The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (22 page)

‘Holmes, I am Watson! I am your friend Watson! I have only tried to save you from yourself, and from the indignities of the law. My only thought has been to save you!’

Holmes’s boot sent me sprawling on my back. He knelt at my side, holding me down with one hand. The other
raised the knife to strike. I screamed my last words above the din of the falls.

‘He has fooled you, Holmes! You have become Moriarty’s creature! He made you think that I am he, and now you are doing his work for him! What a victory! To trick the great Sherlock Holmes into murdering his only true and loving friend! What a triumph! He has won! Kill me then, for Moriarty has won! He has won!’

I shut my eyes, awaiting the sudden pain, the darkness and despair.

It did not come. When I opened my eyes again Holmes was still kneeling at my side, but the knife was lowered. He was gazing at me, and his face was filled with an infinite sadness. It was as if he had been granted a vision of universal truth, and had found it sad beyond all telling. I cannot say how long we remained there, nor what wordless communications passed between us. At last Holmes sighed gravely, and got to his feet. He looked down at the knife in his hand. Expressionlessly, he let it fall into the depths behind him. Then he looked down at me once more.

‘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.

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.

‘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 edited 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

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.