The House of Silk

The House of Silk is a Sherlock Holmes novel by the English writer Anthony Horowitz, published in 2011 by Mulholland Books. It is narrated by Dr John Watson, and it opens with an account of how he and Holmes met, in the manner of A Study in Scarlet.

The client is Edmund Carstairs, an art dealer who has come back from America with a problem. Paintings of his were destroyed by a gang of Irish robbers, and since then a man in a flat cap has been following him, a figure the police wanted long before he crossed the Atlantic. Carstairs hires Holmes after his own detective fails, and the investigation is drawn upwards from a matter of intimidation into the business of a house where powerful men pay for things that cannot be discussed. The book uses the familiar apparatus of the stories: the Baker Street Irregulars running errands across the city, a boy named Ross placed on watch outside a hotel, and Watson following along and writing it up afterwards. Watson tells the reader at the start that the events were for many years considered too shocking to be written down at all.

Horowitz keeps to the period detail and the manner of Watson's narration, and he gives the plot a darker subject than the original stories usually chose, which is why the doctor explains at the outset why the account was held back for so long.