The Final Problem

In June 1960, Ormond Basil, a sixty-five-year-old retired British actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in fifteen films, travels from Antibes, France, to Genoa, Italy. At the port, he encounters Pietro Malerba, a powerful Italian film producer, and Najat Farjallah, a celebrated Lebanese opera soprano. Malerba invites Basil aboard his yacht to cruise to Corfu, mentioning a Warner-RAI television coproduction that could provide work. Basil accepts. His career has stalled, and though he has been sober for nearly five years, the craving for alcohol remains a constant struggle.

An unexpected storm strands the group on Utakos, a tiny Greek island near Corfu, at the Hotel Auslander, the island's only accommodation, run by Raquel Auslander, a composed Austrian Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz. Nine guests are confined there: Basil's group; Hans and Renate Klemmer, a German couple; Dr. Kemal Karabin, a Turkish physician; Vesper Dundas, an Englishwoman, and Edith Mander, her traveling companion and secretary; and Francisco "Paco" Foxá, a charming Spanish novelist. The staff includes Gérard, a French-Algerian maître d', and two young Greek employees, Spiros and Evangelia.

Basil befriends Foxá, who writes detective stories under pseudonyms and admires Basil's Holmes films. Their conversations are interrupted when Evangelia rushes up from the beach screaming. In the cabana, Edith Mander lies dead on the floor with a broken cord around her neck, the other end dangling from a roof beam. A stool is overturned beside her, a chair has been pushed against the door from inside, and the window is shut. Only a single trail of footprints leads to the cabana, with no return path. Dr. Karabin pronounces death by asphyxiation.

The scene resembles a classic locked-room mystery, a detective fiction staple involving a body found in a space no one else could have entered or exited. When Basil and Karabin interview Dundas, she insists Mander was optimistic, showed no signs of depression, and left no suicide note. Dundas explains they met in Paris after Dundas was widowed and Mander had ended a bad relationship. With the storm preventing police from reaching the island, Karabin raises doubts, and a second examination reveals the rope has vanished from the cabana. Foxá proposes that Basil should serve as the group's unofficial investigator. After initial protests, Basil agrees, and Foxá volunteers as Watson, Holmes's companion in Conan Doyle's stories.

That night, Basil and Foxá return to the cabana, where Basil lays out his theory: The killer struck Mander unconscious with the heavy teak stool, hoisted her body with a rope, and let her drop. The rope was partially cut to simulate a natural break, then removed entirely. The blow landed on the left side of Mander's head, suggesting a left-handed attacker. Basil notes the doorway threshold is suspiciously clean of sand, a detail whose significance he does not yet explain.

That same night, someone slides a note and a sharp letter opener under Basil's door. The note references Sophocles' Ajax, in which Odysseus examines footprints in sand left by the maddened warrior Ajax, and puns on the word "elementary." The killer is taunting Basil directly, and Basil and Foxá conclude they are dealing with a cultured, arrogant criminal.

The provocations escalate. Dr. Karabin is found dead in his room, stabbed in the back of the neck with the letter opener left under Basil's door. His toupee is placed backwards, and his outstretched arm points to a Greek magazine featuring Basil as Sherlock Holmes. The room appears locked from inside, but Basil deduces that Foxá staged this illusion by secretly pocketing Karabin's key, which had been slipped under Foxá's own door, and planting it while pretending to force the lock. Foxá admits the deception but insists the key was left for him by the killer.

The hotel's passports vanish from Mrs. Auslander's desk, eliminating any chance of comparing identities. Basil discovers the black embroidered shawl Mander carried the night she died, washed up in seaweed down the shore, and explains how the locked room was achieved: The killer spread the shawl on the floor with its edge under the door, placed the chair on it, closed the door from outside, and pulled the shawl through the gap, dragging the chair against the door and sweeping the threshold clean. A typed note quoting Thomas De Quincey's On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts appears in Dundas's wardrobe, produced on Mander's portable typewriter.

A third murder follows. Hans Klemmer is found bludgeoned to death in the reading room. Basil notices the lobby grandfather clock is ten minutes slow and deduces the killer removed one of its heavy bronze weights, used it as a weapon, and returned it. A coded note references The Strand Magazine and a Holmes locked-room story, linking all three killings through a literary signature. Basil pockets a page from Paris Match found on Klemmer's body: a 1949 list identifying Klemmer by the rank Sturmbannführer, a senior SS title, accused of executing Allied prisoners at the Görlitz camp. Basil confronts Foxá, arguing the Spaniard is the killer. Foxá refutes each point, and their standoff ends when Mrs. Auslander announces the police can finally arrive.

Three months later, Basil travels to Lake Garda, where Vesper Dundas now lives in a villa inherited from her late husband. He tells her the investigation closed without arrests, then reveals his true conclusions: She is the murderer of all three victims, and she is not Vesper Dundas at all but Edith Mander.

The two women switched identities during their travels. Basil explains the evidence: The corpse's hands were smooth and manicured, those of a woman of leisure, while the surviving woman's hands are short-nailed and bitten, resembling a typist's. Mander's military records show she had allergic reactions to berries, meaning she could not have eaten the blackberry tart that stained the dead woman's teeth. The woman killed in the cabana was the real Vesper Dundas.

Through contacts at the Royal Air Force (RAF) historical archive, Basil learns that Mander's husband, Sergeant John Mander, was among the Allied prisoners executed at Görlitz on Klemmer's order. She kills Klemmer for revenge and kills Karabin because the doctor discovered something inconsistent with the identity switch. She steals the passports to confirm Klemmer's identity and prevent anyone from comparing her documents to the real Dundas's.

She reveals one final secret. In 1934, she was a seventeen-year-old aspiring actress who met the young Basil at a London party. He seduced her, promised to help her career, and never contacted her again. During the war, she met her future husband at a screening of one of Basil's Holmes films and became obsessed with Conan Doyle's stories, particularly "A Scandal in Bohemia" and its portrait of Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes. The provocations on Utakos were driven by a decades-old wound inflicted by the very man playing detective.

Basil decides not to turn her in, telling her he may change his mind someday and leaving her in permanent uncertainty. In their final exchange, he addresses her as "Mrs. Adler" and she calls him "Mr. Holmes." He tells her that everything he has to say has already crossed her mind. She replies that her answer has possibly crossed his, completing the parallel with the Holmes-Adler dynamic.