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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Media: Specific Titles:
Fiction :
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin
Author: Yazoo
Wednesday, 01 September 1999 - 09:23 pm |        | Published in 1978; reprint 1996 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Vintage Books; paperback, US$10.00.
Just found this title. Don't know the author's work. Was wondering if anyone had read this title and wants to share what they thought of it.
Flipping through its pages, I noticed Holmes ratiocinating two murderers based on the CNA letters and the Lusk letter. Bought the book just for that one insight since I also think the concept a viable avenue for investigation. Some of you might form a (just?) evaluation of Dibdin's respect for historical "fact" from this idea. And there is no guarantee JtR won't turn out to be Moriarity or Colonel Moran.
Is anybody else ever annoyed at writers taking Sherlock Holmes and re-working Conan Doyle? At least Trow uses a secondary character in his Lestrade series.
Is anybody else annoyed with a very real murderer (or murderers) being turned into a fictional character hunted by a true fictional character like Holmes -- as opposed, let's say, to writing a historical novel based on the 1888 events?
Mixing Sherlock Holmes with JtR, it's no wonder we sometimes think JtR a figment of imagination.
Yaz |
Author: Caz
Wednesday, 01 September 1999 - 11:42 pm | | Hey Yaz!
I often wonder how JtR himself would have felt about all the fictional portrayals of 'Yours Truly', especially being connected with old Sherlock?
Angry that he isn't always taken absolutely seriously?
Delighted to be elevated to the lofty realms of a Conan Doyle-style blackguard? (and thereby feeling his deeds have achieved a macabre kind of acceptance and forgiveness because we are now being entertained by them!)
Smiling cynically to himself that all the peculiar myths his deeds engendered are continuing to haunt us all to this day?
Or laughing out loud when he looks down the ever-growing list of suspects and consistently fails to find himself included? :-)
Whether or not Jack invented his own nickname, would he have been annoyed about all the hoax letters sent in his name, or did he revel in all the free publicity?
Did you know that hundreds of letters were sent to Sherlock Holmes (still are I believe), asking for his autograph and suchlike, one sent in 1904 from the Isle of Wight even offered him the services of a housekeeper they knew! I wonder how many of these were sent by idiots and how many by deliberate hoaxers who enjoyed a silly joke. I wouldn't mind betting that some of the originators of these spoof letters to the great 'tec also wrote some of the JtR letters. It would be an interesting exercise for a rainy day to try and match them up.
Love,
Caz |
Author: Yazoo
Thursday, 02 September 1999 - 04:03 am | | Hey Caz!
Actually Dibden has Holmes making some of the same observations as you make regarding JtR's sense of his own press coverage. I'm a third of the way through but I have this terrible feeling I'm not going to like who Dibden turns into JtR and I won't be able to tell anybody here about it without giving away the ending.
BTW, I just ordered From Studio to Stage by you-know-who. It should be in my hot little hands in a week or so. Are there any special things I should watch for -- ohhh, say like him spelling "I am Jack the Ripper" in acrostic form, or something else in the manner of the Beatles' "I buried Paul" routine like reading the book from the end to the beginning or flipping rapidly back and forth through the pages? (Grins!) I'll email you what I think after I read it. Do I need Diary of a Nobody too? I bet I've already asked you that.
Yaz |
Author: Caz
Thursday, 02 September 1999 - 06:33 pm | | Hey Yaz!
If any more people start ordering my Weedon's memoirs his head will get far too big beyond the grave!
Try to remember, before you start reading, that I'd never heard of this small-time Victorian celebrity until this year. By the time I got hold of From Studio to Stage I had already convinced myself that the man was worth investigating further.
Then just go with your instincts as you look at the first photo of him and start reading about his childhood and adolescence.
He indulges in a lot of name-dropping throughout and has quite an interest in criminology while neatly dodging any direct references to the Whitechapel murders. Just keep your eyes open for any 'ripper' clues I may have missed. Of course I will have been guilty of reading between the lines, making more of some incidents and imagining him to be more sinister than perhaps is healthy :-)
I have recently got hold of Punch Vol.93 with everything from December 1887 to June 1889. This gives me every date on which the Diary of a Nobody entries were originally published, and naturally all the JtR-related material from the period, so I can wade through it all chronologically and get more of a feel of the way Weedon's mind was working at the time of the murders. I have already noticed that the Nobody entries ceased temporarily after the September 15th, 1888 issue and began again from November 17th. I wonder what caused this uncharacteristic gap? Maybe he was busy with the vigilance committee or something, but he doesn't come across as the public-spirited type to me :-). See what you think.
You might like to read Diary of a Nobody if only to give you an amusing insight into the absurdities of Victorian middle-class life.
The biography of George Grossmith by Tony Joseph also gives a lot of very useful family background info. It would appear that all the males who ever surrounded my poor old Weedon were far more successful, famous, talented and popular than him. No wonder he had to boast about having his portrait hanging in Macnaghten's office, bumping into friends like Bram Stoker, and even nearly causing Mark Twain to fall to his death from the edge of a cliff! Are some of his anecdotes simply wishful thinking or delusions of grandeur, written as they were a year after his brother's death, or the true stories of a witty and likeable fellow whose ventures into the world of art and theatre produced mainly forgettable pieces?
I look forward to hearing your opinions Yaz, but whatever you do, don't look for bloody anagrams!
Love,
Caz |
Author: Yazoo
Thursday, 02 September 1999 - 08:16 pm | | Hey Caz and All!
I'll keep an open mind as I read old Weedon, never fear, and I'll email you with my thoughts...if God should grant a miracle and I have any!
Finished The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. For you, Caz, there's an interesting line spoken by Holmes: Has it never struck you that there is a distinctly theatrical thread running right through this Whitechapel case?
There are so many coincidental correspondences to ideas and issues we have discussed on the Casebook, I almost expected a Liverpool cotton merchant to waddle onto the scene. (Not to worry, he don't!)
Don't worry...I won't give away the ending in what follows....
First a warning: If you are more fond of Conan Doyle's characters Moriarity, Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade, than you are of reading ficitonalized versions of JtR, do not read this book.
If you like art with a capital 'A' then read this book.
There are important discrepencies in the evidence presented in the book: most importantly, Kelly is pregnant again (for all I know about what you all have been up to recently, she may be pregnant again here too) and a fetus is removed.
We also have Holmes stating that Tabram was the Ripper's first victim. We get yet another version of the geographical placement/patterning that some people find so illimunating. The only trouble is, Holmes or the novelist inexplicably omits Tabram from the diagram. If Tabram was forgotten after this point, I'd put this ommission down to an editorial slip, but Tabram reappears again later as the first victim on Holmes' list.
I am not at all sure that the author doesn't know better and has simply excercised creative license; he is warping the facts of the murders, the facts of the Holmes legend, the narrative of his novel.
For instance, Dibdin's placing of one the characters so that he is following the man Curious George Hutchinson sees, then sees Curious George and mistakes him for an accomplice, then takes up a position to watch the events George described to the police about Kelly is fascinating and eerie for people who know who George is and what is being described in the scene. George's name or relevance to the Kelly murder is never mentioned in the book so the events would be read in a different way by people who have no knowledge of the case.
Dibdin's placement of the fictional observer of this scene agrees with a suspicion I have that beside George and the well-dressed man, there was a third man of whom George was only dimly aware, watching that night along with him. Is it my interpretive intrusion into the factual record, into the fictional narrative, or both?
Dibdin's novel invites this kind of insecurity in the reader. If you don't like shades of gray in a story, don't read this book.
But Dibdin is writing about artistic constructs and their deconstruction; about Reality and Art; about fact and myth; about Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel murderer. The reality of the Whitechapel murders suffers some in this process, but the years of accumulated fantasy and mythologizing get a thorough investigation -- it is a neat balancing act performed by Dibdin. I think this book should appeal mainly to the deconstructionists among us.
There are many small details in this book that can open up doors to new insights to the reading process and to the definitions/distinctions between Life and Art; Myth and Reality. Two examples should suffice:
1) In my first post, I mentioned the possibility of two, antagonistic murderers hypothosized from the CNA and Lusk letters. However, this idea is put into the mouth of Lestrade, a notoriously unreliable police investigator in this novel as well as in the Doyle writings (so much for my bright ideas). But Holmes makes no comment on Lestrade's observation. You'll have to read the book to draw your own conclusions as to why he is silent; how much meaning this silence can bear.
2) As a small example of the possibilities inherent in Dibdin's writing style, he has Watson write that the blood in his veins turned to "lice." The word is footnoted and the footnote is one, clever word: "sic." I think the word could be interpreted in its literal Latin sense and as an ironic comment by the author. But again, you have to decide some things in Dibdin's novel for yourself; there's room for more than one interpretation (and that should feel familiar to all of us on the Casebook).
This is by far the best-written novelization of the JtR murders that I've read. Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October shares some similarities with this book, but "Night..." is altogether on a different mission, being lighter in tone. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story has enough historical accuracy not to blatently offend JtR researchers.
Yaz |
Author: Caz
Friday, 03 September 1999 - 12:19 am | | Hi again Yaz,
Your quote about the 'theatrical thread' has got me thinking about writing some more stuff and nonsense on the 'Theatrical Jack' Board, so saving this one from any more off-topic posts.
Have a great weekend all you Sherlock Holmes/JtR fiction fiends.
Love,
Caz |
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