Newspaper Article

Detective work, Sherlock Holmes returns to solve a few more cases. But are the horrors of the 20th century too much for the aging logician?

DAVID L. ULIN. David L. Ulin is the author of "The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith."

2005

Overview

Of all the characters in English literature, none has had as independent an existence as Sherlock Holmes. Originally introduced in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 novel, \"A Study in Scarlet,\" Holmes went on to animate three more full-length works and 56 short stories - now known by devotees as the Canon, or the Sacred Writings - before his creator's death in 1930. Even during Conan Doyle's lifetime, Holmes sparked an array of parodies, adaptations and pastiches (a term connoting \"a serious attempt to produce a story in the style of the original author,\" according to Holmes scholar Leslie S. Klinger), but over the past 75 years, such efforts have become ubiquitous. In his \"New Annotated Sherlock Holmes,\" Klinger cites upwards of 2,000 imitative works, from the films of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, whose portrayals of Holmes and Dr. Watson still influence how we see the characters, to Nicholas Meyer's \"The Seven Per-Cent Solution,\" the 1974 pastiche that brought Holmes back to vivid life. One hundred and 18 years after the first Holmes story, the detective continues to inspire additional adventures and interpretations, most recently in three new novels: [Caleb Carr]'s \"The Italian Secretary,\" [Michael Chabon]'s \"The Final Solution\" and [Mitch Cullin]'s \"A Slight Trick of the Mind.\" If the notion of Holmes as a quasi-spiritualist seems to contradict tradition, it also highlights the challenges of taking on so well-known a character. Still, there's something invigorating about such reinterpretations, as Chabon's \"The Final Solution\" and Cullin's \"A Slight Trick of the Mind\" illustrate. Of the two, Cullin's book is by far the more ambitious; in comparison, \"The Final Solution\" reads like a knock-off, superficial and with the merest of mysteries at its heart. But what's surprising is how much the novels share. Both imagine Holmes as an old man (89 in \"The Final Solution,\" 93 in \"A Slight Trick of the Mind\"), retired to Sussex, where he occupies himself with beekeeping and the diminishments of age. Both juxtapose him with young boys, as if to suggest that a heart does beat beneath his methodical exterior, that he is, in fact, a human being. Both address the idea that, even for so rational a figure, a time comes when, as Chabon writes, \"it was the insoluble problems - the false leads and the cold cases - that reflected the true nature of things.\"

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