The Moor

The Moor is the fourth Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King, published in 1998. Mary Russell and her husband investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor.

The plot is deliberately close to the material of a well-known Holmes story, since it takes the detectives back to the moor and to a death that is accompanied by reports of a phantom coach. That overlap is the point rather than a coincidence, because the series is written on the premise that Conan Doyle's accounts were incomplete and that Russell was present for parts of the record. The landscape is the other half of the evidence: a district of bogs, tin mines, isolated farms and weather that erases tracks, which is why the local stories carry as much weight as the physical traces and why the detectives have to test the legends rather than dismiss them. The telegram that opens the book comes from Devon and asks her to bring her compass; her reluctance to leave Oxford is the first of their small frictions.