A Study in Sherlock

“It’s as fictitious as Holmes himself.” He paused and looked toward the geese again. He was gathering himself.

“Ina was murdered, Artie. Murdered. The closest I’d ever been to murder was in the courtroom, where all I do is control the proceedings so the defendant gets a proper trial. A purely formal process, the less emotional the better. I’d never known someone who was murdered, let alone someone who did it, so I’d never experienced its horror personally. No triumph of logic, no intellectual grand slam, can tame my reaction to such hideousness. It can’t lessen my outrage over Ina’s death, or my sympathy for Emmy, or, for that matter, my anguish for Gibson, a great friend, and what he’s become.”

He turned to me. “So here’s what I learned: that’s how it should be. It’s emotion that fulfills us, Artie, not intellect. Pure logic is sterile, an emotionless refuge for incomplete people. In the end, what’s important isn’t how capably we think, it’s how capably we feel.”

I realized something: “Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict, wasn’t he?”

He stared at me for a moment. The eyebrows went up.

“And a bachelor.”

He dropped his cigarette on the ground and smushed it slowly with his shoe. When he’d finished he looked up and poked me in the arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.”

Longtime admirers of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, John Sheldon and Gayle Lynds are also partners in crime and life. They live together in rural Maine, where “A Triumph of Logic” is set. The story’s hero, Judge Linwood Boothby, comes from John’s experience as a Maine prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School. He’s working on his first suspense novel featuring, of course, Judge Boothby and Artie Morey. The pianist in the story, Julia Austrian, is the heroine of Gayle’s book Mosaic. Gayle is a New York Times bestselling spy thriller author. Her new novel is The Book of Spies, named one of the best thrillers of the year by Library Journal. She is cofounder (with David Morrell) of International Thriller Writers and is a member of the Association for Intelligence Officers.

Readers are invited to search this story for clues to a subplot: Dr. Watson has murdered Sherlock Holmes’s love, Irene Adler, and his crime has been solved by the combined efforts of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, and, of all people, Holmes’s archenemy Moriarty.

THE LAST OF SHEILA-LOCKE HOLMES

Laura Lippman

Years later, when people tried to tease her about the summer she turned eleven and opened her own detective agency, she always changed the subject. People thought she was embarrassed because she wore a deerstalker cap with a sweatshirt and utility belt and advertised her services under the name Sheila Locke-Holmes, which was almost her real name anyway. She was actually Sheila Locke-Weiner, but it was bad enough to be that in real life. The only case she ever solved was the one about her father’s missing Wall Street Journal and she disbanded her agency by summer’s end.

Besides, it didn’t begin with the deerstalker cap, despite what her parents think they remember. She was already open for business when she found the cap, on her mother’s side of the walk-in closet, in a box full of odd things. Because her mother was Firmly Against Clutter—a pronouncement she made often, usually to Sheila’s father, who was apparently on the side of clutter—this unmarked box was particularly interesting to Sheila. It contained the deerstalker cap, although she did not know to call it that; a very faded orange T-shirt that said GO CLIMB A ROCK; a sky blue wool cape with a red plaid lining; and a silver charm bracelet.

She took the box to her mother, who told Sheila that she really must learn to respect other people’s privacy and property. “We talked about this. Remember, Sheila? You promised to do better.”

“But I have to practice searching for things,” Sheila said. “It’s my job. May I have the T-shirt? It’s cool, like the shirts people buy at Abercrombie, only even better because it’s really old, not fake-old.”

“Don’t you want the cape, too? And the charm bracelet? I think those things are back in style as well.”

Sheila maintained a polite silence. Her mother was not the kind of mother who was actually up-to-date on what was cool. She just thought she was. “I like the cap. It’s like the one on that book that Daddy is always reading, the one he says he wants to work on if it ever becomes a film.”

Her mother looked puzzled. “Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, the one about the stupid people who fought for the South in the Civil War.”

“Stupid people?”

“The dunces.”

“The dunces—oh, no, Sheila, that’s not what the book is about. But, yes, the man in A Confederacy of Dunces wears a cap like this. And writes things down on Big Chief tablets, sort of like you’ve been doing.”