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

Themes

The Thrill of the Chase

Retellings of famous literary or cultural narratives, such as the loose one presented in Holmes, Marple & Poe, have, by definition, strong and specific genre influences. Given the iconic status of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Jane Marple, and Edgar Allan Poe in the detective fiction genre, the invocation of these three figures draws not only on their specific literary antecedents but also on the genre that they represent. Holmes, Marple & Poe uses the tropes of these genres to build suspense in the novel and capture the thrill of the chase, as the quest to uncover the truth drives the protagonists’ actions.

Patterson and Sitts’s novel draws heavily on thriller conventions, particularly the style of thriller that Patterson is best known for. Holmes, Marple & Poe uses short paragraphs and short chapters, the majority of which end in some form of cliffhanger, to convey the detectives’ forward momentum. In contrast to the original Holmes, Marple, or Poe detective stories, this version of the detective narrative focuses on action rather than deduction. When the novel’s private investigators come to conclusions, they do so quickly; rather than slowing the narrative pace to convey the methodical thought process required to solve crimes, the investigators love the chase. The detectives thrive on the energy they derive from the pursuit, staying physically active and moving at a breakneck pace.

Poe’s thrill-seeking behavior, particularly fast driving, reflects this quest for the adrenaline rush that solving crimes provides. His tendency to engage in altercations during their investigations and chase or fight suspects, such as the Siglik brothers, demonstrates his drive toward action rather than a more contemplative form of detection.

Fraught Relationships With Police

Crime novels are often considered socially conservative; they typically feature an implied faith in the function and health of legal systems. One contrast, for example, is the social problem novel, which might argue that political or legal systems need to be reconstructed or reimagined in order to be properly just. The arc of many detective novels offers an endpoint that arises not when a villain is convicted of a crime, as in a legal thriller, but when they are determined, by the detective’s estimation of what constitutes suitable evidence, to have committed the crime. When the criminal is handed over to police or some other form of legal authority, the novel treats that criminal’s suitable punishment as a fait accompli—which suggests that these novels view policing and the criminal justice system as something that works consistently, if not perfectly.

In Holmes, Marple & Poe, however, the detectives’ relationship with the NYPD is fraught. Though the trio works increasingly closely with Helene Grey, a lieutenant in the NYPD, throughout the novel, this relationship is made possible by Grey’s increasing loyalty to the three private investigators—which frequently puts her in conflict with her colleagues in the police force. Indeed, Police Commissioner Boolin is an antagonist in the novel due to his immediate dislike of the three private investigators (and, it is implied, non-police detectives in general) and to his alliance with the corrupt Mayor Rollins. Boolin’s status as head of the NYPD renders him a representative for the police force—and policing more broadly. Yet the novel does not go so far as to argue that, because Boolin is corrupt, policing itself is inherently corrupt. Rather, the text parallels Boolin with other powerful, corrupt men in the novel, including Rollins and billionaire Huntley Bain, who is arrested at the end of the text.

The tension between how Grey and Boolin operate in the novel indicates that Holmes, Marple & Poe is neither straightforwardly pro-police nor anti-police. Instead, policing, like wealth and political prestige, emerges as a locus of power in which corruption is made highly possible. Whether the potential for corruption is weaponized, the novel argues, depends on the person wielding that power. The capacity to be corrupt is also not tied to legality: Grey is lauded for her willingness to break certain rules, as are the three private investigators. Instead, the novel advocates for a commitment to justice that may or may not lie within legal constraints—but offers a version of justice that is defined almost unilaterally by the three protagonists.

Gender and Detection Styles

In Holmes, Marple & Poe, the three title detectives function as a sort of perpetual deus ex machina—translated literally as “the god outside the machine,” this term refers to sudden authorial intervention to resolve plot points without previous setup within the fictional world. In this case, with each seemingly insurmountable challenge that arises (framed as such due to the way it stymies the police), the detectives reveal longstanding talents or skills that they have not yet disclosed, which are always near-magically perfect for the situation at hand. When they need to track a ransom payment, Holmes immediately programs a tracking app that follows a tracker disguised as a pearl in a necklace. When they are faced with six decades’ worth of skeletal remains, Poe hacks into the NYPD’s open cases database and creates a map that shows every unsolved disappearance since the 1950s. The one continual exception to Holmes and Poe’s knowledge is anything that the novel frames as gendered information, which is then assigned to Marple’s purview alone.

This influence of gender on detecting styles appears in the form of both knowledge and procedure. When the three search Zozi Turner’s room after her disappearance, for example, only Marple recognizes the plastic object in the trash as a contraceptive device; Holmes and Poe seem shocked that an 18-year-old woman might have sexual relationships. Marple, moreover, is shown as having a keener eye for people’s emotions and is presented as the only detective of the three who can comfort crime victims—as when Addilyn Charles requests only Marple’s aid. Though some of this might arise from the characterization of Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s source text (which still raises questions of gender, as Christie famously created the character to argue for the value and intelligence of older ladies), the fact that Poe and Holmes conspicuously lack these (traditionally feminized) traits argues that the novel considers this women’s knowledge alone.

The novel is ambivalent about whether Marple’s knowledge illustrates the specific viewpoint and value that women bring to detecting or whether this type of knowledge is simply unimportant to Holmes and Poe given their specific talents in detection. Less ambiguous is the novel’s framing of Marple as the emotional core of the team; though she seeks help when frightened by a mouse, she more frequently buttresses the other two members of her team, especially since they have various substance use concerns. Marple is thus frequently thrown into the role of a caretaker—another feminized archetype—without which the detecting team as a whole could not function well enough to solve crimes.