THE FINAL SOLUTION A Story of Detection. By Michael Chabon. Illustrated. 131 pp. Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins Publishers. $16.95.

THE detective story is as rules-bound as any sport, or so S. S. Van Dine postulated in 1928 with his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories." At the center of the story, Van Dine wrote, there must be a detective, who proceeds by gathering clues. All clues must be plainly described, allowing the reader to proceed at the same pace as the detective, with no tricks played on the reader other than those played on the detective himself. The culprit must be caught as a result of the detective's investigation, not through coincidence or a spontaneous confession. The culprit must not be a servant. ("It is a too-easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worthwhile person.") The detective must have no prominent love interest. ("The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.")

A genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer. Even Arthur Conan Doyle felt that his Sherlock Holmes mysteries occupied the "lower stratum of literary achievement." It's still true. We relegate the detective story to literature's fringes, alongside other unsavories -- stories of suspense, war, romance. But when all genre writing is put in its proper place, what's left?

In 2002, Michael Chabon edited an issue of McSweeney's designed to challenge what he deemed the hegemony of the "contempo-rary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." Why did everything need to be so "sparkling with epiphanic dew"? Why did Joyce's "The Dead" need to be a story's lodestar for it to be taken seriously? Chabon wrote of his longing for the literary past, when even masters like Balzac and James wrote stories from different molds.

But Chabon's effort was widely reproved. The stories he collected, populated with ghosts, generals, bank robbers and creatures from the deep, looked as though they had been fun to write, but provided little more than slim critiques of the genres they parroted. They were silly, campy. Chabon's own contribution, "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance," was enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker.

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Now, two years later, Chabon seems primed to restart the debate over genre writing with a novella that delicately fuses the Golden Age detective story with a modern narration that's concerned with questions about life and experience beyond whodunit.

The very title, "The Final Solution," derives its power from blended resonances, mingling the horrific and the mundane. The Holocaust reference is transparent; so is the allusion to "The Final Problem," the 1893 story in which Sherlock Holmes apparently plunged to his death at the Reichenbach Falls. Of course Holmes did not die -- at the behest of publishers, Conan Doyle brought him back for more adventures -- and now Chabon presents him once again.

It is 1944, and Linus Steinman, a Jewish refugee from Germany, 9 years old, has not spoken since he arrived in the English countryside. He is alone except for a remarkable parrot that, along with snatches of Goethe and Schiller, sings enigmatic sequences of numbers in German. An aid society places boy and bird in a boarding house. The other lodgers grow mesmerized by the parrot, which they suspect is harboring secret naval ciphers or codes to Swiss bank accounts.

One night a man is murdered and the parrot is stolen. Sherlock Holmes, 89 years old, is persuaded to take a break from his beekeeping to help reunite Linus with his pet, and in the process perhaps find the killer. Thus begins the conventional detective story.

Chabon adheres to all of Van Dine's rules save one, No. 16, which prohibits "descriptive passages" and "literary dallying." But the book is the better for it, because the descriptive passages in "The Final Solution" -- in particular those on Holmes's beekeeping -- are exceptional, on par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon's last novel, the marvelous but uneven "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." And so Chabon makes good on his claim: a successful detective story need not be lacking in literary merit.

The detective story is one of the most conservative genres ever devised. It begins with an injury to society, but in the end the culprit is always found and censured. The spectacle of crime and punishment on the page, as Jacques Barzun once observed, purges the civilized man of his own feelings of guilt and fear.

Sherlock Holmes solves his case, but the crimes that really haunt the novella, those befalling the refugee boy's family, go unmentioned and unpunished. The master detective may be able to distinguish among an infinite number of cigar ashes, but -- unlike the reader -- can't deduce what the German number sequences gruesomely signify. The power of "The Final Solution" comes not from its catharsis, but from a refusal to provide one. It purges us of nothing.

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