Earlier this year, I reviewed a string of
Holmesian pastiches, which is when I got very annoyed at a recurring plot
element. It seems that many pastiche writers go for the cliché plot element
where they “kill” Holmes for one scene, have Watson mourn his tragic death, and
bring him back twenty or thirty pages later. This got so annoying that when I
was reviewing Loren D. Estleman’s first-rate Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, I ended up writing the following:Basically, I’ve gotten very tired of sitting through Holmes’ death over and over again, and only to see him come back. It’s not like I hate Holmes – I love the character – but it’d be refreshing if someone killed Holmes off and just left him dead.
Those words have come back to haunt me.
Because as it turns out, there is a gentleman out there named Michael Dibdin
who wrote The Last Sherlock Holmes Story.
And ooooooooh boy, it’s definitely
the last Sherlock Holmes story. I won’t say why it’s the last one, but I will
say this much: Dibdin’s revisions to the Canon are so drastic that they make
Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per-Cent
Solution look like a faithful follow-up.
