Though it was by no means the final Holmes story that Conan Doyle wrote, I think that it is reasonable to take His Last Bow to be the final story of Sherlock Holmes. Set on the second of August in 1914, just two days before England would enter World War 1, it was  published in September of 1917. This would turn out to be towards the end of the war, though with a year left to go, not so close as for the end of the war to be in sight.

As has been said, it’s more a spy thriller than a detective story, and it threads a very difficult needle by being a fictional story about an important real event. On the one hand, it is a contribution to the war effort to boost morale. On the other hand, it runs the double-risk of hurting morale by this benefit being fake (i.e. fictional), and it also runs the risk of seeming to steal the glory of the people who did real work. That’s nothing particular to this story; it’s true of all fictional stories tied to current events. Comic books were in an especially difficult place in this way regarding the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers—all the moreso because many of them should have been able to easily stop the attacks or else rescue far more people than were rescued in real life.

The ending particularly intrigues me, for reasons I shall get to shortly.

The two friends chatted in intimate converse for a few minutes, recalling once again the days of the past… As they turned to the car Holmes pointed back to the moonlit sea and shook a thoughtful head.

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way.

Holmes’ sense of tremendous change coming was not misplaced, and it extended even into detective fiction. I do not pretend that the changes to detective fiction were the biggest or most important changes, of course; they are merely the ones that interest me here.

The first world war was not, technically, the end of the Holmes stories. Conan Doyle would write another collection’s worth of short stories by 1927, but for all that it would not be many and a new crop of detectives was on its way. Hercule Poirot would emerge into the world during the Great War, though his first story would not find a publisher until 1920. Five years later, Lord Peter Wimsey would investigate his first murder in Whose Body? Poirot had something of a timeless element to him, but Lord Peter did not, and that’s what’s really brought to mind by His Last Bow.

Though Conan Doyle wrote Holmes stories until 1927, with the one exception of His Last Bow they were all set in the late Victorian period, and for good reason. Holmes was a creature of the Victorian period. It is unthinkable to have Holmes without his Victorian politeness—as exact as his deductions—but Holmes’ encyclopedic knowledge of bicycle tires and cigar ash could not really be sustained over more decades, too.

By contrast, Lord Peter was a creature of the inter-war period. His personality was defined by the trauma of the Great War followed by the emptiness of the Great War being over. He took up detection because he had nothing else to do and after his experiences in the war he could not do nothing.

Each detective was a creature of his time period in a more profound way, though. Holmes was a religious man in the style of English religion which would soon perish in World War 1; he was religious but far more preoccupied with the details of life. The Christianity of England in the Victorian period was salt that lost its flavor, and the question of with what will it be seasoned was soon to be asked. But it was not asked in that time. Lord Peter, by contrast, was a non-religious man. He was in some ways the embodiment of the answer that salt which has lost its flavor is good for nothing but to be trampled under foot. He did not even consider religion; as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, he’d have thought it an impertinence to believe that he had a soul.

But Lord Peter was a creature of the inter-war period not merely in his start, but also in his end. Everything in this world is temporary but Lord Peter was more temporary than most because he was an aristocrat and the aristocracy was, in his time, not long for the world. I don’t mean that it would literally end, but the social importance of dukes and the other minor nobility was drawing to a close. England never, itself, had a revolution, but the revolutions that happened elsewhere sufficed for it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that England a peaceful revolution instead of a violent one. That peaceful revolution was on its way during the interwar period, and it did not take a crystal ball to see it coming.

That said, even in Lord Peter’s time it was not really enough that he was a lord. He needed to be rich, too. The title helped him make useful friends, though.

All of this is one of the very interesting things about reading old books. It’s not merely that we can select from the best of what’s gone before us profiting from the work of a great many people in reading through the dreck to find that best, though that is of course quite helpful. It’s also not merely that we can benefit from the difference of perspective, taking for granted things we don’t and noticing what we take for granted, though that is enormously valuable too. It’s also that it’s interesting to see where people thought that things were going and what trends were important when we know what the correct answers turned out to be.

It can be amusing and interesting when they turn out to be wrong, but I think it’s even more interesting when they turned out to be right.