★★★★☆ Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin, by Nancy Springer
** spoiler alert ** Moriarty done better
Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin
Nancy Springer
** spoiler alert **
Moriarty done better
I marked this review a spoiler so that I could tell you that in this installment of Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes series, Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin, Enola runs into Holmes nemesis Moriarty1.
In my opinion, the Sherlock Holmes stories suffer from a problem common to many book and movie series: underpowered villains. When I read The Complete Sherlock Holmes I was unimpressed with Moriarty, whom Arthur Conan Doyle (writing as Watson quoting Holmes) introduces thus
He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him.
I’m sorry, but to any mathematician this is just plain stupid. It just gets worse from there. Moriarty (whose first name may be James or Robert or something else depending on which specific Holmes story you’re reading) is just not scary. He’s a criminal mastermind only because Watson and Holmes say he is. Nothing that he does leads you to that conclusion.
Springer‘s Robert Moriarty is truly creepy and chilling. (He is also a not unconvincing mathematician. One gets the impression that Springer, unlike Conan Doyle, may actually have conversed with a real mathematician or two.) Enola goes through some emotional trauma in this one -- if you’re familiar with Sherlock Holmes you know that Sherlock fakes his own death at Moriarty’s hands. Enola is devastated at the news of Sherlock’s death, then elated when she deduces that he’s alive.
Altogether, I thought this one of the best Enola Holmes novels.
A general remark, which I’m putting at the end so that you can easily skip it -- your opinion of the Enola Holmes books may depend a lot on your opinion of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle. If you worship them, you will probably not like Enola. If, however, you believe as I do that the Sherlock Holmes stories are entertaining but deeply flawed, you may enjoy Enola.
I recently weighed in in a discussion among authors. It started when one of them opined that it’s difficult to write a story about a strategic genius because you have to have him/her do some act of strategic genius, which you can’t write unless you yourself are a strategic genius. I answered that this is not really a problem: Just have your genius do something really stupid, then use your magic author powers to make it work out perfectly.
That is basically the entire Sherlock Holmes series. Sherlock repeatedly does and says really stupid things, which Conan Doyle makes into acts of genius. The same flaw accounts for Moriarty’s failure to impress.
Springer‘s Enola is better in this regard. It is true that she sometimes solves her cases by getting lucky, but Springer doesn’t attempt to portray luck as genius.
I thank NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advance reader copy of Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin. Release date: 10-Feb-2026.
Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin on Amazon
By my usual rules this is not a spoiler because Moriarty is prominently mentioned in the publisher’s blurb, but I read it without knowing that, so for me the identification of Moriarty was a revelation.