Symons, Julian -- A Three Pipe Problem (1975)

C

A Sherlock Holmes pastiche with a twist.  Instead of the battered despatch box in Coutts’ Bank disgorging its contents, the Holmesian interest comes from an actor playing Holmes who decides to use Holmes’s methods to solve a series of modern “Karate Killings”.  This isn’t very successful.  Symons didn’t believe in Great Detectives, and so, although he solves the mystery, it’s more by inept bumbling than by reason, and there’s none of the grandeur or vitality of Conan Doyle’s splendid melodramas.  Instead, 1970s London is drab and sordid, full of gangsters, actors, and motor-cars.  (Symons’s favourite theme of reality vs. fantasy—the man who wants to be Holmes and sees everything through the lens of the canon, lives in reconstruction of 221B Baker Street.)  The plot is dodgy, and would make a much better short story (used by Ellery Queen).  It’s obvious from well before the halfway point that the murderer must be ***a traffic warden***, but the motive (revenge for running over dog) is very unconvincing, and the murderer’s identity arbitrary.

Nick Fuller.