'The Final Problem'

Bethany Latham - historicalnovelsociety.org - 02/2026

Perez-Reverte has been on my to-read list for a while, and now I regret waiting so long to get around to him. TL; DR: I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

In 1960, Ormond Basil still has name recognition, but his acting career, rubbing elbows with everyone from Errol Flynn to Gloria Swanson, is mostly behind him. A storm strands him and a few other travelers at the only hotel on a small Greek island. The extensive reading, research, and method for Basil’s most famous film role – Sherlock Holmes – comes in handy when a guest ends up dead. Was it suicide… or murder? Until the water calms and police arrive, everyone agrees Basil is the man to conduct an investigation. Real-life deduction could pass the time!

Basil is obviously patterned on Basil Rathbone, and there’s much mixing of historical Hollywood lore with Pérez-Reverte’s tweaked version of same. This is a witty offering that laughs at its own premise, the prose convincing for British Basil’s diffident tone as narrator (“She wasn’t a great beauty by any means, but not bad for an Englishwoman”). It’s also entirely meta; there’s discussion of how different mystery authors use conventions of the genre and their application to the situation at hand. Basil remarks to his “Watson”: “The true art of narrating a mystery … does not consist of telling a story, but making the reader, mistakenly or not, tell it to themselves. … The tension in a mystery novel is not between the killer and the detective, but between the author and the reader.” There are copious quotes from Holmes and others, both Golden Age cozy and hardboiled crime (this last, wryly denigrated). The end result: a literary novel that strikes a beautiful chord with anyone who loves the Golden Age of mysteries. It’s a heck of a lot of fun.

https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-final-problem/