The Good Doyle Is in the Lodge

Sadly, it didn't occur to me immediately that the Mark Frost who wrote this book was the same Mark Frost that co-created Twin Peaks with David Lynch. Knowing this I wondered whether there would be any surreal scenes involving dwarfs, giants, owls, or creamed corn. While (spoiler!) there weren't, The List of 7 was a blast.

It's Christmas Day of 1884 and Arthur Conan Doyle is at home skeptically reading the theosophical treatise Isis Unveiled by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The surgeon has more than a passing interest in the occult. Some is most certainly bunk, to his trained mind, but some may not be. The trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Suddenly he notices an envelope has been slipped under his door. It's an odd letter that implores him to attend a séance the following night. He recognizes the writing as being in the hand of a woman – a damsel in distress.

Intrigued, Doyle decides to attend but gets to the address early and positions himself across the street where he watches as the other attendees arrive. The Boxing Day extravaganza is to include two couples. The first is working class, a brawny man and his pregnant wife while the second arrive in a private carriage. Doyle determines that they are Lady Nicholson and her brother. His reconnoitering done, he approaches the door which he finds to be open, beckoning him inside.

The participants huddle around the table with the medium and the séance begins. A white mist materializes as does an image of a young boy which Lady Nicholson recognizes as her missing son. A fanfare trumpet then appears to the gasp of “The horn of Gabriel!” Doyle spies the filament which suspends the trumpet and, out of disgust, throws his chair at the “unearthly daguerreotype” which shatters and the wires stream down. Then all hell breaks loose as cloaked figures appear from the shadows and start slashing throats.

Things are looking mighty perilous for Doyle when he receives aid from an unknown figure who applies his derring do along with his muscle to defeat their pursuers. The anonymous man identifies himself as a professor at Cambridge. Back at home, Doyle discovers that his apartment has had some unwelcome visitors who have left it is total disarray and with a layer of what appears to be ectoplasmic slime. He then discovers that his upstairs neighbor has been murdered. To add Pelion upon Ossa, a woman was disemboweled nearby and, Doyle being a surgeon, is made a suspect. He goes on the lam and heads to Cambridge to seek out the professor.

After a close encounter with some stone gargoyles that mysteriously have life breathed into them, Doyle finds out that the man who saved his skin is actually Jack Sparks, a private investigator in the employ of the queen. Together they seek out Lady Nicholson's murderers and the fate of her son. Also on the job are Barry and Larry, two rogues that turned away from the dark side with Jack's help. What follows is a romp around England and eldritch encounters which lead to a list of seven names as well as a nefarious plot to commandeer the fate of England.

There are pleasures aplenty to be had in The List of 7, not the least of which is the story itself. Being a fan of Twin Peaks, this was hardly surprising. Frost deftly doles out clues which lead his protagonists into peril. The book captures an immersive feeling of Victoriana and Frost writes gripping action scenes that had me on the edge of my seat and were as good as anything Michael Bay have ever committed to film. Two really stand out for me.

The first involves our heroes paying a visit to Lord Nicholson under the guise of attending one of his grand galas. Frost lets on that something is amiss as their carriage goes down the lengthy lane from the main road to the mansion. It is lined with trees but, at one point, the sides of the road are bare with only fresh stumps to remind visitors of the arboreal splendor that once was. As they approach the mansion, they discover what happened when a wall surrounding the building comes into view. The barrier was hastily erected to keep something out. Or was it to keep something in? Someone had taken an ax to a section of it to allow entrance and so Doyle and Sparks investigate. The genius here is that, for most of this scene, little happens. It is eerily quiet and the estate seemingly lifeless. You know that the mysterious cloaked figures will come to try and put an end to Doyle and Sparks but when? The emptiness of the estate and the knowledge that a wall was built in a hurry ratchets up the tension until it's so thick you can cut it with the wrong side of a knife.

Another great scene involves the discovery of a tunnel beneath a publishing company. Doyle and Sparks are accompanied by Larry here and the companion descends into the dark first. (It was nice to read of someone investigating a dark passage with a candle instead of a 400 watt MagLite which everyone on TV and in the movies seems to have these days.) Traipsing around with only a candle is spooky enough but then the trio hears something or multiple somethings approaching. They find a door locked tight. Who or whatever gets closer and closer as Larry does his level best to pick the lock. They get through the door and lock it behind them whereupon they find themselves in a storage room of the British Museum. The creatures banging on the door are ancient Egyptian mummies which have been reanimated. Despite knowing that Doyle and company would escape, I was glued to the page scared witless.

Aside from the great fun of the game being afoot, it was also neat to read how Jack and his adventures with Doyle prefigure Sherlock Holmes. At the end of the book Doyle is sworn not to divulge what he and Jack did so he creates Holmes so that he can do so indirectly. There's a cocaine addiction, a nemesis – for Jack it's his brother Alexander, and even an incident at Reichenbach Falls. Bigger Holmes fans than me will surely pick up on other things.

Having finished the book I decided to see if any of the characters here other than Doyle were real. It turns out that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was indeed a real person and Isis Unveiled a real book. It turns out that she rhapsodized about the existence of a White Lodge, which will be familiar to Twin Peaks fans. It would seem that Frost is responsible for much more of TP's mythology and weirdness than I had known.

While the first few chapters elucidate upon theosophy a bit, I wish that Frost had delved into it more. His look at the philosophical underpinnings of the subject quickly ends up being relegated to motive for the bad guys. It's enough to provide atmosphere and explanation but it would have been fun had the book kept running with it. One thing it would have done would have been to fill in more details of the age – an age when Darwin and many other scientists were unlocking the secrets of nature and soon a wave of technology based on the knowledge they uncovered would transform the world. Frost sets up tension between science and reason vs. nature and mystery both within Doyle himself and amongst various characters. It's an interesting subject and it would have been neat had Frost developed the theme further.

Despite this, readers are left with one helluva story.