At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff little line drawings. It is a slim novel with a fat one trying in vain to get in.
In July 1944, the war is nearing its end and Holmes is teetering on the edge of dotage, a prospect that scares him far more than the Reichenbach Falls. Still keeping bees and smoking foul-smelling shag, he is tempted from retirement by a murder outside the vicarage of a nearby village on the South Downs. The vicar, the Revd Mr Panicker, an Indian with High Church tendencies and a sexually deprived wife, takes in lodgers. One of them, an improbable travelling salesman, has been bludgeoned to death, apparently while making a surreptitious departure under cover of darkness.
The household also contains the Panickers’ ne’er-do-well son and two other lodgers.
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