As one scholar has said, the detective novel is a product of the intellect: the writer, like a mathematician and a general leading a battle, acts “from the outside”, that is, this narrative did not allow for classical emotional identification, but rather demanded a reading in which the skill of thinking discovers the killer together with the narrator .

In the late 19th century, it was Arthur Conan Doyle who created the model of the investigative story and character. His Sherlock Holmes embodies intervention “from the outside” par excellence, where observation, combination of signs and deduction are the tools to proceed with. In four novels and 56 stories, he created such a mosaic of situations that he could not kill his hero and had to force events to resurrect him.

That’s the vast material that Arturo Pérez-Reverte works with in his latest novel, which he calls the same name as the story in which Holmes seemingly dies, plus another vast artistic resource: cinema. Protagonist of The final problem He is the actor who played Holmes through fifteen films, Basil Rathbone, Ormond Basil in fiction. The reader who fully enjoys it is the one who has references from both fields, so that he can approach the stories and films that abound with an agile eye.

Trapped by a storm, in a hotel located on the Greek island of Utakus, nine visitors and four servants are driven by three murders that take place according to the scheme of a closed room, mysterious and challenging because from the first, the actor and author of the series, will be forced to act as random Holmes and Watson, inside games of supremacy with an invisible killer. Circles open on the basis of generous dialogues that question the poetics of the novels and films that popularized the detective and stuck him in the general imagination with the physiognomy of the actor.

In this, his 34th novel, Pérez-Reverte emulates a tribute, accurately recreating Doyle’s narrative summary: landscape, conversation, brief hints, and invites the reader to join the hero’s action: to observe both the clothes and the scars. characters, which does not ignore gestures and vocal inflections, premeditated steps and improvisations. Everything means something. And anyone, even Basil-Holmes, could be a murderer. And just as Watson appears, Moriarty and Irene Adler can be hidden among the captive passengers.

He thriller in our days moved away from this novel of intelligence. If there is no bloody crime, fierce fights, brazen chases, detectives hurt by personal traumas, the novel does not have that instant preference that can be love for heinous action. The protagonists plunge into the mud and risk their lives. And conflicts are always resolved. IN The final problem, the outcome is as surprising as it was in Doyle’s novel of unexpected revelations, but – new – he chooses to leave the decision on punishment open. This will consist of hanging by the thread of a will that could at any moment bring the police to the door of the guilty man’s mansion. And that is very good, because Pérez-Reverte knows how to write a traditional novel, but is still a contemporary author. (OR)