Though Doyle had killed off his character by 1894, he still wrote other short stories for publication in the ‘Strand Magazine’. ‘The Lost Special’ was one such story, a seemingly inexplicable mystery in which a special train and its few passengers disappear between two stations. After the mystery is described in full, it is stated that a letter appeared in the press, giving a proposed solution from ‘an amateur reasoner of some celebrity’. It is possible, and has been proposed by Haining, Tracy, and Green, amongst others that this ‘amateur reasoner’ was Sherlock Holmes. The strongest clue to this is the quotation, ‘once one has eliminated the impossible…’, used by Holmes throughout his deductions. However, this suggested solution is proved wrong by a confession from the organising criminal once he is later arrested for an unrelated crime. Haining suggested that Doyle was ‘getting out some Holmes’ during the series hiatus, but given the failure of the unnamed detective it appears he was parodying his most famous creation. The story was published in book form in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Tales of Terror and Mystery’ in 1923 and has for years appeared in French editions of the complete adventures.
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