Today’s uncommon mystery is by Michael Dibdin. I’ve talked before about a Michael Dibdin book called The Dying of the Light. The amazing thing about Dibdin is that each book he writes is very different from the last, with the exception of his continuing series about Aurelio Zen, a detective in Rome. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, originally published in 1978 and recently reissued in a Vintage Crime paperback, is a good example of his originality.
Not that there’s anything unusual about this kind of book, called a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a literary work that imitates the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and pretends to continue the adventures of the character he made so famous. The Holmes pastiche has been practiced by writers such as John Gardner and University of Louisville author Sena Jeter Naslund. Doyle’s son Adrian Conan Doyle wrote some Holmes stories with the help of mystery author John Dickson Carr. Probably the most successful author of Sherlock Holmes pastiches was the now-little-read Wisconsin writer August Derleth, who called his Sherlock Holmes clone Solar Pons and whose series ran to seven books. And this book, despite its title, is far from being the last Sherlock Holmes Story.
Most Conan Doyle imitators suffer from Holmes worship; they try too hard and too reverently to portray Holmes. The key to a good pastiche is to get away from idolatry and make the characters your own. In this case, Dibdin makes Watson into a credible character who understands that, as he says, “Living with great men is itself a minor art.” Watson knows his role is that of the amazed and admiring sidekick in the famous verbal exchanges in which Holmes reveals a brilliant chain of deductions. So, when one morning the great detective surprises him by inferring that he had dinner the night before at Simpson’s in the Strand with an old friend and fellow-intern, Watson, suitably amazed, does not correct Holmes by telling him he had actually dined with his fiancée Mary Morstan at a restaurant in Mayfair.
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story purports to be papers written by Dr. Watson not long before his death, sealed up by his bankers for fifty years, and dealing with events in the fall of 1888 when Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the Whitechapel district of London. Dibdin welds factual details of the Ripper murders with fictional details of Holmes cases as chronicled by Arthur Conan Doyle. The result is an ingenious solution to the murders that will shock Holmes fans. I think you’ll like it.
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