When I first heard that Katherine Addison wrote a new book, I was excited. I love her writing! When I heard it involved angels, my response was a disappointed, “Oh no.” I have significant issues with angels in fantasy novels. Then I read a review that said that The Angel of the Crows was Sherlock Holmes WingFic, which meant that I had to get my hands on the book. I love Sherlock Holmes stories; I almost love the spin-offs and alternates more than the originals! They’re just so endlessly inventive when they’re done right.
The Angel of the Crows (2020)
Written by: Katherine Addison
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 427 (Hardcover)
Publisher: Tor Books
The Premise:
This is not the story you think it is. These are not the characters you think they are. This is not the book you are expecting.
In an alternate 1880s London, angels inhabit every public building, and vampires and werewolves walk the streets with human beings in a well-regulated truce. A fantastic utopia, except for a few things: Angels can Fall, and that Fall is like a nuclear bomb in both the physical and metaphysical worlds. And human beings remain human, with all their kindness and greed and passions and murderous intent.
Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of this London too. But this London has an Angel. The Angel of the Crows.
Spoilers ahead.
Discussion: One of the pleasures in any Sherlock-inspired book is the variation on the Holmes/Watson pairing. The core elements stay (and should stay!) the same — that one is a genius obsessed with the problems facing their chosen city, and the other is their brave and steadfast friend. Here, the Sherlock is an angel called Crow, and Dr. Watson is Dr. J.H. Doyle, recently home from fighting the Fallen in Afghanistan. Things progress much as usual: Addison takes us through remixes of some of Holmes’s most familiar cases, and adds in Jack the Ripper for good measure as the recurring mystery that runs through the whole book.
The question becomes, did I enjoy this re-envisioning of the Holmes/Watson stories? The answer is definitely… sort of?
Addison (or Sarah Monette) writes insanely well. Reading anything she writes is a pleasure just for the sheer precision she brings to the language. I liked the way she adjusted the elements of Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries to suit her needs. And she definitely brought a richness of fantasy elements to the page: angels and hellhounds and the Fallen and werewolves and healers.
I am extremely fond of the format here: a collection of related stories, which allows for individual mysteries to be solved, all the while deepening the relationship between the characters.
Crow worked for me as a Sherlock-style character. He was a genius, but also limited in the understanding of human nature. It felt like a very natural shape here — an isolated angel who’d figured out a way around angelic traditions to keep his own identity, yet suffered loneliness because of his decisions. Doyle made a good Watson, being pained yet brave. He admired Crow, but didn’t let that admiration keep him from arguing against Crow when he felt the need. Doyle’s “secret” felt very evident to me, but then I have just recently reread Alexis Hall’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter which also had a trans “Watson;” even though I saw the reveal coming, I thought it landed well.
So lots of things I enjoy.
That said, as a whole, the book seemed uneven. The opening third felt far too familiar — not just Crow’s meeting with Doyle, but the whole flavor. It felt heavily influenced by the BBC’s Sherlock, down to Doyle nitpicking Crow’s language as not proper. That meant I felt like skimming through the first segments, waiting for it to feel fresher.
The middle stories really appealed to me as she deepened the worldbuilding and let us explore the angels she put on the page. Angels, in this world, are part of a consensus — nameless, selfless drones — or are bound to a place and gain their identity. Being part of the consensus means wholeness and being a piece of the choir, hearing beautiful music. So even though Crow has gained an identity, it’s at the cost of loving fellowship. Fallen angels are the ones who lose their places, lose their identities, and are not subsumed back into the whole. They go mad and are very dangerous — their claws are toxic. Doyle is injured by one in Afghanistan, and as a result has been turned into a hellhound, able to shapeshift. I loved all that and would happily read hundreds of more pages about her world.
Once Addison starts with The Hound of the Baskervilles remix, matters start to fall apart again. Baskervilles is always an awkward story, which depends on the familiar team being separated for too long, and here, Addison has to deal with the fact that she’s bound Crow to London. That case resolved (violently — hellhound against hellhound), there’s nothing left but to solve the Jack the Ripper murders, which happens too abruptly and easily.
And then there’s my issue with angels.
On an individual scene-by-scene level, Addison’s angels are wonderful. I love the details given: I loved the “consensus” as something both yearned for by most angels, yet feared by Crow, who fought hard to keep his own identity separate. I liked that they had their own culture, yet managed to fit seamlessly into the human one. I loved the faint awkwardness of Doyle always sitting on Crow’s feathers when they crowded into a carriage. I really liked the molt that the angels did, and would have like to see more.
I would have liked to see the Fallen on the page. I wanted more about the angels as a whole. The bigger the picture got, the more my brain locked up, yelling, as it so often does when faced with angels in fantasy novels, but how does this work?
I have troubles with fantasy angels because they’re so often inextricably bound up in Judeo-Christian culture — even if they mostly lack the spinning wheels of fire and hundreds of eyes or four faces. The Angel of the Crows is not an exception to my issues.
Here, you have angels and fallen angels and yet no religion. How do you have no religion? The England in this story is a Christian country and accepts angels as part of that, except… not really? Their general slant of religious beliefs aren’t any different.
If you have a Christian society and you have angels on your side, how does it not lead to some insane zealotry? If your enemies have fallen angels on their side, how do you not end up labeling them all as “evil?”
Yet the London society is exactly the same as usually depicted — unthinking colonizers, content in their own moral superiority. It felt like here was this huge world-changing element — tangible proof of their god siding with them — that made no difference in the world. Weirdly unsatisfying. It made me feel like I was only getting the smallest surface glance at this world that I wanted to see more deeply.
Then there’s the Jack the Ripper angle. I was all for the more familiar stories weaving in and out of the Jack the Ripper murders. It seemed like an interesting counterpoint: that this “worst thing in London” was just a man. Not a hellhound, not a werewolf, not a fallen angel. Just a very bad man with an appetite for blood.
The Jack the Ripper story is resolved with a whimper instead of a bang. Part of the Sherlockiana promise is that cleverness and bravery will solve the cases. But here, it’s literally Doyle’s nose as he sniffs out the Ripper after his most recent kill. There’s nothing that a trained dog couldn’t do here and so it falls oddly flat.
It’s especially irksome because at the end, there’s a werewolf on the scene who can do the same thing that Doyle does, without Doyle being “forced” to reveal that he’s a dangerous, unregistered hellhound to the city at large.
For me, the entire denouement seemed spent fixing problems caused by this revelation that didn’t need to be revealed in the first place, coupled with the letdown of the Ripper ending.
There’s an awful lot you could say about the resonance and reality of a person like Jack the Ripper being portrayed as just a banal little man who gets away with his kills by being forgettable. Maybe if it had been led up to more, it would have felt better. As it is, it felt like I’d been led up to a Boss Fight and then given an opponent better suited to be a minion.
In Conclusion: In the end, despite some significant misgivings, I’m going to tip this book into the “good read” category. I’m sure it will be one I reread, just for the sheer enjoyment of the writing and the characters. If you haven’t read Addison/Monette before and you have a yen for period supernatural mysteries, read The Angel of the Crows, then dig up a copy of The Bone Key and read that too.
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