There has to be a story here....

[graycardinal]

 I  had originally planned to see Skull Island today, but matinee showtimes worked out to make Beauty & the Beast a better fit. (I definitely recommend the new version, but this is not that post.)

No, this is the post about the trip home again on the bus, and the trio of teenagers who occupied  the seats across from  mine. There were two girls, one with dark hair and washed-to-almost-white denim jeans, the other not quite blonde with a black skirt  and top plus white sweater.  Their companion was a young man with neatly waved wheaten hair and pale grey jeans. All in all, not quite clean-cut enough to be Mormons on mission, but considerably more tame of dress than one tends to see in the weekend bus-riding teen population out here in the burbs....

...except that one of them was carrying  a small rectangular shopping bag clearly labeled and striped as coming from...

...wait for  it...

Victoria's Secret.

And it wasn't either of the girls.

And what I realized only just now: there is no Victoria's Secret  in the shopping center where we all boarded that bus.

Clearly there's a story here, but I am not at all sure what it is.

Comments

[sanguinity]

Is there an upcoming post about the new Beauty and the Beast? Shall I save my Beauty and the Beast questions until then?

Also, have you read the new Cavallaro? I had to go read it twice to try to figure out the plot, and I'm still not dead certain I've got it.

[graycardinal]

You talked me into one, just posted. Have not yet got hold of the new Cavallaro -- but I just finished a book, so this was a good moment to remind me about that one.

And yes, I owe you email. Things are slightly less insane than they've been, but still busy. Soon I shall dig out from under the backwash....

[graycardinal]

Also, I had the great good luck to encounter the Cavallaro via a chance library stop, and am progressing nicely. One question, if I may: Leander has just disappeared, August has just come onstage, and in light of the charts up front it has occurred to me - should I consider that the possibility of a renegade "good" Moriarty suggests the equal possibility of a renegade "evil" Holmes? (A straight yes/no is sufficient; I need no specific spoiler beyond that.)

[sanguinity]

Yes.

Is it possible you'll grasp this in a single pass? Of the four of us (you, me, Lang, Grrlpup), you'd be the first.

[graycardinal]

No farther along (though I should get some reading in once I catch my bus; there are errandss to be done today), but a handful of preliminary observations:

(1) We know from the first book that Cavallaro is devious, and thus it seems highly unlikely to me that she'd have spent the first 50-odd pages on pure setup. Therefore, the mystery plot has started moving before it appears to have done so.

(2) There's no Mycroft on that family tree. This is...interesting.

(3) Structurally speaking, if this is in fact a trilogy as it's been billed, that suggests some things about where this book is likely to end.

(4) Consider where the money in the Holmes family is -- and isn't.

(5) There are, in the end, a limited number of candidates for an "evil" Holmes...even if Cavallaro is being devious. But in this case, I think the "walks like a duck" test is relevant. And we have been shown a fairly large and conspicuous duck over the course of the last book and the opening of this one.

[sanguinity]

1) That seemed self-evident to me, too. Certainly the half-overheard arguments between the adults struck me as likely being relevant to Leander's disappearance.

2) Is it? Are you expecting Mycroft-descendants to appear from somewhere?

3) Such as? I know where it ends, of course, but I'd love to hear your early speculation.

4) And the money or lack of money in various places suggests what to you?

5) Who is your large and conspicuous duck? It strikes me that there are multiple candidates for duckness, even in the first book.

[graycardinal]

[via phone]

Hah. No, I need another pass through at least part of this too. That said: I don't think I trust any data at all that's sourced through Milo...and that seems to take in an awfully big chunk of the overall supply of data.

[sanguinity]

Is it Milo you don't trust, or Milo's data, or something else? (Or a combination of the above?)

[graycardinal]

Both. Greystone is far too clearly a replication of the original Professor Moriarty's webwork of underworld genius to be coincidental. Milo may or may not be a deliberate Evil Mastermind, but that's what he's presenting as at the end of this installment.

[sanguinity]

Huh. I thought Milo was pretty obviously supposed to be a throwback to Mycroft, and his web of data and influence; I hadn't considered likening him to Moriarty. (And this despite my belief that Moriarty and Mycroft are the matched pair of canon, not Moriarty and Sherlock. So that was a fairly major possibility to miss on my part.)

[graycardinal]

Milo as a Mycroft-analog? I did not get that vibe at all.

Cavallaro has been very clear from the first that Milo's business is mercenary in nature, as opposed to a public service. Her YA readership is probably too young to get the reference -- and I suppose it might have slipped past her editors, if they're young enough -- but "Greystone" is very obviously a riff on the real-world "Blackwater" organization, and that has a lot of not-very-savory connotations attached to it. It is also, as you have probably deduced by now, my walks-like-a-duck entity from the other subthread. Milo acts throughout this book with total and casual disregard for civil authority -- and gets away with it not because his heart is pure, but because he's essentially got civil authority under his professional thumb. Greystone is very much not a proto-MI6; it's Milo's personal cadre of ninja enforcers.

Which makes Milo more a Moriarty figure than any of the actual Moriarty family we meet -- most of whom may be criminals, sure, but none of whom display much in the way of mastermind ability. My broad theory is that Milo has essentially set the actual Moriarty clan up as straw enemies, because he needs the appearance of a clan of Evil Masterminds in the wild in order to justify Greystone's existence and methods.

Nor does Milo's relationship with Charlotte strike me as comparable. In canon and most traditional pastiche, Mycroft and Sherlock are very good about respecting one another's boundaries, but Milo manipulates Charlotte just as casually as he does everyone else with whom he interacts. Also, he routinely wiretaps both Charlotte's and Watson's phones.... I call that not just overprotective but creepy, even for this clutch of Holmeses.

I was also struck by a line in one of Leander's emails to Jamie's father: "We've had a detente with the Moriartys for almost a century." This is more reliable evidence, I'd argue, than virtually anything Milo has to say about the temperament and behavior of the Moriarty clan -- and Milo makes a far more believable catalyst than does Charlotte for the shattering of that detente.

There is, I suppose, a chance that we'll find out in the third book that Lucien Moriarty has been pulling Milo's strings since the first page of Study in Charlotte. But I honestly doubt it. My guess is that Book Three will focus on the showdown between Milo and Charlotte for all the proverbial marbles (very possibly including the Elgin ones), which Charlotte and Jamie will ultimately win because she has Jamie in her corner, and Milo has never loved anyone but himself. Which is not in some respects a terribly Holmesian lesson, but it makes more sense out of the amazing level of family dysfunction in this Holmes clan than anything else I can extrapolate just now.

[sanguinity]

I should have been clearer: I hadn't considered Milo-as-Moriarty myself, but I understood what you meant once you said it. Milo as the true heir to the Professor in this series is a strong and interesting theory.

(I probably hadn't gone there myself because I have fewer lawful-good feelings about Mycroft than Doyle did. I agree with you that Blackwater has a lot of not-savory connotations, but I also strongly associate it with the US govt doing nefarious things overseas; 'nefarious things overseas' is also one of my associations with the British Empire, and thus Mycroft.)


:: In canon and most traditional pastiche, Mycroft and Sherlock are very good about respecting one another's boundaries... ::

Which raises the question of whether this is more strongly influenced by traditional pastiche or more revisionist adaptations. Language-Escapes thought Cavallaro was strongly influenced by BBC, herself.

Because I know you don't watch BBC: their Mycroft is exactly that level of personally-invasive creepy. BBC spent the entire first 90min episode trying to fake out viewers that this guy running around being concern-troll creepy was Moriarty, but HAHA SURPRISE HE'S MYCROFT. That made BBC's Mycroft the lead entry in the chain of Moriarty-like Mycrofts we've had since. (Perhaps it's clearer now why I associated Milo with Mycroft? I've seen quite a few recent portrayals of Mycroft that look quite a lot like Milo.)

All that said, I think we both agree that Milo is shady and worth our scrutiny.


:: "We've had a detente with the Moriartys for almost a century." ::

So, this bothered me about that line on both read-throughs: wasn't it Leander who gave Jamie the History of Holmeses and Moriartys In The 20th Century, which included things as recent as nuclear arms sales? I've given my copy back to the library, so I can't check, but did I misremember/misunderstand that earlier conversation?


And I'm going to hold comments on your last paragraph until you've finished August. (Which you must be close to doing, if you've gotten to Leander's emails!)

[graycardinal]

On Cavallaro's influences:

Hmmm. BBC-Sherlock is clearly a non-trivial influence -- indeed, possibly this trilogy is in part a direct response to Cumberbatch's portrayal of Holmes -- but I think that what Cavallaro is doing here is also in some respects in direct opposition to the BBC series' fundamental assumptions.

It's been clear from the start that both Cumberbatch's Sherlock and Cavallaro's Charlotte are broken personalities, for instance -- and that they're broken in some of the same ways. But Sherlock's condition is understood to be very much self-created (because the BBC series simply brings the character forward in time and in isolation), whereas a great deal of Charlotte's psychological damage looks to be the product of growing up in a deeply dysfunctional -- if not outright abusive -- family environment.

Mind, with your additional background on the BBC portrayals, I do see why Milo might be regarded as a Mycroft figure. But as we've both observed in various contexts, Moriarty and Mycroft are to some degree mirror-images of one another in ways that Moriarty and Sherlock are not...and it seems to me that in Cavallaro's universe, the relationship between Milo and Charlotte is just this kind of mirrored opposition. Moreover, as I've observed upstream, there isn't a comparable mirror-adversarial relationship between Charlotte herself and any of the established on-stage Moriartys.

[continued on next rock]

[graycardinal]

And as to the Moriartys in particular:

You're right that it's a conversation with Leander that supplies the history of Holmes/Moriarty rivalry -- but even in that conversation, Leander is at pains to note that it was mostly rivalry rather than vendetta, that the only direct Holmesian casualties of any of it were Araminta Holmes's cats, and that there had been no run-ins between Holmeses and Moriartys for 20 years at the point when Alistair hired August.

In short, what this tells me is that if the Moriartys had launched a revived vendetta, it would most logically be targeted against Alistair and/or Milo. As the climax makes clear, though, everything that happens in Germany is based on the illusion of a vendetta rather than the real thing. Emma wasn't poisoned; Leander wasn't taken by a Moriarty. (Whether there was a Moriarty plot to poison Emma is open to discussion; that allegation is made, but I'm not entirely sure I believe it.)

Which gets us to that ending, which is very rushed indeed (and I think deliberately so, to avoid anyone's being able to stop and really analyze any of the "evidence").

As I've indicated previously, I just don't see a viable candidate for Evil Mastermind in any of the onstage Moriartys (and given that we've never actually seen Lucien onstage, I am wary of casting him in that role too cavalierly). We're left to look on the Holmesian side, and that pool of candidates is pretty narrow. Alistair is evidently both venal and corrupt, but just as obviously he flunked Masterminding 101 long ago; he controls no one at all. Emma is more competent, but we see very little of her and what we do see is mixed at best. Leander? He's evidently the real Sherlock of the clan -- a lone wolf with enough resources to do as he likes -- and seems content in that role.

And then there's Milo. Who built Greystone into an army of ninja enforcers because there were things machines couldn't do. Who's all about control and information management. Who wiretaps his sister's phone (and Watson's) as a matter of course before any of the other villainy in the book has happened. And who has, by all appearances, been doing most of the escalating of the Holmes/Moriarty feud for some years now. If he's not this trilogy's Evil Mastermind, he's doing a really good job of faking it.

And I do not believe for one second that he thought he was shooting Hadrian, because that would imply that his own team was less than competent at keeping Hadrian in hand. If Hadrian actually escaped, it's because Milo gave his team orders to let that happen. (Also, that would require "Hadrian" to have gotten into the house and then come out again with the Holmeses, and that's another can't-possibly-have-happened-that-way scenario.)