“Crow is better since your advent. More. . . I hesitate to use the word ‘human,’ but less like a machine devoted to murder.” He looked at me, his gaze steady and his eyes very blue. “Less like someone who might Fall.” [loc. 8155]
London, 1888. A doctor returns from service in Afghanistan, wounded and without purpose. A friend introduces him to an unusual individual who is looking for someone to go halves on a flat in Baker Street. A partnership is born.
Perhaps it's not the partnership you're expecting: the doctor's name is J H Doyle, and the person looking for a flatmate is a black-winged angel named Crow, an angel without a dominion, prone to describing himself as the Angel of London. Doyle's secrets, revealed only gradually to the reader, are like an open book to the angel. And London is peopled by vampires, hellhounds, werewolves and ghosts, as well as the angels both named and Nameless (but not Fallen -- the Fallen destroy whatever they touch) who protect their dominions and largely tolerate Crow.
Steampunk London, familiar cases given new twists (Addison's transformation of The Hound of the Baskervilles is especially divergent), and the case that Conan Doyle's Holmes never tackled: a serial killer in the East End, murdering and mutilating prostitutes.
It'd be easy to read this as 'casefic', like the original sequence of Holmes and Watson stories: the detective solves a case with flashes of brilliance, while his loyal sidekick acts as an intermediary to the mundane world. But that reading would miss a great deal of the charm of this novel: the growing respect, affection and cooperation between Doyle and Crow, and the ways in which their natures and secrets interact with the old stories to produce something new. This Crow is gentler and kinder than Holmes: this Doyle has more (and also, in a way, less) agency, and more independence than Dr Watson.
The prose is measured and old-fashioned: not quite Conan Doyle's style, but a pleasing riff on it. Perhaps there could have been more exploration of the world Addison's built: airships, an America without the United States, the hive-mind of the Nameless, the involvement of the Fallen in human wars ... But the focus is on the evolution of Doyle and Crow's relationship, and that was thoroughly satisfying.
I had already decided that The Angel of the Crows owed as much to the TV series Sherlock as to Conan Doyle's original canon: I was pleased to read the author's note in which she confirmed that it began as Sherlock wingfic.
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