For years I've heard and read of Micheal Dibdin's rather infamous Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. Some time ago, I actually did read the story in an online PDF. This is story that Holmes fans tend to either love or hate. There is a monstrous twist half-way through the tale, that I won't give away here, which left Holmes fans (understandably) mortified. Though I knew what the twist was, and was not really offended, I generally do not like pessimistic or downbeat endings. Some reviewers have complained on the lack of a "double-twist" at the end.
This is why I wrote that story "the Napolean of Crime," with it's obvious reference to Moriarty. The scenario is similar, though not identical to Dibdin's, only with the twist that he did not supply. A "rebuke" if you will.
Truth be told, since my previous book, The Maple White Terror, happened to be set in a "Doyle Universe," in which not only Holmes and Professor Challenger meet and interact, but references to other stories occur. There were three Challenger stories written by ACD, The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, and When the World Screamed. All of them qualify as science fiction, placing ACD in the same category as Jules Verne as a pioneer of the genre, except for Mist. This was a tale which basically promoted the "science" of Spiritualism, in which Doyle was infatuated, and featuring Challenger as a reluctant convert. When writing the climax to The Napoleon of Crime I included a reference to Land of Mist, but after reading John Lavas's explanation of it online, I decided to leave it out, which is a bit of a same; I wanted the "shared universe" concept to be evident. Why did I leave it out? It seems that Doyle wanted his popular characters from The Lost World to star in it, but wanted it set in the "real world," or something like that, so he deliberated created inconsistencies, such as the suggestion that Edward Malone's published accounts of both The Lost World and The Poison Belt were false.
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