SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE REAL THING

First, the bad news: In his closing acknowledgments, Meyer, dropping his pose as Dr. John H. Watson’s editor, announces: “I’m thinking this will be my last Holmes novel.”

Now, the other news, which is mostly excellent except for Rupert Milestone, the portrait painter who hasn’t paid the rent for his Notting Hill studio for three months. His landlady, recently widowed Lady Vera Glendenning, engages Holmes to find him, but the trail has gone cold—though not as cold as the body the Metropolitan Police eventually discover in a location as gruesome as it is unoriginal. In life, Milestone seems to have been an immensely gifted mimic who could copy the styles of masters old and new while displaying precious little originality of his own. The news that he was also a restorer who worked for fearsomely dominant art dealer Sir Jonathan Van Dam, Lord Southbank, poses questions about the relations between the paintings he restored and those he created. Calling on Juliet Packwood, the niece of Milestone’s dealer (and the daughter of Watson’s late comrade-in-arms Col. John Packwood), and Signor Garibaldi, Van Dam’s authenticator, leads Watson to a theory of the case and an amatory attachment that may compromise his deductions. At length, Holmes, more disinterested, more analytical, and able to see more complications beneath the obvious solution, leads Watson and the Met to a denouement as surprising and fulfilling as any in the sacred scriptures themselves. The whole exercise is adorned with the usual footnotes and an increasingly pointed and self-reflexive series of discussions about copies, forgeries, and the “real thing.”

Though Meyer ends by identifying himself as a forger, a generation of readers will be ever grateful for his efforts.