Laurie R. King. O Jerusalem. Bantam, 2000.

I went to the public universal library card catalog known as Amazon.com to see how many books were titled O Jerusalem. I found ten on the first three pages of my search. The title comes from the Bible:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! (Psalm 137:5-6)

The O Jerusalem by Collins and LaPierre was one of the most exciting books I ever read. I was visiting a friend who owned a copy. I started reading it before going to bed. I ended up spending most of the night to finish it in one sitting.

King’s O Jerusalem is very different. King has made a cottage industry by writing sequels to the Sherlock Holmes stories. The narrator of the tales taking Watson’s place is Mary Russell, a precocious teenager. In O Jerusalem she has just turned nineteen. Holmes recognizes her talent and is training her to become a detective like him, so he takes her along on certain cases that bring him out of retirement.

In this case, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft enlists his help for some government work in Palestine. The year is 1919, after the end of World War I, the defeat of the Turks, and the beginning of the British Mandate there. According to the novel, Holmes had spent some time in Palestine in the 1880s and learned Arabic. Russell is Jewish and speaks Hebrew, at least at the bat mitzvah level. Holmes and Russell, then embark to the Holy Land where their adventures begin.

Much of the tale is a kind of argosy through Israel. They visit numerous locations from Beersheva to Jericho and from Jaffa to Haifa. Much of the time they are accompanied by two Arabs who work for the British, Ali and Mahmoud. They encounter a few murders, and at some point each one of the four bails out at least one of the other members of the group.

However, the biggest mystery seems to be what Holmes and Russell are doing there. They discover some interesting facts and interesting people, but no one really knows what the actual purpose of their mission to Palestine is. About halfway through the novel Holmes and Russell meet General Allenby—a person whom Russell greatly admires. Finally they get a sense of what they are looking for.

It seems that there is a Turkish-rooted underground that wants to destabilize the British occupation and League of Nations mandate. Holmes deduces from what he observes that the plans of this underground include something big—think September 11 big.

Holmes begins to get close as he visits an ancient Orthodox monastery. He identifies one of the key operators in the underground group as someone thought to be dead. It is also pretty clear that someone in the British administration or army is informing the underground of what the British are doing. At one point they kidnap Holmes, and they clearly knew where his car was headed.

Some of the various parts come together, and the tale that begins with rambles around the Holy Land ends with a truly tense tale. The opposition works in the underground not merely figuratively but literally. Holmes and Russell have a claustrophobic adventure among the various tunnels under the city of Jerusalem.

There are some allusions to other Holmes stories. One is mentioned explicitly as they come across a ten year old issue of the Strand magazine. Another time Holmes disguises himself with the pseudonym of William Gillette. I had to laugh since William Gillette was an actor who made a living a hundred years ago playing Sherlock Holmes on stage. (A few chapters later, this allusion is explained for the uninitiated.)

Even though the story takes a while to get off the ground, the many fascinating, historical, and Biblical places they visit give us an idea of what the Holy Land was like, and in many ways, what it is still like.

One quibble with the storytelling: Our first-person narrator occasionally uses words or terms that would not have been in use in 1919. One might be able to excuse some of the wording by saying that Russell, born in 1900, is looking back in the 1980s or 1990s and has picked up modern terms in the meantime. However, when a character speaks of the Armenian genocide, that is a clear anachronism since the term genocide was not coined until World War II.