If one was stranded at a small hotel on an isolated island in the Ionian Sea with a murderer on the loose, one would hope for someone like Sherlock Holmes to be on the case. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s newly translated mystery novel, “The Final Problem,” this is precisely the case. The Spanish author has written a suspenseful locked-room mystery, but he has done so with an homage to three people—not all of them real. The homage is to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and Basil Rathbone, the famous 20th-century actor to have arguably best portrayed Doyle’s Holmes.
“The Final Problem” places Ormond Basil (who is unmistakably Basil Rathbone, but perhaps for legal reasons could not use the actor’s actual name) on the tiny Greek island of Utakos. Ormond Basil is known immediately on the island as the famous actor who played the famous consulting detective in movies. References abound to those actual movies that Rathbone appeared in, along with countless references and lines from Doyle’s stories.
