Just Finished Reading The Pirate King by Laurie R. King

Laurie R. King's 2011 mystery novel The Pirate King...not to be confused with R.A. Salvatore's fantasy novel with the same title...is another one of those books I picked out nearly at random from my local public library's shelves.  It is part of the author's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series...yes, turns out that Holmes wasn't a fictional character after all and is married to protagonist Russell, whom he calls...Russell.  The setting is England in the 1920s as the two go around tackling different cases...personally, I wished that Doctor Watson was in it, too.  The installment I read involves Mary Russell taking on an undercover assignment in a pirate movie filming...a movie with a very convoluted plot that sees her and the crew on a treacherous sea voyage after a stop in Portugal to hire "authentic" looking actors to portray pirates...

The mysteries that Russell is hired to solve seemed to be nothing more than a minor afterthought on the author's part...the story's emphasis changes to the ongoing experiences of the actors, film crews, and "pirates"...and to the final destination of the sailing ship they are on.  I can't be more specific without giving away the story, so I'll just enter in some general reactions.  One, the story gave a glimpse at the fledgling movie industry and Britain's attempts to "catch up" with American films produced in Hollywood. Their strategy in this regard was to make blockbuster adventure movies, filmed not in studios but on location instead...hence the convoluted trip out of England to Portugal...and points south.  Two, the Sherlock Holmes of this series...if this book is to serve as a good example...seemed weaker and less defined.  Of course, it's a bit of a mind game to claim within a fictional series that one of its characters was actually "real"!  Three, in spite of the various flaws I saw in the story line, I did very much like the main protagonist, Mary Russell, an Oxford educated woman fluent in several languages.  Her capacity in Arabic was integral in resolving the crisis at book's end...

So although I thought that The Pirate King drifted too much for much of the novel, I think I'll give Laurie R. King a second chance and read another Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes book...maybe one of the earlier ones (the series began in 1994).  After all, I didn't like all of the late Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mysteries, either.  Oh, by the way, it's not just Sherlock in this series: his competitive brother Mycroft...with whom Russell has an antagonistic relationship...is there as well...