Holmes, Marple & Poe: The Greatest Crime-Solving Team of the Twenty-First Century

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-24

Chapters 25-48

Chapters 49-66

Chapters 67-96

Chapters 97-118

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Holmes’s Sense of Smell

Holmes’s hyperosmia, or unusually acute sense of smell, is an invaluable detective ability. Throughout the text, it allows him to quickly solve mysteries that otherwise might have dragged on: In the novel’s early chapters, his sense of smell directs them straight to Sloane Stone’s body; later, in the Siglik house, he is able to smell the pit of bodies even through layers of stone and concrete, despite being unconscious from a heroin overdose mere moments before. Holmes’s hyperosmia therefore takes on a near-magical power, one that enables the text to move forward quickly in perpetual action without the slower pace of logical deduction (which the original Sherlock Holmes was best known for performing).

Holmes’s sense of smell also leads him to one of his greatest struggles in the text: his heroin use. Holmes frames taking the drug as a reaction to the intense and constant sensory barrage of his hyperosmia; his choice to consume heroin through the nose makes him both worried and faintly hopeful that his sense of smell will be dulled. His decision to attend drug rehabilitation at the end of the novel suggests that he no longer wishes to compromise his sense of smell via heroin.

Cars and Trucks

Cars and trucks recur as motifs in the novel. Poe’s car collection is the most prevalent: Poe is a classic sports car enthusiast; as he reveals later in the novel, driving sports cars offers him a sense of closeness to his late romantic partner, Annie. Even so, not all of Poe’s cars offer him this intense emotional connection. When one of his cars is dinged by gunfire, for example, he is more irritated at the inconvenience of repairing the paint than devastated at the metaphorical damage to his deceased partner.

The Texas truck, which is later revealed to belong to Carson, Lucy Ferry’s ex-boyfriend and murderer, initially emerges in the novel as a not very useful clue. Though Marple sees the truck relatively early in the novel, the prevalence of white trucks registered in Texas means that she cannot resume any related investigation until after Lucy’s body is discovered. After Carson is arrested, however, Marple purchases the truck at a police auction and drives it to Texas so that she can return Lucy’s ashes to her family. Marple’s surprised delight at driving the truck plays contrary to her characterization as someone with primmer tastes, while her choice to drive the truck back to Texas with Lucy’s remains provides a narrative inversion of the way Lucy’s killer followed her from Texas to New York.

New York City

New York City serves as a backdrop for Holmes, Marple, and Poe’s first investigations as a three-person partnership. The city’s geography serves both to orient the reader and to highlight different characters’ relationships to New York society. The three detectives’ building in Brooklyn frames them as part of New York City (since Brooklyn is one of New York’s five boroughs) but external to what many consider the “main” area of New York—Manhattan. This lends them joint insider-outsider status, reinforcing their roles as detectives who are (supposedly, as their backstories are unclear) new to New York but simultaneously highly informed about the goings-on in the city.

The well-to-do figures that the detectives interact with (many of whom are corrupt) are, by contrast, affiliated with rich neighborhoods in Manhattan, which inverts stereotypical portrayals of poorer areas of cities as more prone to crime.

The novel’s presentation of New York is also highly contained, even as its characters make frequent forays out of the city proper. When characters travel to the upstate bean field where Sloane Stone’s body is buried, for example, or the New Jersey woods where Addilyn brings her ransom payments, these places are described as seeming highly remote from New York, even when their geographic locations put them in relative proximity to the city.