Michael Dibdin's Variety

Michael Dibdin was a crime writer best known for his series about Aurelio Zen, a detective in Rome, but he wrote half a dozen other mysteries and, except for the series, each of his books has a brand-new setting, period, and plot. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story was Dibdin’s first book, originally published in 1978 and recently reissued in a Vintage Crime paperback, and it’s 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.

            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.

Nothing could be more different than another Dibdin favorite of mine, The Dying of the Light, published in 1993 and reissued in paperback in 1995.

            The book opens at tea time, in the lounge of what appears to be an English nursing home, where the old folks’ names sound as if they came out of a Clue game or an Agatha Christie novel: Colonel Weatherby, Lady Belinda Scott, Canon Purvey, and the corned beef millionaire, George Channing, who turns out to be the first victim.

            In this setting, two of the characters, Rosemary and Dorothy, are amusing themselves and trying to keep their minds alive by pretending they are indeed in an Agatha Christie novel: they speculate that the last two deaths in the home were the result of foul play rather than natural causes, and they invent linked romantic pasts for the other guests, providing them each with a motive for doing away with their late companions.

            Then Dibdin begins to twist the plot. First a cruel nurse attendant enters, striking one of the guests, snarling, threatening the rest. “Aha!” we think, “perhaps there is more to Rosemary and Dorothy’s speculation than game playing.” Then we learn that the clock in the lounge always says ten past four, and we see some of the guests behaving in a very disturbed way. “Aha!” we think, “Rosemary and Dorothy aren’t just playing mind games; they’re nutty as fruitcakes and so is everyone else; this isn’t an old people’s home but an insane asylum.”

            Then Rosemary finds Dorothy dead, an apparent suicide, and we realize Dibdin has tricked us again: we have to take seriously the murder speculation that Rosemary and her dead friend have been indulging in. Dibdin plays with the reader in this way throughout: First Rosemary is set up in the tradition of the elderly female amateur—that is, the Miss Marple type—but then she is undercut, then set up again, but we are always reminded that she is also an inventor.

             When a police inspector from the county constabulary enters, we are ready to play Dibdin’s game and to guess whether the constable will look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be brilliant, or look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be . . . a bumbling idiot. The questions remain right up until the end:  will Rosemary be able to convince the inspector that her friend was murdered?  Was Dorothy in fact murdered?  When Rosemary leaves herself off the list of possible suspects, does that mean we should suspect her?  Dibdin keeps shifting the ground under us, and ultimately creates a kind of paradox: a book that is both a good mystery and a good parody of a mystery. The Dying of the Light is a dark book, but an entertaining one that will keep you guessing.