Dottle from Baker Street

THE EXPLOITS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (338 pp.)--Adrian Conan Doyle & John Dickson Carr--Random House ($3.95).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, got so tired of the great sleuth that he had wicked Professor Moriarty shove him over a waterfall, restored him to life only after a public clamor. Humorist Stephen Leacock also tried his hand at rubbing Sherlock out: he put him on all fours, entered him as a dachshund in an international dog show, and had him painlessly destroyed for not having a dog license.

All to no purpose. Beloved in the '90s, Sherlock Holmes is in tiptop legendary health today. He has not even been killed by the deadly fact that almost any modern writer of whodunits constructs stories far more ingeniously than Doyle did and sticks much closer to reality at the same time. On the contrary, it is the fairy-tale quality of his world that has kept Holmes alive: he wields his magic wand in a never-never land where all cops are laughable simpletons, all locks susceptible to the key of logic.

The Old Yellow Fog. In The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, a dozen new stories "based on unsolved cases [from] the original . . . stories," Adrian Conan Doyle (Sir Arthur's youngest son) and John Dickson Carr have tried their hands at rebuilding this magic world. Like a pair of Frank Lloyd Wrights constructing a row of thatched cottages, they have studied the authentic models down to the last detail. Holmes himself appears on the glossy jacket, dressed in his deerstalker and plaid cloak. Within, a yellow fog haunts as ever the windows of 221-B Baker Street, hansom cabs clop beneath the gas lamps, and Landlady Hudson is forever being swept aside by terrifiec clients. Holmes himself is the same old neurotic--spending most of the day in his mouse-colored dressing gown, brooding over the Times, and indulging his parsimonious habit of filling his after-breakfast pipe with "the previous day's dottles." He has lost none of his old flair for dropping cumbersome snubs on his woodenheaded friend, Dr. Watson:

"'I take it that you are familiar with the name of the Duke of Carringford?' [asked Holmes].

"'You mean the late Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs?' "

"'Precisely.'

"'But he died some three years ago,' I observed.

"'Doubtless it will surprise you to learn, Watson, that I am aware of that fact,' replied Holmes testily."

Spiders & Guillotines. The famed Holmesian deductive method is also unchanged. In "The Deptford Horror," for example, it is soon clear that Mr. Theobold Wilson is a left-handed man with a Cuban background. "Your [walking] stick is cut from Cuban ebony," says Sherlock, "[and] there is a slight but regular scraping . . . along the left side of the handle, just where the ring finger of a left-handed man would close upon the grip." "Dear me, how simple," chuckles Mr. Wilson, blandly leading Holmes down to the cellar stove in which he keeps two specimens of the Galeodes spider--"the horror of the Cuban forests [which] possesses the power ... to break the spine . . . with a single blow of its mandibles."

Most of the stories feature a fine disposition of Doyleish corpses. In "The Adventure of Foulkes Rath," "the whole top of Squire Addleton's skull was cleft like a rotten apple" ("Indeed," says Inspector Lestrade with some understatement, "it was a miracle that he regained consciousness even for a moment"). In "The Red Widow," there is a "chilled silence" when Holmes and Watson hear that "Lord Jocelyn Cope was put to death in his own ancestral guillotine"--and certainly the corpse makes what Watson calls "a grim spectacle"--"clad in a velvet smoking jacket" but with only a "white cloth . . . where his head had been." In "The Black Baronet," a nifty, throat-slitting device, built into a drinking cup, ends the career of a blackmailer.

Pale Womanhood. No Holmes story is complete, of course, without the agonized presence of an "imperious and beautiful woman," preferably bending her "pale, perfectly chiseled face" over the pale remains of her perfectly chiseled husband, or submitting to her blackmailer's demands with a low bend of her diamond tiara. "She is informed," says Holmes briskly of the Duchess of Carringford, "that [her husband's] first wife is alive . . . that her own marriage is bigamous, her position spurious, and the status of her child illegitimate." "What! After thirty-eight years?" cries Watson. "This is monstrous, Holmes."

By sticking strictly to the original ingredients and prose style, Authors Cart and Doyle handle the job very well -- even down to introducing the original "Baker Street irregulars," "the grubby little boys" Holmes employed on odd occasions. It is the present-day descendants of these urchins who will have the most fun with the new tales, and there will be much whimsical nattering over such points as whether Holmes, a sensitive connoisseur of Italian music, should be allowed to fiddle Auld Lang Syne on his Stradivarius, or stoop to such an expression as "upped and died." But only Sir Arthur's ghost is likely to be really critical of this loving attempt to relight the master's dottles.

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