The mystery man is back

“Education never ends, Watson,” says Sherlock Holmes in “The Red-Headed League” in 1890 at age 36. “It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.” By 1898, however, Holmes had apparently altered this characteristically Victorian view of life as a moral progression, when he said in “The Retired Colourman”: “[I]s not all life pathetic and futile? ... We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow -- misery.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 tales of Sherlock Holmes were published over a 40-year span, from 1887 to 1927. The earliest recorded case is “The ‘Gloria Scott,’ ” in which Holmes reminisces about the commencement of his career, sometime in the early 1870s (when Holmes was barely 20); the last is the aptly titled “His Last Bow,” reporting the 60-year-old Holmes’ undercover activities on the eve of the Great War, in 1914. The rest, as one critic wrote, is silence.

Though Holmes’ philosophy may have darkened over the years (many scholars contend that after his seeming “death” at the Reichenbach Falls, he was never the same man), there is no marked change in him or his talents. This is what the reading public wanted, and perhaps Conan Doyle’s greatest invention was a “series” character with constant appeal. Two recent novels contemplate the great detective near the end of his life: Mitch Cullin’s “A Slight Trick of the Mind” and Michael Chabon’s “The Final Solution.”

Chabon’s book, set in 1944, never names the “old man” central character as Holmes, and so avoids the need to give Holmes’ biographical details. Its focus is a contemporary murder and the old man’s interaction with a mute boy. He copes with the lad’s infirmity to conclude the case satisfactorily, but there is little sense of thrill, either for the investigator or the reader. Ultimately, Chabon concludes, what drives the Holmes character is “the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.” But Chabon’s old man is singularly juiceless.

Cullin’s work is more ambitious. Set in 1947, it finds a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes diminished physically and mentally. He is more comfortable dwelling in the past, allowing the currents of his life to flow around him without affecting him. Now, however, he must deal with three mysteries: the apparently senseless death of a young companion, the disappearance of a Japanese diplomat and the reasons for his own actions 45 years earlier.

Each mystery presents a compelling aspect of Holmes’ efforts to accept his own life and the choices he has made. In considering the apparent death by bee sting of his housekeeper’s son, Holmes is able to determine the true cause, but he cannot explain why bad things happen to good people. In the course of a trip to Japan (Cullin skillfully depicts the post-war gloom), Holmes befriends a man whose father has vanished. Holmes realizes that he knew the missing man and could reveal the history of his friend’s father. Instead, he grapples with the moral consequences of his investigative powers and must decide whether revealing the “truth” is invariably the right course. Interwoven with these “cases” is Holmes’ manuscript of a previously unrecorded investigation undertaken in 1902. That investigation proves trivial, but the focus of the mystery, a strikingly beautiful woman, is unforgettable, as Holmes reexamines his only opportunity for love and the course he chose.

Cullin’s knowledge of Holmes’ biographical details is impressive. Though he is a lifelong Sherlockian, Cullin’s previous fiction has made little use of his passionate interest. Here he imagines Sherlock Holmes grown beyond the public persona of the rational investigator, dealing at the end of his life with questions that ultimately confront all thoughtful people. In “The Sign of Four,” Watson accuses Holmes of being an “automaton -- a calculating machine.” Cullin’s compassionate work happily reveals the detective to be a man after all. In short, while the book wears the garb of another Holmes adventure, Cullin’s tale is a wise and touching examination of the human condition. *