Online Reading Challenge discussion

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King

SUMMARY

The first in the beloved Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes series, chosen as one of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association and as an Outstanding Book for the College Bound by the American Library Association, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice has continued to beguile readers of all ages and backgrounds.

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.

In this first of the “Russell Memoirs,” young Mary encounters a retired Sherlock Holmes during the first year of the Great War, and impresses him enough that, reluctantly, he takes her on as his apprentice. It takes a great deal of adjustment—on both sides.

He said nothing. Very sarcastically.

But Russell, as he comes to call her, matures into an Oxford undergraduate with her own strengths and interests—

I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head.

—until danger comes out of nowhere, and threatens their partnership, and their very lives.
(Summary provided by the author)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels and other works, including the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes stories (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was chosen as one of the “20th Century’s Best Crime Novels” by the IMBA.) She has won the Agatha, Anthony, Creasey, Edgar, Lambda, Macavity, Wolfe, and Romantic Times Career Achievement awards, has an honorary doctorate in theology, and is a Baker Street Irregular. In 2022, she was named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. She co-edited (with Lee Child) the new handbook from Mystery Writers of America, How to Write a Mystery, and has a new contemporary series with SFPD Inspector Raquel Laing, beginning with Back to the Garden.

Laurie R. King is the third generation in her family native to the San Francisco area. She spent her childhood reading her way through libraries up and down the West Coast; her middle years raising children, renovating houses, traveling the world, and doing a BA and MA in theology. (Her long autobiography goes into detail about how she uses these interests.) King now lives a genteel life of crime, on California’s central coast.

Her crime novels are both serial and stand-alone. First in the hearts of most readers comes Mary Russell, who met the retired Sherlock Holmes in 1915 and became his apprentice, then his partner. Beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Russell and Holmes move through the Teens and Twenties in amiable discord, challenging each other to ever greater feats of detection.

In the Russell & Holmes stories, King explores ideas—the roots of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan; feminism and early Christianity; patriotism and individual responsibility—while also having a rousing good time. Various stories revisit The Hound of the Baskervilles and Kipling’s Kim, set a pair of Bedouin nomads down in a grand country house in England, and offer an insider’s view of the great quake and fire of 1906, all the while forging an unlikely relationship between two remarkably similar individuals who happen to be separated by age, sex, and background. King’s newest series, beginning with Back to the Garden, finds SFPD Inspector Raquel Laing working on Cold Cases that reach into the present.

King’s Stuyvesant & Grey series, also historical, follows American ex-Bureau of Investigation agent Harris Stuyvesant, damaged young Captain Bennett Grey, and Grey’s sister Sarah as they move through Europe between the Wars.

Five King novels concern San Francisco homicide inspector Kate Martinelli, Kate’s SFPD partner Al Hawkin, and her life partner Lee Cooper. In the course of the stories, Kate has encountered a female Rembrandt, a modern-day Holy Fool, two difficult teenagers, and a manifestation of the goddess Kali.

King’s stand-alone suspense novels include A Darker Place, the story of a middle-aged professor of religion who investigates “cults” for the FBI, and encounters a movement that embraces the dangerous beliefs of alchemy. Folly tells of woodworker Rae Newborne, who comes to a deserted island to rebuild a house, and her life. Keeping Watch is the story of Rae’s friend Allen Carmichael, a Vietnam vet who draws on his combat experiences to rescue abused women and children—until he comes across a boy whose problems may rival his own. Califia’s Daughters (a paperback original by “Leigh Richards”) is a post-apocalyptic sort of tale set in a near future where women rule and men are fragile.

She has collaborated on nonfiction works including How to Write a Mystery with Lee Child, The Grand Game of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, and several short story anthologies.
(Biography provided by the author)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• In an Editor’s Preface, King playfully discloses the “true” origin of the story at hand: that what follows will be the actual memoirs of Mary Russell, which were mysteriously sent to her out of the blue, along with a trunk full of odds and ends. Why does King begin with this anecdote, essentially including herself in the story? Does it bring the world of the novel closer to our own? Have you read any other books (Lolita, for example) which begin with a false-preface, and what effect does this device have on the rest of the novel? Were you fooled?

• It is 1915, the Great War is raging through Europe and the men of England are in the trenches. How does this particular period in history allow a character like Mary Russell to take the stage in areas of post-Victorian society usually reserved for men? In what significant ways does she seize these opportunities? Would she have thrived if born into a different, more oppressive social climate, say, one hundred years earlier?

• How would you characterize Mary Russell based on her first opinion of bees? Does her disdain for their mindless busy-work and adherence to hive social structure reflect a particular attitude toward the social landscape of England at the time? Do you agree with Mary?

• Holmes uses the game of chess to sharpen Mary Russell’s strategic thinking and intuition. How does chess – and, in particular, the Queen – serve as a metaphor throughout the story? In what ways does King herself use the game to comment upon the master apprentice relationship?

• Russell and Holmes don disguises throughout The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and their work sometimes requires them to cross dress. Discuss each point in the novel where either Russell or Holmes takes cover in the opposite sex; what special access does this method of disguise give them to the other characters? Is gender reversal necessary in order to win the confidence of certain people? How does Mary Russell’s world change when she dresses as a man?

• Watson is eternally known as the great detective’s sidekick. Who, in your opinion, is a more effective foil for Holmes, Watson or Russell? What different aspects of Holmes’s personality emerge in the presence of each? What would happen if Holmes were paired with a different partner, one more timid or less tenacious?

• At Oxford, Mary Russell concludes that theology and detective work are one and the same. In your opinion, how are the two subjects related?

• The art of deduction is constantly at play in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. Even when Mary notices that Watson has shaven off his mustache, she cares to look closer at the skin and imagine that it was done “very recently”. Is Laurie King training the reader’s perceptions to be more acute throughout the novel? Does every detail of our lives hold a mystery and a story?

• What are some crucial differences between the training Patricia Donleavy received from Moriarty and the training Mary Russell received from Holmes? What mental and emotional strengths do both women have in common, and what separates them? Holmes comments: “A quick mind is worthless unless you can control the emotions with it as well.” How does this maxim apply?

• At what point in the novel did you suspect that Russell’s adversary was a woman? When you read a mystery, what assumptions do you typically make about the gender of the villain? In what ways does King toy with the reader’s assumptions about gender throughout the novel?
(Discussion questions provided by the publisher)