Elementary

By Stefan Kanfer

THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY by Michael Dibdin Pantheon; 192 pages; $7.95

SHERLOCK HOLMES VS. DRACULA by Loren D. Estleman Doubleday; 214 pages; $7.95

It was on a damp October night in 18 --when the wind howled like a child in the chimney. In those days Sherlock Holmes kept a child in the chimney for comparison purposes.

"Yes, Watson," he remarked paradoxically, "the future can be discerned. It is the past that is hidden."

"Great Scott!" I expostulated. "How did you read my mind?"

He puffed upon his underslung pipe. "When I see a man shuffling a tarot deck, certain conclusions become manifest -- the first of which is that you are wasting your time with occult twaddle."

My protest was unavailing. Holmes helped himself to a drink from the gasogene. "Using nothing but logic, one can follow today's events and see deep into the next century. Of course, you have only my word for it."

"Your word is like another man's paragraph," I assured him.

"Very well then. By the '70s I will have become an industry, the star of countless films and books. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven- Per-Cent Solution will even make me the client and Sigmund Freud the detective."

"Preposterous." "Profitable. In 1978, a London writer named Michael Dibdin, 31, will offer The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, pitting me against the 1888 slayer of harlots, Jack the Ripper."

"A novel idea, Holmes."

"More like a short story, Watson. And hardly new. A Mr. Ellery Queen will have already written A Study in Terror in 1966, postulating that Jack was an aristocrat named the Duke of Shires. Other literature will theorize that the killer was a Scotland Yard inspector or a member of the royal family."

Shocked, I gulped my brandy. Even though I was immortal, I wasn't getting any younger.

"In the same year," Holmes went on, "a young American novelist, Mr. Loren D. Estleman, 25, will publish Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. " "But you have already annihilated such creatures in the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. " evertheless, if a man goes to bat for me, the least I can do is listen to his tale. And, in point of fact, both Dibdin and Estleman observe the law, grant them that. As the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers will write of the Sherlockian pastiche, "The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's." Neither writer mocks; both stories are formal. Both will have readers clued to their seats. But face it, old fellow, your speech is pathetically easy to echo."

I remonstrated; he echoed my tone with pathetic ease.

"The Dracula tale," said Holmes, "stretches credulity to the breaking point. It actually has me saying modestly, the monster was 'one step ahead of me, as usual.' The fiend would never have been a step ahead."

"And you would never have been modest."

"As for the Ripper book, the thing is a well-plotted psychodrama with a denouement as sacrilegious as the title is misleading. There will always be one more Sherlock Holmes story. Remember, even Conan Doyle was not able to kill me. He brought me back from the grave after 'death' at the Reichenbach falls. But all the later stories, like these two novels, were not quite up to my former standard."

"Perhaps it's as Doyle wrote about his severest critic," I mused. "A Cornish fisherman once told the author, 'Sherlock may not have killed himself falling over that cliff. But he did injure himself some thing terrible. He's never been the same since.' " The world's most illustrious consulting detective merely indicated his file of brilliantly solved cases. "I prefer the comment of Her Majesty as to my durability.

'Be he ever so humble there's no police like Holmes.' "

-- Stefan Kanfer

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