Five favorite Holmes canon stories, pt 5: The Final Problem (plus The Adventure of the Empty House)

[marycrawford]

Part 1: The Blue Carbuncle
Part 2: The Copper Beeches
Part 3: The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
Part 4: The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

I’m just going to cheat and combine The Final Problem with The Adventure of the Empty House, because how can I talk about just the one without at least mentioning the other? I can’t end my list of favourite stories with Holmes being mostly dead! *g*

I think The Final Problem is one of the best stories in the series, from the tension right at the opening to the amazing finale, and it is definitely one of the most dramatic; it also has one of the best villains. It’s interesting how almost everybody who has heard of Sherlock Holmes also knows Moriarty, even though Moriarty appears in just this one story, not counting a couple of minor references in others. What I find even more striking is that Watson, our narrator, never even meets the Napoleon of crime; Watson glimpses a man in black striding up a mountain, and that is all. Moriarty is a man made of smoke and mirrors.

This is where I sidestep to the BBC radio version of The Final Problem, because in the opening Bert Coules does something that I think is particularly brilliant, and very fannish: he takes the canon and twists it juuust a bit, in a way that is still completely in character but sheds new light upon the original.

Just like in the story, Holmes appears at Watson’s house at night without warning, after they haven’t seen each other in a while; Holmes looks ill and strained, shows his scraped and bleeding knuckles, talks wildly of airguns and roughs with bludgeons and bricks falling off roofs, and demands that Watson come away with him to the continent for an aimless holiday, because they are both in danger from an apparently near-omnipotent criminal mastermind whose name Watson has never even heard Holmes mention before.

The twist is in how Watson reacts in the radio version; he’s not immediately convinced that any of this is real, and picks up on the inconsistencies in Holmes’s story immediately: “A brick? Forgive me, but -- this man is a criminal genius, and he arranges for someone to throw a brick at you?” Heeee. You have a point, my dear fellow.

When Holmes persists, Watson is worried sick, and given all he knows of Holmes’s past and habits, decides that maybe Holmes is in the grip of some kind of drug reaction or mania. And yet Watson resolves to come with Holmes to the continent anyway, whether Moriarty is real or just a figment of Holmes’s imagination, because in either case he’ll need someone to take care of him. ♥!

There is so much emotional tension in the original story as well as sheer drama and excitement, all of which comes across very well in the radio and Granada TV versions -- the way Holmes tries to shield Watson even as he draws him further into danger, the repeated conversations where Holmes has second thoughts and tries to send Watson back to safety, and fails (“It was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an old campaigner as well as an old friend”), the danger running along with every step of their seemingly idyllic mountain holiday. And then they arrive at Reichenbach, and Holmes finally does succeed in sending Watson away, and. SNF.

Did I mention I am a total, total sucker for stories where one partner believes that the other is dead, with all the resultant heartbreak, and then it turns out not to be true?

Of course, if I’d lived in Victorian times, I would have thought Holmes really did die at Reichenbach, and there would have been outrage, and possibly I would have worn a mourning band around my upper arm or hurled eggs at Arthur Conan Doyle’s window -- and then, ten years later, I would finally be able to read about Holmes’s return in The Adventure of the Empty House.

I sometimes wonder what the Holmes fandom would have been like if Arthur Conan Doyle had stuck to his decision to write more ‘important’ works, and hadn’t caved into public pressure to revive Holmes. I think we would have gotten a gamut of Post-Reichenbach stories, full of possible scenarios -- like the Post-Gauda Prime subsection of Blake’s 7 fanfic.

One of the scenarios that I find entertaining is that Coules’s version turns out to be correct, and that there IS no Moriarty, that Watson has been fooled all along and unwittingly fools his readers in turn. Nowhere in The Final Problem is there any objective proof that such a man as Moriarty exists, or for that matter, that the British police are involved in Holmes’s plans at all; there is one telegram that reaches Holmes in Strasbourg, which supposedly says that Moriarty has escaped, but Holmes throws it into the fire before Watson has seen its contents.

This is also what I find so tantalizing when we do finally get a solution to the mystery of Holmes ‘death’ in The Empty House; much as I love the larger story, and the wonderful drama of Holmes’s return (fainting!Watson, how much do I love you? Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis much), Holmes’s tale of how he survived Reichenbach is so full of holes that it pretty much begs for fanfic, excuse me, ‘pastiches’, to fill in the gaps.

Also, returning to the theme of unreliable narrators, the way Holmes describes lying on a ledge of rock above the waterfall ‘in the most perfect comfort’, while spying on Watson and the police trying to solve his murder, is very like him in its outrageousness, but I also love the Granada TV series for adding a moment where Holmes watches Watson grieve for him and doesn’t sneer at it, but reacts in a much more human fashion.

And speaking of outrageousness, one of my all-time favourite Holmes moments is when he and Watson are having fun hiding out in the empty house opposite 221B, and Holmes has just managed to astonish Watson:

"Good heavens!" I cried. "It is marvellous."

"I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety,'" said he, and I recognised in his voice the joy and pride which the artist takes in his own creation.

I just find it so, so telling that Holmes casts himself as Cleopatra here; it is the sort of thing that makes me incredibly gleeful.


I'd love to hear what your favourite moments are, or what you would want to see in a Post-Reichenbach story, or how much you believe of Holmes's little jaunts into Lhasa and Khartoum -- even if we are agreed that his supposed visit was to the head Lama, and not the head llama, and that Watson was undoubtedly chagrined at the printer's error.