‘Never fear, old fellow,’ he murmured. ‘You shall not be hurt. I shall not let him hurt you.’
With these words he stepped backwards off the edge of the precipice. I crawled to the brink of that fearful abyss and looked over in time to see Holmes’s body strike an outcrop of rock far below. Then I knew no more.
* The pub in question is probably The Roebuck, which still stands at the corner of Brady Street and Durward Street. The pun arose from the fact that Durward Street was originally called Buck’s Row; it was lost when the name was changed following a petition by the residents after Mary Ann Nicholls was murdered.
† Now Thurloe Street. The ‘new museum’ Watson refers to is evidently the Natural History Museum, completed in 1880.
‡ Sic.
Conclusion
I awoke two days later in a bed at the Englischer Hof, whither I had been conveyed by a party from Meiringen. My unconscious body had been discovered lying at the very edge of the path by the falls, so that the slightest movement must instantly have precipitated me into the yawning depths. On Thursday morning I was interviewed by the Swiss police. They accepted readily enough that my prostration had been caused by the shock of my companion’s death, but proved considerably more sceptical when it came to swallowing my story of vanishing youths and criminal masterminds. At length I hit upon the idea of asking Lestrade to confirm my bona fides, and following the receipt of a telegram from Scotland Yard the attitude of the local officials changed from guarded suspicion to respectful condolence.
On my return to London a week later I removed the papers and the jars from the empty house in Baker Street. The jars I took to Bart’s and there disposed of their hideous contents. The papers I burned. Once these measures had been taken I felt reasonably sure that no one would ever have cause to suspect the truth about Sherlock Holmes’s last years. But I wanted to do more than that for my old friend: I wanted to perpetuate the good that was in him before the darkness overshadowed it. Above all I wanted to impress upon the public mind an image of Holmes’s honourable life and noble death; an image so attractive and indelible that if any later searcher should stumble on the truth (for I could not be sure that other damning evidence did not exist elsewhere) his accusations would be received with frowns and frigid silence, as being at once tasteless and absurd.
As luck would have it, the perfect sculptor for my monument was at hand. In order to avoid interrupting the course of my narrative, I omitted to mention that A.C.D. had approached me early in 1891 with a view to obtaining further material from my records for Holmes’s cases. It seemed that his second foray into this genre had proved sufficiently successful to induce him to continue the experiment, but with a difference. What he now proposed was to write a series of short tales, each devoted to one of Holmes’s successes. As I have said, I was out of touch with Holmes at this time, but in view of his ready agreement on the previous occasion I had no hesitation in selecting twelve cases which I felt illustrated various aspects of my friend’s genius and passing these on to A.C.D. In the fury of the events which followed closely thereafter I forgot all about this new literary venture.
A.C.D.’s stories started to appear in the Strand’s July issue. They were immediately successful, and with every month that passed the demand for the magazine increased. A.C.D.’s response to this triumph was typically ambivalent. On the one hand he could not help being pleased that his work was so popular; on the other he feared that the very success of the stories was keeping him from more serious and worthy endeavours. The news of Sherlock Holmes’s death showed him a way out of this dilemma. Early in 1892 he came to see me and proposed that I furnish him with the material for a further twelve tales, the last of which was to be an account of the events leading up to Holmes’s death at the Reichenbach falls. This would effectively terminate the series and free A.C.D. from the temptation of indulging further in work he had come to regard as menial if lucrative drudgery.
The suggestion could not have fitted in better with my own desires, and I set to work with a will. Eleven of the dozen cases were no trouble to prepare, since I had only to collate and copy out in a fair hand my already-existing notes. But when it came to dealing with Holmes’s death I was faced with the singular problem of inventing a plausible series of events which would satisfy the known facts, yet reveal nothing of the terrible truth behind them. I fear I did not manage to concoct a very convincing smokescreen. Indeed, a close reading of the finished story – which A.C.D. entitled, more aptly than he knew, ‘The Final Problem’ – will reveal that it is riddled with inconsistencies. But it is part of the business of a good writer to prevent his audience from reading closely if this does not suit his purposes, and when the tale finally appeared any question of its weaknesses went unheard in the general howl of dismay that Holmes was dead and the series at an end. Never had there been such an outcry! A.C.D.’s readers had come to think of Holmes as a valued and trusted friend. My wishes could not have been more fully realised.
Later, of course, A.C.D. saw fit to start writing detective stories again, and since the public has no use for dead heroes he was obliged to bring Holmes back to life in another apocryphal adventure, which I may say I think has the distinction of being even less probable than the one I devised. But by then Holmes had ceased to be remembered as a real figure, except by a small circle of acquaintances. He had become a fictional character. I have no complaint to make at this turn of events. It was after all Holmes himself who, by his infamies, effectively removed himself from the ranks of mankind. Thereafter he was doomed to become either a myth or a monster. Fortunately I was able to ensure that it was the former. Perhaps, indeed, the myth I helped to create has taken such powerful hold on the public imagination that the facts, once they can be safely revealed, will not be credited. So be it! I had rather be taken for a fraud, than have seen the many for whom Sherlock Holmes was an ideal and an example shattered and embittered on learning the horrible truth about their paragon.
For myself, the cost was not light. I returned from Switzerland in broken health, and with a craving for further injections of cocaine which took more than two years to mend. By then my practice was once more in ruins, and although I benefited substantially by Holmes’s will, my wife and I were in financial straits for some time. But others have recently made far greater sacrifices for our country, and it would ill become me to complain of my lot.
And so my narrative is finally at an end. Since Holmes’s death my existence has been a quiet and commonplace one. But sometimes, as I sit by the fire on nights when the wind wails in the chimney, my thoughts travel back to the great falls at Reichenbach, and I hear again the exquisite consolation of Holmes’s final words, and see once more the light of understanding in his eyes, during those last moments when he seemed once again the best and the wisest man I have ever known.
‘Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.’
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: The Final Problem
Afterword
‘To the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, he added the complexities of evil and misfortune,’ writes Borges of Nils Runeberg, the Swedish theologian who argued that the Saviour was not Jesus Christ but Judas Iscariot (‘Three Versions of Judas’ in Labyrinths, Penguin, 1970). Some disciples of the Master will no doubt accuse me of an equivalent heresy. But it should at least be obvious that, like Runeberg’s, mine is the blasphemy of the true believer.
Anyone wishing to compose variations on the Canon must first decide which authority to follow on questions of chronology. My guide throughout has been D. Martin Dakin, whose conclusions are supported with weighty and lucid arguments in his book A Sherlock Holmes Commentary (David & Charles, 1972). My epigraph is taken from James Edward Holroyd’s introduction to Seventeen Steps to 221B (Allen & Unwin, 1967), which is edite
d by him and contains various entertaining and informative essays. It would be impossible to exaggerate my indebtedness to The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 1968), edited by William Baring-Gould, whose two volumes constitute a splendid lucky-dip de luxe for anyone whose interest in the stories extends beyond the simple desire to know who done it.
I consulted various sources for information on the Whitechapel murders, but found little of consequence that is not included in The Complete Jack the Ripper (W. H. Allen, 1975). Donald Rumbelow surveys all the existing evidence and theories with an impartiality virtually unique in a field dominated by writers who have discovered The Answer.
I should not like to close without mentioning the late J. L. Stonier, but for whom this book would not have been written. He was himself an admirer of the Holmes stories, and I like to think he might have granted that the pastiche he helped to make possible was ‘not entirely devoid of certain features of interest’.
M.J.D.
Chiswick
December 1977
The Aurelio Zen Series
The Zen Series from Michael Dibdin
Ratking
Zen is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy’s most powerful families.
Vendetta
An impossible murder in a top-security Sardinian fortress leads Zen to a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.
Cabal
When a man falls to his death in a chapel in St Peter’s, Zen must crack the secret of the Vatican to solve the crime.
Dead Lagoon
Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a rich American resident, while confronting disturbing revelations about his own life.
Così Fan Tutti
Zen finds himself in Naples, a city trying to clean up its act – perhaps too literally, as politicians, businessmen and mafiosi begin to disappear off the streets.
A Long Finish
Back in Rome, Zen is given an unorthodox assignment: to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family who is accused of a brutal murder.
Blood Rain
The gruesome discovery of an unidentified corpse in a railway carriage in Sicily marks the beginning of Zen’s most difficult and dangerous case.
And Then You Die
After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, Zen is trying to lie low at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, but an alarming number of people are dropping dead around him.
Medusa
When human remains are found in abandoned military tunnels, the case leads Zen back into the murky history of post-war Italy.
Back to Bologna
Zen is called to Bologna to investigate the murder of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team.
End Games
After a brutal murder in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community in Calabria, Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth.
About the Author
Michael John Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton in 1947. His mother was a nurse and his father a Cambridge-educated physicist with a passionate enthusiasm for folk music. The family travelled extensively around Britain until Michael turned seven, when they settled in Northern Ireland.
After graduating with an English degree from Sussex University he took a Master’s Degree at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dibdin’s first published novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, his self-proclaimed “pastiche”, appeared in 1978. Shortly afterwards he moved to Italy to teach for a number of years at the University of Perugia where he was inspired to write a second novel, A Rich Full Death, set in Victorian Florence. In 1988 he wrote Ratking, the first of the famous crime series featuring the Italian detective Aurelio Zen. The novel won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award. Other books in this series include three of his best received titles, Cabal (1992), which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, Dead Lagoon (1994), and finally End Games, published posthumously in 2007. Amongst his best-received non-Zen novels were The Dying of the Light, an Agatha Christie pastiche, and the darkly comic Dirty Tricks.
While Dibdin travelled frequently to Italy, he lived in Seattle with his wife the novelist Kathrine Beck, from where he wrote all but the first three Zen novels. The city also provided a new location for his other detective novels including Dark Spectre (1995) and Thanksgiving (2000), the story of a British journalist’s obsession with his recently dead American wife.
Michael Dibdin died in 2007 at the age of 60.
By the Same Author
A RICH FULL DEATH
THE TRYST
DIRTY TRICKS
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
DARK SPECTRE
THANKSGIVING
Aurelio Zen series
RATKING
VENDETTA
CABAL
DEAD LAGOON
COSI FAN TUTTI
A LONG FINISH
BLOOD RAIN
AND THEN YOU DIE
MEDUSA
BACK TO BOLOGNA
Copyright
First published in 1978
by Jonathan Cape Ltd
First published in 1989 in paperback
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House, 74-77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Michael Dibdin, 1978, 1990
The right of Michael Dibdin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–29049–9
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story Page 19