My literary love, Michael Chabon, has written a delightful homage to Arthur Conan Doyle called The Final Solution*. Although it is never explicitly stated, the main character is an older Sherlock Holmes, in retirement fifty years after his glory days. The following quote is at the heart of the novel, and I found it too provocative not to share.

The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings – the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted – had he not? – by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems – the false leads and the cold cases – that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot.

In an interview at the end of the book, Chabon expressed his admiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing and a wish that The Final Solution will inspire readers to pick up the old Sherlock Holmes books. It sure worked on me – I’m absorbed. Speaking of which, gotta go read….

* I love this clever title because it references not just the “Final Solution” of Nazi Germany, which figures in the novel’s plot, but also the name of the story in which Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, titled The Final Problem.