The Final Solution – Michael Chabon (2005, 127 pages)

An elderly once-famous detective has retired to Sussex to keep bees. Sound familiar? The detective is never identified by name, but it’s reasonable to assume he’s Sherlock Holmes.

“Even on a sultry afternoon lie this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter – newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers, bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs – that made treacherous the crossing of his parlour, and open his front door to the world.”

Chabon is brilliant at capturing the frailties and fears of old age and fading faculties:

“The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth lie the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woollen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.”

“Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odour of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigour and rectitude of the Empire.”

It is 1944, and the old man is asked to investigate the disappearance of a parrot, which has been reeling off lists of numbers of great interest to various shady persons. The parrot is the only friend of a mute Jewish boy, and shortly after it disappears a lodger at the same premises of the boy is found murdered.

The old man relishes the opportunity to use his much-lauded skills again. Yet while it is a mystery novella, this is not the main point of the story. Rather it is about how some things are so huge – wars, the Holocaust –  they defy reason and straightforward explanation. Answers can be comforting, but sometimes they are not there to be found.

 “A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching in the glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallisation, the paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.”