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Not since the end of Kill Bill, vol. 1 has there been a cliffhanger as tantalizingly cruel as the ending of Michael Chabon's Inventing Sherlock Holmes in the new issue of The New York Review of Books. (Yes, we read The New York Reivew of Books: their fabulous party page photos make Gotham's look like out-takes from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)

We're chugging along, enjoying every one of Chabon's 2,900-plus words when we hit this:

I know I run the risk of hokum in dwelling very long on the connection, at least as old as Rabelais and arguably traceable to the shaman retailing trickster tales by the campfire, between doctors and literature, storytelling and healing. So I'll just mention that when the first dozen Holmes stories were collected and published in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a book that made Conan Doyle famous and rich, and saved him forever from the life that he had never resigned himself to living out, they came dedicated to Dr. Joseph Bell.
—This is the first of two articles.

Damn you, Chabon! You've got us dangling on the line!

Aww, can we stay mad at that face...
Inventing Sherlock Holmes [NYRB]
MichaelChabon.com [official site]