at often-evoked ‘missing adventures’ in “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” and “A Singular Affair at Trincomalee,” but the most memorable effort is “The Case of the French Savant” in which Holmes doesn’t catch a contemporary crook but delves into a historical Nepalese mystery. Apart from plugging continuity, there’s no very pressing need for these stories; and the results are rather dry, only occasionally coming to life as Riccardi works one of his enthusiasms into standard mystery business.
* * * *
The Final Solution (HarperCollins, $16.05), sub-titled A Story of Detection (originally published in a slightly different form in the Paris Review), is a novella-length, Holmes pastiche by Michael Chabon, author of the outstanding The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Set towards the end of WWII, it’s one of that subset of stories which finds the Great Detective in his dotage but not senile (though occasionally flustered) and tackling one last mystery even as he devotes the greater part of his declining years to bee-keeping. Amusingly, Conan Doyle’s casual, offhand remarks about Holmes’s retirement pastime have meant subsequent writers being forced to do at least a couple of days’ research into apiary in order to flesh out an aspect of Holmes’s biography that his creator probably made up on the spot and rarely pondered afterwards. As in H.F. Heard’s A Taste of Honey, which remains the Holmes-in-retirement effort to beat, there’s a coy withholding of the hero’s name, or those of any of his associates, and the aged detective is only one thread of a larger design. The murder of a commercial traveller on the Sussex Downs leads to the arrest of the fairly rotten son of a local vicar, who is ethnically unusual for the region. Holmes takes the case at the slightly-resentful invitation of the local police, not to catch the killer but to find a missing parrot owned by a refugee Jewish boy and which is given to spouting strings of numbers in German which some believe constitute vital coded information. It’s a mix of the farcical and the melancholy, with some good mystery spadework but little interest in the whodunit angle. Chabon gives us a credible, cranky old Holmes, contemplating the utopian, mostly crime-free (bar the occasional regicide) cities of his hives and contrasting them with a London he has left behind in time as well as mileage, but finally drawn back to sleuthing again. The title is ironic, since this is one of several recent efforts (cf: Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid) that finally comes to question the whole idea of a solution—the killer is apprehended, the boy reunited with his bird; but big questions remain unanswered and unanswerable; and it is suggested that the tidy wrap-ups of most mysteries merely seek to impose an order on a chaos which can never be dispelled.
* * * *
A Slight Trick of the Mind (Anchor Books, $12.95) by Mitch Cullin, author of Tideland (recently filmed by Terry Gilliam), is sub-titled [clears throat] a novel and has a certain overlap with The Final Solution. Again, we’re presented with Sherlock Holmes the elderly beekeeper, and we find him confronted with mysteries which force him to reconsider his attitude to the whole business of solving puzzles. Like a lot of books about very old people, it unfolds out of order as ancient and recent memories bubble up in the mind of its protagonist. In 1947, Holmes is lately returned from a trip to Japan where he has stayed with a fellow apiarist, who has also sought further elucidation of the disappearance, decades, earlier of his diplomat father (who told his family that he had met Holmes, though the detective thinks he has no memory of the man). As he recalls his trip to Japan, with observations on the lately-defeated people and the ruins of Hiroshima, Holmes is also driven to write an account of an apparently trivial case, involving a woman who seems too involved with her armonium lessons, and that took place just before his retirement. Roger, the son of Holmes’s current housekeeper, assists Holmes in his bee-keeping, and is drawn to read the serial-like installments of the detective’s memoir, though a surprising and tragic turn two-thirds of the way through the book means he never gets to the end of the tale, which has little in common with Doyle’s mysteries and gets closer to the tone of that apparently irrelevant passage about the disappearing family man in The Maltese Falcon. Cullin ambitiously gets under Holmes’s skin, prodding him to question the way his mental processes have estranged him from ‘normal’ life—the strongest suit of the book is its attitude to solutions, with Holmes deducing the exact circumstances of one accidental death but never sharing his conclusions and putting forward a tentative wrap-up to another mystery that chiefly serves as a comfort to the ‘client’ though it’s clearly supposed to be a convenient invention. A flaw, to this British reader, is that Cullin too often defaults to American words (‘pants’ for ‘trousers,’ ‘cement’ for ‘glue’) when supposedly writing from inside the consciousness of a Brit who’d never use those expressions. Doyle has Watson speak of his ‘well of English’ being permanently defiled by Americanisms, which is an excuse for some writers to take greater liberties, but that get-out shouldn’t apply to books written in the third person or narratives purportedly penned by the precise sleuth rather than the sloppy doctor. Still, A Slight Trick of the Mind has a probing, troubling, melancholy sensibility which makes it a more distinctive, satisfying read than many a straight-ahead ‘the game’s afoot’ pastiche.
* * * *
Ghosts in Baker Street (Carroll & Graf, $16.95), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, is another themed collection, taking as its motto ‘no ghosts need apply’ (from “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) but endeavouring to deliver cases in which Holmes and Watson are involved with the apparent supernatural. Some contributors walk a fine line between providing a rational explanation and leaving the door open a crack for phantoms to creep in; and none—not even Loren D. Estelman, who also contributes an essay about his novels in which Holmes meets Dracula and Dr Jekyll—pitch the sleuth into a full-on ghost story. The mostly-American contributors also tend to set out promising mysteries which get bogged down in infodumps of historical research—into the suffragette movement in Jon L. Breen’s “The Adventure of the Librarian’s Ghost,” Victorian theatrical lore in Carolyn Wheat’s “A Scandal in Drury Lane, or The Vampire Trap,” squalour and poverty in Colin Bruce’s “Death in the East End” (mostly, and effectively, a Watson story—with a wet-blanket Holmes scene at the end), or Irish cultural and political history in Michéal and Clare Breathnach’s “The Coole Park Problem.” Stashower presents a neat sidelight on The Hound of the Baskervilles in “Selden’s Tale,” which doesn’t use Watson as a narrator; but mostly we’re on more familiar ground. Also included are several bits of non-fiction—an overview of occult detective stories from Barbara Roden (strong on the older stuff, but oblivious to any activity in the current century), and a set of thoughts on Holmes provided by Caleb Carr (author of The Alienist) almost in apology because his own contribution grew into a novel and has been published separately.
* * * *
The Italian Secretary (Carroll & Graf, $23.95), by Caleb Carr, is that novel. Here, Holmes and Watson are summoned to Scotland by Mycroft (more active than usual) to investigate a couple of deaths at Holyroodhouse, the Royal palace where David Rizzio, Italian Secretary to Mary Queen of Scots, was foully murdered. A haunting, revealed as a sham, is at the heart of the mystery; and again a pile of research clogs up the gears of the plot. Here’s a case where one of Doyle’s interpolated confessional narratives or discovered historical manuscripts (a device rarely favoured by pasticheurs) would come in handy. Oddly, a pregnant housemaid who figures vitally in the plot is given the name, Allison Mackenzie, which sounds fine and Scots but is also famously the heroine of Peyton Place, an association presumably not intended by Carr. Knowing it was intended to be a shorter piece but grew in the writing doesn’t do the book any favours, though it’s a decent enough yarn when it gets going.
ASK MRS HUDSON, by (Mrs) Martha Hudson
Whenever you wish to ask my advice, you may address your inquiry to “Ask Mrs Hudson” at: [email protected]
Your query may be of a personal or impersonal nature; I am pleased to give advice on any topic whatsoever.
Sincerely,
(Mrs) Martha Hudson
*
