THE EXPLOITS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (338 pp.)—Adrian Conan Doyle & John Dickson Carr—Random House ($3.95).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, got so tired of the great sleuth that he had wicked Professor Moriarty shove him over a waterfall, restored him to life only after a public clamor. Humorist Stephen Leacock also tried his hand at rubbing Sherlock out: he put him on all fours, entered him as a dachshund in an international dog show, and had him painlessly destroyed for not having a dog license.
All to no purpose. Beloved in the '90s, Sherlock Holmes is in tiptop legendary health today. He has not even been killed by the deadly fact that almost any modern writer of whodunits constructs stories far more ingeniously than Doyle did and sticks much closer to reality at the same time. On the contrary, it is the fairy-tale quality of his world that has kept Holmes alive: he wields his magic wand in a never-never land where all cops are laughable simpletons, all locks susceptible to the key of logic.
The Old Yellow Fog. In The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, a dozen new stories "based on unsolved cases [from] the original . . . stories," Adrian Conan Doyle (Sir Arthur's youngest son) and John Dickson Carr have tried their hands at rebuilding this magic world. Like a pair of Frank Lloyd Wrights constructing a row of thatched cottages, they have studied the authentic models down to the last detail. Holmes himself appears on the glossy jacket, dressed in his deerstalker and plaid cloak. Within, a yellow fog haunts as ever the windows of 221-B Baker Street, hansom cabs clop beneath the gas lamps, and Landlady Hudson is forever being swept aside by terrifiec clients. Holmes himself is the same old neurotic—spending most of the day in his mouse-colored dressing gown, brooding over the Times, and indulging his parsimonious habit of filling his after-breakfast pipe with "the previous day's dottles." He has lost none of his old flair for dropping cumbersome snubs on his woodenheaded friend, Dr. Watson:
"'I take it that you are familiar with the name of the Duke of Carringford?' [asked Holmes].
"'You mean the late Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs?' "
"'Precisely.'
"'But he died some three years ago,' I observed.
"'Doubtless it will surprise you to learn, Watson, that I am aware of that fact,' replied Holmes testily."
Spiders & Guillotines. The famed Holmesian deductive method is also unchanged. In "The Deptford Horror," for example, it is soon clear that Mr. Theobold Wilson is a left-handed man with a Cuban background. "Your [walking] stick is cut from Cuban ebony," says Sherlock, "[and] there is a slight but regular scraping . . . along the left side of the handle, just where the ring finger of a left-handed man would close upon the grip." "Dear me, how simple," chuckles Mr. Wilson, blandly leading Holmes down to the cellar stove in which he keeps two specimens of the Galeodes spider—"the horror of the Cuban forests [which] possesses the power ... to break the spine . . . with a single blow of its mandibles."