The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery was published by Philomel Books in 2006, the first of six novels featuring Sherlock Holmes’s fictional younger sister Enola. The series was adapted into a Netflix film franchise starring Millie Bobby Brown (2020, 2022), bringing Springer’s creation to a global audience of hundreds of millions.
Enola Holmes is fourteen on her birthday when her mother Eudoria vanishes — leaving behind cryptic messages hidden in her gifts but no explanation for her disappearance. Enola’s much-older brothers Sherlock and Mycroft arrive to manage the situation and immediately plan to send Enola to a finishing school — to tame her wild education (her mother taught her ciphers, botany, jujitsu, and cycling but not deportment or needlework).
Enola refuses. She decodes her mother’s messages, discovers money hidden for her escape, and flees to London where she reinvents herself as a “scientific perditorian” (finder of lost persons). Her first case — the disappearance of the young Marquess of Tewksbury — intersects with her search for her mother, and the novel follows both investigations simultaneously.
Springer’s innovation is to make Enola’s struggle simultaneously detective-procedural and feminist-political: she must solve crimes while resisting the Victorian patriarchy’s determination to contain her (represented by Mycroft’s legal authority as her guardian). Sherlock — more sympathetic but still limited by his era — admires her intelligence while failing to grasp that her freedom is not negotiable.
Collecting The Case of the Missing Marquess
First edition (Philomel Books, New York, 2006): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$20