promiscuous). There’s a fine line between stereotyping and creating a sex positive character and each reader will have to draw their own conclusion about where the line falls. My personal feeling is that Haas is such a unique person that she doesn’t represent anyone but herself, and as a person who loves physical instant gratification of all kinds, her behavior is in character.

On page 2, Wyndham hints that he was assigned female at birth. With one very brief exception, this is the only time that the matter is alluded to, although his estrangement from his family is discussed for other reasons elsewhere. There’s no romance except for some hints of tension between him and a law enforcement official known as Second Augur Lawson, as well as some flirtation from an endearingly awkward necromancer. I hope this will be the first book in a series as I desperately ship Wyndham and Lawson.

The reason for the B is that the mystery itself is not terribly compelling and it seems that Ms. Haas should have been able to solve it from the comfort of her own home using logic and her extensive knowledge of issues such as magic, time travel, alternate universes, and so forth. This is a book in which the mystery serves only as an excuse for hijinks. The longer the book went on the less interested in the plot I became – a weakness in a book that sells itself as a Holmes homage. I stuck with it because I was so attached to Wyndham, and because I couldn’t stop wondering what Haas would do next!