The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
#27 in my 2007 book challenge was Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution. The title is a play on Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Final Problem“, and the Nazi’ euphemistic response to what they called “the problem of the Jews.”
An old man becomes involved in a case of a murdered man and a missing parrot. He is a former detective, now retired, and he keeps bees. By these details, and others, the reader infers this is Sherlock Holmes, who somehow survived the Reichenbach Falls incident of “The Final Problem.” The parrot belonged to a mute, Jewish boy who had escaped from Germany. It recited strings of German numbers, and thus was valuable to various villains depending on what they thought the numbers meant. There are hints throughout, but their meaning is confirmed very near the end in a risky chapter told from the point of view of the parrot. The old man never solves the meaning of the numbers, but he does solve the mystery of the parrot’s disappearance, as well as the murder.
Both in story and writing style, I found this a tense, clever homage to the Holmes stories, and appreciated how Chabon gave it a dark, Holocaust influence that has become a hallmark of his last few novels. Recommended.
Added later, from G. Grod, who is more familiar with the Holmes story than me:
“The Adventure of the Final Problem” is the story with Holmes and Moriarty and the Reichenbach falls. But most of the stories come after that. Doyle tried to quit Holmes, but had to bring him back by popular demand - the story of his return is in “The Adventure of the Empty House”. It’s where he explains that he had to go into hiding to operate secretly against the crime networks still extant after the death of Moriarty.
In your review of Chabon, you make it seem like Chabon brought Holmes back, when in fact Doyle did it. Holmes never actually dies in the stories. In “His Last Bow” he is preparing for WWI. Stories published later occur chronologically earlier within the canon.