When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle
Michal Dibdin has done an excellent job of invoking the feel and tone of a Holmesian story. The snide and condensing way that Holmes treats everyone he meets. The kindness and slight dimwittedness of Watson. The grudging respect of Detective Lestrade. And the many small ways in which Sherlock Holmes shows himself to be of a superior mind.
There is the common enough ploy of having a lost manuscript surface in which one more tale of the Great Detective comes to light. There is the also pretty standard bit of business that Doctor Watson was a real person who merely allowed the bumbling and somewhat talentless Arthur Conan Doyle tell the complex and compelling stories of Sherlock Holmes’s many adventures.
There has always been something very odd about Conan Doyle and his hatred of Sherlock Holmes-can we even imagine that JK Rowling would hate Harry Potter? I have always found ACD’s whipping up a super villain to kill off Holmes a bit silly. Here we have another explanation.
There are the usual preliminaries, stories of how bored Holmes can become and how he falls back onto his addiction to cocaine, tales of Watson’s domestic life, tidbits about how ACD has written up this adventure or that. Then we find ourselves in 1888 and the authorities have come to ask the help of Sherlock Holmes in tracking down the most famous criminal of the age-Jack The Ripper.
So far so good. Holmes and Watson go to work at once, and with the help of Mycroft, Sherlock is given unusual powers over the deployment of police patrols and when he uncovers a pattern to the Jack The Ripper murders, he has White Chapel so well protected that the killer cannot strike again.
A small aside. My favorite book on the real world crimes is Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer, which recounts how Jack only murdered four women, not five, as one of them was a copycat killer. The author of that book them places forth the theory that a certain American doctor was the killer, as he liked to show off his collection of human organs contained in jars. The idea that one man killing a handful of victims so gripped the city of London is amazing to think about these days.
I will not reveal the Shocker that is at the heart of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. That would be like telling that Darth Vader is Luke’s father or revealing that the Maltese Falcon is made of lead and therefore a fake or that Tyler Durken is a little less real than we are lead to believe. There is a lot of fun to be had by a shocking bit of business in a story.
There is a problem with the shocking bit as well-they can be a bit too much to take. I could never believe that Migaleto Lovelace built a giant steam powered spider in the 1860s, for example. And though I had no trouble at all beliving that Jesus and Mary Magdalene created a Holy Bloodline, some people took it all a bit too seriously. And so it is with Holmes and Watson-these are more family members than fictional characters, we like to think that we know them intimately.
In the years since the Canon of Sherlock Holmes, there have been all kinds of odd and interesting things happening to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson-but this is one of the more interesting twists of the tale. I kept waiting for some reversal, some secondary twist to explain the first twist away-but it never comes. The ending was almost inevitable, but nonetheless a bit sad. I can only be grateful that this isn’t really The Last Sherlock Holmes Story.
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