THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY

Sherlock Holmes was Jack the Ripper. That uninspired notion was the subject of a tongue-in-cheek essay last year (in Borowitz' Innocence and Arsenic), and it is the subject of this fevered, strained, and unnecessarily lurid exercise--the latest (and undoubtedly not the last) unearthed manuscript by dear old Dr. Watson. At first, Watson has no inkling of the truth: he's convinced that Holmes is right in believing that the Ripper is none other than that fiend Moriarty! But when Watson follows S.H. and sees him butchering a tart and then finds Holmes' hidden jars of victims' organs--he can no longer doubt. As you can imagine, he gets very emotional about it. The only reward here is one passable cutesy: ""221B or not 221B? That was the question. . . .