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ОглавлениеTHE STORIES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, known as “the Canon” in allusion to a term used by Bible scholars, were written by Arthur Conan Doyle over a period of some forty years, from 1887 to 1927. They include four novels and five volumes of short stories, for a total of sixty tales. According to a report by Charles E. Lauterbach in 1960, the Canon contains a total of 660,382 words. Later, in the computer age, researcher Les Moskowitz was able to determine (2005) that they use 20,426 different words.
The sixty stories, and the collections in which they appear, are considered here in “Canonical” order, the order in which they are usually published in collected editions. It corresponds closely, but not exactly, to the order in which they were first published.
Sherlockians sometimes resort to a set of four-letter abbreviations for the story titles that were devised by Jay Finley Christ and first published in connection with his Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes, 1947. They are widely used in footnotes and sometimes even in text about the stories, either in all capitals (ABBE for “The Abbey Grange”) or, less often, in the upper-and-lower-case format which Christ used: Abbe, Blac, Engr, RedC, 3Stu, and so on.
The novel which began Doyle’s writings about Sherlock Holmes was published at the end of 1887 as the principal contents of Beeton’s Christmas Annual for that year, a paperback published by Ward Lock and Co., London. The magazine also included a couple of short plays, as well as advertisements. Few copies remain, and Beeton’s has become the best-known treasure for which Sherlockian collectors long. Prices are high though not stratospheric; a newly discovered copy (without covers) sold for £18,600 at an auction in Oxford, England, in 2008. Three facsimile editions have been produced: one in 1960 jointly by the Baker Street Irregulars and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one in 1987 by British publisher John Michael Gibson, and a 1987 reprint of the BSI facsimile issued by Magico Magazine of New York. Descriptions of the original and the facsimiles, which can be distinguished from the real thing in subtle ways, appear on Randall Stock’s website at www.bestofsherlock.com. A Study in Scarlet was subsequently published in a trade edition by Ward Lock (1888), and it, too, has been reproduced in facsimile (1993). The first American edition came from J.B. Lippincott Co. in 1890. Several magazine appearances are also recorded.
Detective stories not having been fully invented in 1887, it is hardly surprising that this first Sherlock Holmes novel does not follow what have come to be the conventions. Indeed, in an early chapter Holmes must virtually explain to Dr. Watson what it is that he does. Watson, as the narrator, devotes the first two chapters to introducing himself and the hero, whom he meets in a memorable scene in the pathology laboratory at “Bart’s” (St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London). Only in Chapter III (of fourteen chapters, divided between two Parts) does a murder engage their attention.
The murder is virtually solved by Chapter VII of Part I, which is intriguingly subtitled “Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department.” The scene changes in Part II, “The Country of the Saints,” which is narrated in third person rather than first. The action now takes place on the “great alkali plain” of western America, a region unknown to geography, and in the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake City, Utah. A sweet young romance is interrupted by the lecherous demands of the Mormon establishment, leading to events more characteristic of a Western than of a detective tale. There is much about horses, ravines, rifles, and the purity of womanhood. The vicious and colourful behaviour attributed to the Mormons in these chapters is less than historically accurate, as Jack Tracy has concisely shown in Conan Doyle and the Latter-Day Saints (1979), but provides splendid motivation for the murder that is finally explained in the last chapter of the book.
The crude dramatics of both Parts echo Doyle’s other early novels rather than the more sophisticated Holmes stories he would write later. Similarly, the prominence of the love interest and frontier adventure detract, in a modern reader’s mind, from what fails to be a pure detective story, although they will have striking echoes in The Valley of Fear, written almost thirty years later. But the introduction of the principal characters (and their delineation in such passages as the famous “Sherlock Holmes — His Limits”) are entirely convincing. Watson is shown as a respectable doctor; Holmes as a brilliant, unsystematic, easily bored young man; and Lestrade of Scotland Yard as a self-important plodder. And such details as the comic constable John Rance and the moment when Holmes is taken in by an “old woman” show Doyle already in full command of his medium.
J.B. Stoddart of Lippincott’s Magazine, preparing to launch a British edition of his Philadelphia-based publication, took the young Doyle out for dinner August 30, 1889, along with another young author, Oscar Wilde. Both were commissioned to write novels for Lippincott’s. Wilde’s eventual product was The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Doyle’s was The Sign of the Four, which appeared in British and American editions of the magazine in February 1890. Shortly afterwards it was issued in book form (no. 266 in the “Lippincott’s Magazine Series”) and that October in an edition from the firm of Spencer Blackett, classified by at least some bibliographers as the true first edition. There were also several newspaper serializations once the three-month exclusive rights purchased by J.B. Lippincott & Co. in England had expired.
In the United States, where Lippincott had rights in perpetuity, offprints from the magazine were also published, but the first identifiable American book edition was also the first in a long string of piracies (that is, unauthorized publications): a volume issued in March 1891 by P.F. Collier. Copyright protection in the United States did not extend (until July 1, 1891) to the works of foreign authors, and it quickly became open season on The Sign of the Four. Donald Redmond’s 1990 book Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates: Copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930 is largely a study of how this one book was published and republished. He writes: “From 1890 at least until 1924 The Sign of the Four was never out of print. From 1894 until the eve of the First World War five to ten different versions were on sale simultaneously.”
Because the piratical publishers worked fast and cheap, errors and verbal variations crept into their texts, some of which have survived into modern editions. The most famous, a reference to “crows” (rather than “crowds”) at the Lyceum Theatre, inspired Newton Williams, an early student of textual variations, to dub his work “the great crow hunt.” Such variation even extends to the title of this novel, which was The Sign of the Four in Lippincott’s, but lost a definite article to become The Sign of Four in the Spencer Blackett edition and the Collier piracy (apparently typeset from the Spencer Blackett text). The four-word title is more widely used today. Green and Gibson assert in their Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983) that “the author originally used the longer title though preferred the shorter one.”
Under either title it is a splendid novel, vastly more mature than its predecessor. Presenting Sherlock Holmes for a return appearance, though still clearly not foreseeing that he had created an industry, Doyle crafted a tightly knit plot that can be recognized as a detective story in modern terms. But the love interest, linking Dr. Watson with the client in the case, Mary Morstan, is still conspicuous, alternating with detective work: Holmes and adventure yield the stage to Watson and love five times through the book’s eleven chapters. Miss Morstan makes an early impression on Watson, he moons over her, he sees her become more and more responsive to his attentions, and at the end of the narrative he reveals to Holmes that he has proposed marriage and she has accepted. So neat is the tying-up of loose ends, after so brief a courtship, that one recognizes the author’s intent to write Watson out of Holmes’s life, ending their companionship and ruling out any future adventures.
The action again takes place in London, with rich scenes set in its foggy streets and in a huge, mysterious suburban house, Pondicherry Lodge. The case begins not with a murder but with a puzzle brought to Holmes by Miss Morstan: she has been receiving valuable pearls from an anonymous source, and now a mysterious message has arrived. Holmes finds the explanation only after a murder does occur and requires solution, to say nothing of a fine scene in which he and a borrowed dog, Toby, follow a literal scent through London. An even finer chase scene takes place along the Thames, through glinting sunlight and evening fog. Explanations follow, but the inevitable flashback (to India in the time of the 1857 Mutiny, an era that would appear again in “The Crooked Man”) is confined to a single chapter. Characters are excitingly drawn (Bartholomew Sholto is usually acknowledged to be a portrait of Wilde), and despite many improbabilities and fumbled details — the action shifts inexplicably from June to September within hours — the book can be said to deserve its immediate success and its continuing popularity.
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is popularly and loosely used for any part of the Holmes saga; it was the title of the second film starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and it has provided such distortions as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (an early collection of parodies), The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (a society of female enthusiasts), and The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But strictly it is the title only of one book, the first of five cumulations of the original short stories.
These twelve stories appeared in twelve consecutive issues of the Strand magazine, July 1891 through June 1892, helping to establish the new magazine’s reputation for first-class fiction. (They were also published in the American edition of the Strand, a month later in each case, and syndicated in American and British newspapers.) They also created a new genre: a series of stories involving the same character, each of which could, unlike the episodes of a serial, stand alone. When the sequence began, Sherlock Holmes was almost unknown; a year later he was the popular rage, and his creator was recognized as a successful author.
In October 1892, a collected volume of the Adventures was published by George Newnes, Ltd., the proprietors of the Strand, priced at six shillings (about $24 in today’s money). The first edition, ten thousand copies, was sold out by early in 1893, and succeeding editions have been in print ever since in both Britain and the United States (where the first edition is that of Harper & Brothers, 1892).
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes includes some of the best-known and, by general acclaim, the best of the Holmes tales, in particular “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League.” By the time of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” which is the fourth in the series, Doyle had established most of his bag of conventional tricks. That tale offers everything from the police baiting (in which Holmes mocks professional incompetence) to the obligatory moment at which the sleuth crawls about the scene of the crime with his magnifying glass. The formula “The Adventure of,” which begins the titles of more than half the stories, was used for the first time in the seventh of the series, “The Blue Carbuncle” — it had taken Doyle that long to recognize that he was writing to a genre. (“The Adventure of” is often omitted by commentators.) The slowness of that recognition explains both the frequent cross-references among these early stories (each one mentions some that had gone before, as the author reinforced the connections in the readers’ minds) and the peculiarities of the first story of all, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which is so little like a “typical” Holmes adventure.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA. First published in the Strand in July 1891, this tale involves romance as much as detection. Its structure indeed suggests opera, and appropriately so, as the heroine, Irene Adler, is an operatic contralto, entangled with a flamboyantly improbable king. Scholarship about the story has concentrated on determining the intended identity of “the king of Bohemia,” and on the logistics of Ms. Adler’s blackmail attempt. The chief influence of the story, however, has been the fancy that Holmes meant something erotic or even spiritual by the label “The Woman” he applied to her.
THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE. This tale, first published in the Strand for August 1891, is a classic of detection (in it Holmes makes his celebrated remark about the importance of trouser-knees) and bank robbery. For grotesquerie, on which Holmes prides himself and on which Doyle so often relied for his literary effects, it would be difficult to beat the story’s picture of Fleet Street choked with red-headed men of all tinctures. A striking reinterpretation of the tale is that of Samuel Rosenberg in Naked is the Best Disguise (1974), who identifies its motif of tunnelling, and its effeminate hero, as signs of a homosexual subtext.
A CASE OF IDENTITY. First published in the Strand for September 1891, this tale, with its curiously old-fashioned title, is nearly as insipid as its near-sighted heroine, Mary Sutherland — who, however, becomes the first of the “damsels in distress” whom Holmes rescues in so many of his cases. One might describe “A Case of Identity” as being Poe’s deceptively simple “Purloined Letter” in a setting of middle-class tedium, in which, as some punster has observed, the Angel is a devil.
THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY. The fourth of the original tales, first published in the Strand for October 1891, may plausibly claim to be the perfect Sherlock Holmes story, offering everything readers have come to love, from a railway journey to a scene in which Holmes throws himself into the mud to look at clues through his lens. Once the mystery is solved and the innocent man cleared, to the discomfiture of Lestrade, Holmes arranges for the guilty man to go free, in view of extenuating circumstances. This tale is one of several in which an Australian background plays a part.
THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS. They are the sign of the Ku Klux Klan, whose American villainies (a favourite theme throughout the Canon) lie behind the violence in this tale, first published in the Strand for November 1891. The story also offers a particularly rich list of unpublished cases, and a revealing scene in which Holmes berates himself for failing to save a threatened client’s life. Finally, it includes that splendid atmospheric line, “The wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney.”
THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP. Given to the world in the Strand for December 1891, this tale begins with a Watsonian domestic scene (the famous passage in which the doctor’s wife calls him James rather than John) and moves on to an opium den before its main plot begins to appear. The story, one of double life and deception (and one in which Doyle gives full play to his fascination with deformed faces), is about a middle-class journalist who enters the dirty and unrespectable world of begging. Ugly economic truths come unusually clear to the reader as Holmes works out what is going on. Also featured in this tale are feminine beauty, in the form of Mrs. Neville St. Clair, and couture.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE. Christopher Morley called this tale “a Christmas story without slush”; it was first published, presumably just before Christmas, in the Strand for January 1892. The tale has to do with a holiday goose, which in pre-refrigeration days must be eaten promptly and which proves to contain a stolen jewel. The comic Henry Baker is only an incident, and the actual thief is of no account. What matters in the story is its seasonal framework, from the “compliments” brought by Watson to Holmes on “the second morning after Christmas” to Holmes’s pardoning of the thief at the end because it is “the season of forgiveness.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND. Best known and probably most often dramatized of the short stories, this tale brings Holmes to the assistance of another damsel in distress. Her sister has already died in mysterious circumstances in a lonely country house, and now she too is threatened. Freudians delight in this story, with the obvious sexual threat posed by a selfish stepfather, and the story’s climax comes after one of those late-night vigils in the dark, when Holmes conquers an improbable snake, a “swamp adder.” (Much has been written by Sherlockians about its species and the likelihood that it could drink milk and respond to a whistle.) The flavour of exotic India adds grotesquerie to the English countryside as it subtracts realism from the tale, which was first published in the Strand for February 1892.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB. Doyle becomes luxuriously gruesome in this story, beginning it in Watson’s consulting-room as he (incompetently) treats an amputation. Then the patient — Victor Hatherley, whose profession of engineer was just the new thing for a smart, practical young man in the 1890s — tells the story of how he lost his thumb to a meat cleaver, and Holmes identifies the crime and the criminal for whom the attack on Hatherley was a mere incident. The story was first published in the Strand for March 1892.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR. One can hear an echo of Doyle’s early social and romance tales in this story, which first appeared in the Strand for April 1892. The title is a novelty, for there is no acknowledged bachelor in the story. At its centre is a society wedding; in the background, events no less romantic that took place in the American west. Holmes, seeming not to share the Victorian impression of America as uncouth, speaks of the future “quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes” as the hope for civilization. The story includes such other beloved details as Holmes’s snub of a nobleman who suggests that the detective has not worked at such a social level before (“No, I am descending”) and the arrival of “ancient and cobwebby bottles” to accompany a catered supper at 221B Baker Street.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET. Unusual for being set amid snow, this tale — which first appeared in the Strand for May 1892 — is one of several jewel-theft adventures in the early Canon. It also has a spicy sexual subplot, and brings Holmes into indirect contact with one of those mysterious quasi-royal personages who figure in several of the stories. How plausible it is for any such personage to pawn state property (with a most respectable banker) for private advantage, and how plausible it is for a corner to break off such a coronet with an audible crack, it may be best for the reader not to inquire.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES. This next of the “damsel in distress” tales, published in the Strand for June 1892, presents the first of the “four Violets,” women — more or less distressed — who share that given name and appear in Holmes’s cases. Violet Hunter, the governess puzzled about a household where she is compelled to cut off her beautiful red hair, is in fact a strikingly strong and interesting woman, whom writers have sometimes imagined as a possible mate for Holmes. The story is an admirable venture into the Gothic genre, with its isolated house, intimations of madness in the attic, feminine fear, and final bloodshed.
THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
A second series of twelve “adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” as they were first called, appeared in the Strand beginning in December 1892 and continuing through December 1893. Again, the American edition of the Strand carried them a month later, and they also appeared shortly afterwards in Harper’s Weekly (except for “The Final Problem,” which was published in McClure’s as well as in the Strand).
As soon as the series was complete, it was published in book form as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The first American edition, from Harper & Brothers, contained all twelve of the 1892–93 stories, but the first British edition, from George Newnes, Ltd., omitted “The Cardboard Box,” which was then dropped from all subsequent book editions of The Memoirs, including a “second issue” from Harper in September 1894.
THE ADVENTURE OF SILVER BLAZE. Set against the irresistibly colourful background of horse racing, and provided with some of the most dramatic dialogue anywhere in the Canon, this story is a favourite and has been dramatized often. It provides the “dog in the night-time” incident, which in non-Sherlockian contexts is the most frequently quoted of Holmes’s sayings, and for Sherlockians it provides the vexing mathematical puzzle of the train whose speed Holmes could calculate to the nearest one-half mile per hour, as well as many interesting anomalies in the details of racing colours and regulations. Further, in the original publication, it provides the most popular of all Sidney Paget illustrations, showing Holmes and Watson in their railway carriage, in classic poses. The story, first published in the Strand for December 1892, and reprinted in Harper’s Weekly for February 25, 1893, has a surprise ending of a kind that could hardly be improved upon.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CARDBOARD BOX. First published in the Strand for January 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for January 14 of that year, this story involves fine detective work and a very satisfactory outcome. It also involves a double murder (the severing of the victims’ ears, a mutilation of the kind Doyle used again and again in his writings, is particularly grotesque) and one motivated by sexual jealousy. Presumably for such reasons, Doyle chose to suppress the story soon after its publication, not to restore it for twenty-three years. He told an acquaintance in 1903 that “a tale involving sex was out of place in a collection designed for boys.” Later he called it “sensational” and (which it is not) “weak.” It may well be that his real reason for suppressing the story was its grimness; unlike most detective stories, it has nothing like a happy ending.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE YELLOW FACE. This tale, first published in the Strand for February 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for February 11, 1893, is one of the less popular of the early stories, perhaps because Holmes’s attempts at detection in it are utterly unsuccessful. The background references to the American South are less convincing than those in “The Five Orange Pips,” and what it says about relations between the races makes many readers uncomfortable. The story’s greatest strength is probably its picture of life in London’s rapidly growing outer suburbs.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE STOCK-BROKER’S CLERK. The Strand in March 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for March 11, 1893, presented this tale of a clever robbery and a man who impersonates his own brother. It uses a theme that had already appeared in “The Red-Headed League” — distracting an innocent man with highly paid busy-work to allow thieves to have a clear shot at their booty. Perhaps because much of the action takes place in inelegant Birmingham, or because Hall Pycroft the clerk is so colourless, the story is not highly regarded.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ‘GLORIA SCOTT.’ After ten brief paragraphs of introduction, this tale (first published in the Strand for April 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for April 15, 1893) is told entirely in the voice of Holmes, reminiscing before the fire. It is as though the author, two years into his writings about Holmes, felt the need for some novelty. What he introduces is a flashback to the detective’s youth, specifically to the incident that led him to make detective work his career. Like so many of the stories, the matter turns out to have its origin in distant regions and long-gone years — in a mutiny aboard a ship en route to Australia’s penal colonies. The detection is of little interest, though there are some fine minor deductions about the person of old Trevor, and the most memorable aspect of the case in fact is the amusing if improbable cipher in which an important message is conveyed.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL. A month after “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” in May 1893, the Strand presented a second story about Holmes’s college years, one with many strong features. It also appeared in Harper’s Weekly for May 13. This tale offers royalty, sexual intrigue, a first-rate antagonist for Holmes in the person of butler Brunton, and the “ritual” itself, a series of solemn questions and answers, so easily memorized, so hard to forget. Although the solution to the puzzle is somewhat artificial, involving trigonometry and arbitrary pacing of distances, the climactic scene in which a corpse is found under the flagstones of Hurlstone Manor is a fine one.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE REIGATE SQUIRES. This tale, set among the gentry of Surrey, appeared first in the Strand for June 1893, titled “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire,” singular. Harper’s Weekly published it June 17, 1893, as “The Reigate Puzzle,” perhaps because Americans could not be expected to know exactly what a squire was (although there is evidence that “Puzzle” was the author’s original intention). In British book editions, the title became “The Reigate Squires,” plural, but the “Puzzle” version has remained standard in the United States. By any title, the story is undistinguished, though it presents some memorable glimpses: of Holmes prostrate with depression even while Europe rang with his praises, of Holmes feigning illness to create a diversion, of Holmes knocking over a table and blaming Watson, of Holmes showing off his abilities at the analysis of handwriting. It takes no graphologist, however, to see that the fragments of a note that are reproduced with the tale, being the essential clue, are in the handwriting of Arthur Conan Doyle.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CROOKED MAN. Published in the Strand for July 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for July 8 of that year, this story returns to the Indian Mutiny as background, and gives full scope for Doyle’s fascination with physical distortion: the “crooked man” is an ex-soldier who is hideously crippled as the result of torture by the rebels outside Bhurtee. The tale is notable for the presence of Teddy the mongoose, for the Canon’s only reference to regular church going (in the Roman Catholic tradition, not that of the established church), and for the motive that lies behind the evil deeds it presents: a love triangle, the rivalry of two men for the love of the beautiful Nancy Devoy.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RESIDENT PATIENT. When this story first appeared in the Strand in August 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for August 12, it began with a brief episode now unfamiliar to most Sherlockians. Holmes is at work on an “abstruse” chemical investigation, but “towards evening” he breaks a test tube, gives “an exclamation of impatience,” and suggests to Watson that they go for “a ramble through London.” In modern British editions of the story, that incident has disappeared, and the “ramble” is suggested in the same brief paragraph in which Watson speaks of “a close, rainy day in October.” In American editions, it is also missing, but in favour of a three-page digression known as “the thought-reading episode,” a passage that had previously been published in “The Cardboard Box.” That episode was transplanted into “The Resident Patient,” at the expense of the broken test tube, when “The Cardboard Box” was suppressed, as it effectively was from 1894 to 1917. Such editions as the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes continue to print it in full in both stories. In other respects “The Resident Patient” is less remarkable, though the opportunity it gave Doyle to use his knowledge of medical practice gives verisimilitude. The story deals with the mysterious behaviour of Dr. Trevelyan’s resident patient, who proves to be in hiding from his former companions in crime; at last his sins find him out.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GREEK INTERPRETER. This tale dates from the Strand of September 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for September 16.
It is of interest chiefly because it introduces Mycroft Holmes, the detective’s brother, offering a long scene at the Diogenes Club in which he displays his eccentric brilliance. The case itself is set among foreigners rather than among Englishmen, and involves kidnapping and extortion of a most melodramatic kind. Little detection is involved, but there is a satisfactory rescue scene in which Watson has the opportunity to administer first aid in the form of brandy.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NAVAL TREATY. So long is this story — some 12,700 words, compared with an average of 8,100 for the fifty-six short stories — that it was originally published in two installments, in the Strand issues for October and November 1893. Harper’s Weekly also published it in two installments, October 14 and 21 of that year. (The first installment ended with Holmes’s announcement that “We are now going to interview Lord Holdhurst, the Cabinet Minister and future Premier of England.”) For the first time in the Canon, Holmes is involved with government secrets and affairs of state: a treaty has been stolen, and war threatens if it is not recovered. The story has elements of the locked-room mystery, with a rather improbable floor plan of the Foreign Office, and of the purloined-letter tradition, as the treaty is found very close at hand. Its most memorable moment is, however, a digression, in which Holmes admires a moss rose and reflects that “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE FINAL PROBLEM. The title of this tale seems a redundancy — the more so as Holmes faces no “problem” in it, in the sense of a mystery to be solved. Rather, he has traced to his lair the mastermind of London criminality, Professor Moriarty, and must now conquer him or be conquered by him. To Watson’s horror, detective and arch-criminal die together, falling over the falls of the Reichenbach, in Switzerland, to which the two men have journeyed in anticipation of a showdown. Doyle wrote this story and offered it for publication in the Strand (and also McClure’s) for December 1893, simply as a way of killing off Holmes so that he might turn his authorial attention to other works. When it appeared, he told audiences later, “if I had killed a real man I could not have received more vindictive letters than those which poured in upon me.” There is, however, no first-hand evidence that young men about town wore black mourning-bands on their arms that winter. Their grief, real or assumed, is a tribute to the effect of the earlier Holmes stories and the pathos with which Doyle, in Watson’s voice, writes a final tribute to “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.”
Determined for some years to write nothing more of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle weakened in 1901 when he realized that Holmes was the perfect protagonist for a novel he wanted to write about a demon hound on Dartmoor in Devon, in southwestern England. He did not, however, bring Holmes back to life, instead presenting his story as an adventure that had taken place some time before the encounter at the Reichenbach Falls.
It has become the most beloved and best known of all the Sherlock Holmes tales, the name Baskerville being easily recognizable even to those who have never read a word of the story. It is also arguably the finest of the novels, perhaps of all the stories, for it displays a unity in time and texture, and a splendid series of perplexities and rising climaxes, unknown in any of the others. It has no long flashback (a device which disfigures all three other novels, as well as some of the short stories) but it does indulge in the luxury of varying points of view, several chapters being told as extracts from Watson’s diaries or letters to Holmes, while others are his usual more leisured narrative.
The case takes Watson, and then also Holmes, to desolate Dartmoor, in the vicinity of the fearful prison at Princetown, to investigate the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville, along with some peculiar collateral events. The plot is simple enough, although two sexual subplots complicate matters somewhat, but in this novel the atmosphere is immensely rich. There is the moor itself, with its relics of prehistoric man (emphasized by references throughout the story to anthropological studies and themes). There is the lurking presence of the prison, with Selden, the escaped murderer, a constant threat. There is the suffocating pettiness of village life; there is the gloom of Baskerville Hall, where the new squire, Sir Henry, announces at the end of the story that he is eager to install electric lights. There is constant tension between science and superstition, and Doyle was not wrong when he famously wrote to his mother that the book was “a real Creeper.” A textual analysis of The Hound by Wendy Machen (in Canadian Holmes, 1989) finds that the dominant colours in this story are the black and white of night, the grey of uncertainty, and the green of the moor’s vegetation. Somehow this grim environment has appealed to Sherlockians, among them Philip Weller, whose 2001 commentary on The Hound is titled Hunting the Dartmoor Legend, and Brian W. Pugh and Paul R. Spiring, who produced On the Trail of Arthur Conan Doyle: An Illustrated Devon Tour in 2008.
Doyle attributed the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles to his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson, declaring in a dedicatory epistle (of which three different versions appear) that Robinson had told him of “a west country legend.” But scholarship has not turned up any Devonshire legend involving a dog, a wronged woman, and supernatural vengeance, though there are “black dog” legends aplenty. Tradition has pointed to a legend associated with the Cabell family of Buckfastleigh, Devon; but that legend cannot be traced before 1907 and may itself be based on the Baskerville story. The Baskerville and Vaughan families of Herefordshire apparently are associated with a longstanding Black Hound story, as Maurice Campbell argued in the Sherlock Holmes Journal in 1975. The safest conclusion is that The Hound has overlapping and multiple sources — as Janice McNabb argues in The Curious Incident of the Hound on Dartmoor (1984).
The difficult question is just how much Fletcher Robinson contributed to the creation of what was published as Doyle’s work. Robinson (born August 22, 1870, died January 21, 1907) was himself an author, responsible for travel and sports writing as well as many short stories and several novels. His greatest contribution to posterity, apart from whatever he did to help give birth to The Hound, was The Chronicles of Addington Peace, a set of detective stories (1905). It is clear that he visited Dartmoor with Doyle in the spring of 1901, and the dedications variously credit him with “help” in “the general plot,” “the local details,” “all the details,” and the “evolution” of the story. Exactly what that involved is now unclear, despite careful teasing out of the available biographical evidence. Robin Paige presented one theory in the form of a light-hearted novel, Death at Dartmoor (2002). At about the same time, the question became fodder for the newspapers when a Devon man named Rodger Garrick-Steele called for the exhumation of Fletcher Robinson’s body in order to determine whether he had been poisoned by Doyle. Not only did Doyle steal the plot of The Hound from Fletcher Robinson, Garrick-Steele charged, he may also have had an affair with his friend’s wife, then murdered him to conceal his double offence. The charges were elaborated in a rambling, ill-punctuated six-hundred-page book, House of the Baskervilles (2003). Scholars have laughed Garrick-Steele’s claims out of court, and church authorities rejected the request for exhumation.
The Hound was first published as a serial in the Strand, between August 1901 and April 1902 (in the American edition, September through May).
Chapters I–II appeared together; Chapters III–IV; Chapters V–VI; Chapters VII–VIII; Chapter IX alone; Chapters X–XI; Chapter XII alone; Chapter XIII; and part of XIV; the remainder of XIV with XV. As soon as the final installment had appeared, book editions were ready, from George Newnes, Ltd., in England and from McClure, Phillips & Co. in the United States. They were best sellers, particularly after the American publisher obtained the manuscript, broke it into leaves, and distributed it to booksellers across the country as a publicity gesture. The Hound was also serialized in several American newspapers during the summer of 1902.
In 1903 Doyle was persuaded to bring Holmes back to life, or rather to invent a way in which his detective might have been alive all the time in spite of the report from Reichenbach. The persuasive influence was money, primarily from the American magazine Collier’s Weekly, although the stories continued to appear in the British edition of the Strand as well. Doyle’s own experience, and the emotional complexities he was undergoing during the first decade of the twentieth century, led him to write more realistic, more deeply coloured adventures for Holmes than anything the earlier two series had offered. The Return of Sherlock Holmes may be his finest work.
The thirteen stories in this sequence were collected in book form as soon as they had all appeared in magazines, even while they were still being republished in a group of American newspapers. The first edition appeared in the United States, from McClure, Phillips & Co., in February 1905; the rights were soon transferred to Doubleday, Page & Co. for subsequent editions. A British edition from George Newnes, Ltd., appeared in March, but the rights were soon taken over by Smith, Elder & Co. The American book edition was illustrated by Charles Raymond Macauley, and the British once again by Sidney Paget, whose drawings continued to appear in the Strand appearances. However, the illustrations most often associated with the stories in The Return are those of Frederic Dorr Steele, who drew dramatic covers for Collier’s as well as black-and-white illustrations to accompany the stories inside that magazine.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE. This tale is rather a chapter of biography, or autobiography, than a mystery story in the accepted sense, for the mystery Holmes solves is incidental to other matters, and explained in only a few sentences. What matters is the return of Sherlock Holmes to London, and the unsuccessful attempt on his life by Colonel Sebastian Moran, right-hand villain to the late Professor Moriarty. The memorable scenes involve Watson’s faint when he is confronted with his friend, whom he has presumed dead, and the vigil in the “empty house” across from 221B Baker Street while Moran tries to shoot the dummy which he supposes to be Holmes. The story first appeared in Collier’s for September 26, 1903, and the Strand for October 1903.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER. Collier’s published this story October 31, 1903, and the Strand in November 1903. Its most memorable feature is the use of a thumbprint as a clue; the print never has to be matched with anything, for its very presence is sufficient to tell Holmes that something is wrong, but any reference to the uniqueness of fingerprints marks the story as modern (fingerprinting, developed for police use in India, was introduced in England in a paper given to the British Association in 1899, and adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901). In other respects the story is of interest for its plot of sexual revenge, and for the device Holmes uses (an echo of what he tried in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) of enticing a fugitive out of his hiding place by raising an alarm of fire.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MEN. With this story Doyle returns to themes of adultery and love gone wrong, which evidently obsessed him during the early years of the century, while his own emotions were painfully divided. The “child’s scrawl” that proves to be an underworld cipher, and the clue in a gory murder, makes this story one of the most memorable in the Canon, and one of the most frequently dramatized (although solving such a cipher is ordinarily a far simpler matter than Holmes, or the author, makes out). Much attention has been given to Doyle’s possible sources for the dancing men, and to the genuine existence of an ancient Cubitt family in Norfolk. For the first time since “The Five Orange Pips,” Doyle uses an American background in this story, reasonably enough since he now had a major American audience. It appeared in Collier’s Weekly for December 5, 1903, and in the Strand for December 1903.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY CYCLIST. Violet Smith (who is not herself the solitary cyclist of Charlington; that was her pursuer) is the distressed damsel in this dramatic story, and the second of the four Canonical Violets. Like Violet Hunter in “The Copper Beeches,” she is a career woman making her way in the world, and finding the atmosphere at a remote country house threatening. In short, the tale is as much a Gothic work as it is a detective story. The dramatic wedding scene at the end is among the most exciting passages in the Canon. This story was first published in Collier’s for December 26, 1903, and the Strand for January 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL. A lonely little boy from a broken home runs away from school: the plot of this story must reflect Doyle’s childhood fears. Its concluding scene, in which Holmes patronizes and swindles the rich and powerful Duke of Holdernesse, gives a convincing picture of the detective as iconoclast; the scene in which he arranges crumbs on the tablecloth to show Watson how the cow-tracks on the moor were arranged is a classic of detection, explication, and dramatic sense. The story was first published in Collier’s for January 30, 1904, and the Strand for February 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETER. Not, please, “the” Black Peter: the title indicates a person’s name. The story appeared first in Collier’s for February 27, 1904, and in the Strand for March 1904, and deals with a particularly violent murder — Holmes is first seen returning from an attempt to drive a spear through a pig’s carcass, to estimate the force involved in the harpooning of Peter Carey. The whaling background doubtless owes something to Doyle’s youthful experience in that industry.
THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON. Holmes has not much to detect in this case; he is employed instead as an agent to recover papers from Milverton the society blackmailer. To do so, he resorts to wooing Milverton’s housemaid (a sordid episode which has led to much Sherlockian speculation and sniggering) and, in Watson’s company, to burglary; in his presence, Milverton is shot dead by an unidentified woman who has been dubbed “Lady X.” The case thus has much colour and action, as well as moral satisfaction, the noble Holmes vanquishing the snakelike Milverton. The tale was first published in Collier’s for March 26, 1904, and the Strand for April 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS. The British fear of Napoleon, emperor of France, even eight decades after his death, figures large in this story, though ultimately only as a red herring: the gem might have been hidden in busts of anyone, but Napoleon is a plausible subject for monomania, on which everyone except Holmes blames the curious incidents of vandalism. The tale gives an opportunity for Holmes to display his clear reasoning and, in the scene at the end where he triumphantly produces the pearl, his flair for drama as well. “The Six Napoleons” was first published in Collier’s Weekly for April 30, 1904, and the Strand for May 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTS. Improbable details abound in this story of a student who cheats on a university exam; the very procedure used to unmask the cheater, in which the don responsible calls in Holmes privately, is alien from the way a university would deal with such an incident. But as a logic puzzle the tale is splendid, giving Holmes the opportunity to choose from among three young men, the only possible suspects. At last he confronts the culprit, who confesses in a burst of emotion. The story first appeared in the Strand for June 1904 and Collier’s for September 24, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ. Holmes is made to appear politically somewhat retrograde in this tale of Russian nihilists, exiled revolutionaries of the kind much feared in the England of that generation. The story is not of the first rank, despite Holmes’s perception in understanding the dying words of the murdered secretary — “The professor, it was she” — and his ingenuity in scattering cigarette ashes so that the concealed murderess would leave footprints when she emerged. It was first published in the Strand for July 1904 and Collier’s Weekly for October 29, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE-QUARTER. Doyle’s beloved world of amateur sport (with which Holmes ostentatiously denies any familiarity) provides the background for this pathetic tale, in which mystery proves to be domestic tragedy. The comic portrait of the miser, Lord Mount-James, is hardly enough to make the tale a success. It appeared first in the Strand for August 1904 and Collier’s for November 26, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE. By 1904, Doyle had spent almost a decade tending to a dying wife, while he was in love with another woman. Two years later he would become president of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Thoughts on such matters clearly lay behind the writing of this story, about a brave woman who helps her lover kill her aristocratic but drunken husband. The story is also notable for its picture of Holmes seeing more than the official police can see as he inspects the bloody room at the Abbey Grange, and for its juxtaposition of free-minded Australians with decadent English. “The Abbey Grange” was first published in the Strand for September 1904 and Collier’s for December 31, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN. The title of this story is as intriguing as the story itself; its resonance can be seen in its mention in “The Naval Treaty,” along with the untold “Adventure of the Tired Captain.” The second stain is a clue that helps Holmes solve his case, which involves not the usual murder but a matter of espionage and statecraft, again recalling “The Naval Treaty.” By far the most interesting feature of the case is the beautiful Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope, who is faithful to her high-placed husband after her fashion. The story was first published in the Strand for December 1904 and Collier’s for January 28, 1905.
This novel may just be Doyle’s masterpiece; it may even be two masterpieces, for it consists of two almost entirely separate mystery novels, and the second of them, “The Scowrers,” is if anything more successful than the first, “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” which involves Sherlock Holmes in a way the second does not. J. Bliss Austin, prominent collector and scholar in Pittsburgh, felt such an affinity for the second book that he managed to become owner of the entire manuscript of The Valley of Fear — but then he was a vice-president of United States Steel, a company whose shadow can easily be felt in “The Scowrers,” a tale of the Pennsylvania coal and iron fields.
“The Scowrers” is set in the 1870s, in a time of technological and social change, and hence of conflict between the mostly Irish miners and labourers and their American-English bosses. One flower in the carbonized soil of the Shenandoah Valley (a metaphor repeatedly used in The Valley of Fear) was a fraternal and, eventually, terrorist group called the Mollie Maguires, largely a perversion of the otherwise legitimate Ancient Order of Hibernians. It has been the subject of several books, variously historical and fanciful, and of a 1969 film (The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery). The Mollies were eventually infiltrated by the new Pinkerton detective agency, in the person of agent James McParlan, and a number of them hanged for murder, including Jack Kehoe, the most prominent leader or “bodymaster.” Doyle learned the story of the Mollies from a somewhat partial source, Allan Pinkerton’s book The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), and while The Valley of Fear is not precisely a roman à clef, it follows the Pinkerton version of the story closely. Sherlockians have enjoyed speculating about which of the coalfield towns — Tamaqua, Pottsville, Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) or Mahanoy City — is the original of “Vermissa.” Bruce Kennedy and Robert Watson Douty explore such questions, and recreate the grim atmosphere of the Valley in those days, in their chapbook In the Footsteps of Birdy Edwards (1980). The Baker Street Irregulars carried out further inquiries during a weekend excursion to the area in 2004, resulting in the publication of an anthology, Murderland, the following year.
But none of this background is apparent in the first half of The Valley of Fear, which begins as a country-house murder mystery with Professor Moriarty lurking in the background. The seven chapters of “The Tragedy of Birlstone” give some scope for a mystery and its solution to develop, and for personal touches of a kind impossible in a short story, such as the curious behaviour of the late John Douglas’s devoted wife. The clue of the missing dumb bell is one of the most amusing, and hence unforgettable, in the whole Canon. Eventually, after the seven “Scowrer” chapters, an “Epilogue” returns the scene to England, and Holmes is seen brooding when — astonishingly — Moriarty is victorious after all.
The Valley of Fear was serialized in the Strand magazine from September 1914 through May 1915, after most of the tales that would later appear in His Last Bow. In the United States it was not carried by Collier’s, but instead appeared in the “Associated Sunday Magazines,” a group of newspaper supplements, beginning on September 20, 1914, and concluding on November 22. In book form it appeared in February in the United States (from George H. Doran Co.), and in June in England (from Smith, Elder & Co.). As Gibson and Green note in their Bibliography, there are a number of deliberate textual variations, some caused by the war with Germany, in which Britain (but not America) was engaged beginning late in 1914, some “for greater accuracy” in the American details.
This fourth collection of Canonical short stories is the smallest of all, containing but eight tales — and that figure includes “The Cardboard Box,” originally published as one of The Memoirs but suppressed from 1894 until this volume appeared in 1917. The stories were somewhat rearranged from the order in which they had been originally published. The British edition was published by John Murray, apparently because Smith, Elder & Co. thought seven or eight stories too few to make a worthwhile book. The American edition appeared simultaneously, from George H. Doran Co. The subtitles of the two editions differ slightly: in Britain it was Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, and in the United States A Reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes. Many editions (but not, for example, the John Murray Short Stories) include a one-paragraph Preface signed by Watson: “The friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well....”
Shortly after His Last Bow was published, Doyle wrote an article, “Some Personalia about Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” which appeared in the Strand for December 1917. It was later revised as a chapter in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924). Clearly intended as an epilogue to the entire Canon, the existence of this article makes it clear that His Last Bow was intended to be, indeed, Holmes’s last bow. It leaves open, however, the question of which sort of “bow” the author had in mind: the kind an actor takes at a curtain call, or the kind the dying Robin Hood drew to shoot an arrow to his final resting place.
THE ADVENTURE OF WISTERIA LODGE. Like “The Naval Treaty,” the only Canonical short story that is longer, this one was first published in the Strand in two parts: “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles,” September 1908, and “The Tiger of San Pedro,” October 1908. Collier’s Weekly published the two parts August 15, 1908, under the title “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles.” The titles for the two parts survive in modern editions; the title “Wisteria Lodge” for the full story was first used when His Last Bow was published in book form. This tale was “a difficult story to write,” Gibson and Green say obiter in their book Bibliography, and it shows, being long and confusing. The horrible face at the window and the shocking relics of voodoo that serve as clues along the way are hardly sufficient to redeem the story, nor is the sudden appearance of “Don Murillo,” the deposed Latin American dictator.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE. A background of Italian-American mafia activity makes this story a favourite with many readers, though its early pages, in which Holmes reassures a distressed landlady and puzzles over the identity of her mysterious lodger, is in fact more typical of the Canon. The “cipher” which proves to be Italian has excited much commentary; whichever way Holmes counted the letters, they don’t seem to come out right. The story was first published in the Strand in two parts, in March and April 1911 (a month later in the American edition), and retains a division into Parts I and II.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS. Mycroft Holmes, last seen in “The Greek Interpreter,” returns in this story, bringing his brother a case which, like two or three others, involves espionage and international intrigue rather than domestic crime. Apart from its supposed political importance, the case is of interest chiefly for the ingenious disposal of a body atop an Underground train — and of course for the presence of the dead man’s fiancée, one of the four Canonical Violets. “The Bruce-Partington Plans” (the title referring to the blueprints for the Bruce-Partington submarine, a thoroughly up-to-date invention in 1908) appeared first in the Strand for December 1908 and Collier’s for December 12 of the same year.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE. The title is sensational; the story is a splendid one, drawing on Doyle’s medical background (and drawing on Watson’s medical mediocrity) to present a Holmes who is feigning fatal illness to ensnare a clever adversary. Such detail is given about the ruse that there is hardly room for the mystery itself, and it is not even quite clear who Victor Savage was or why he was killed. “The Dying Detective” was first published in Collier’s for November 22, 1913, and immediately off printed as a Christmas greeting pamphlet from the advertising department of Collier’s. It also appeared in the December 1913 issue of the Strand.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX. Comedy and Gothic melodrama figure more in this story than in most other Canonical tales — the comedy in Watson’s clumsy attempts to play detective, acting on Holmes’s behalf in Montpellier; the melodrama in Holmes’s frantic prying open of the coffin in which the missing lady is about to be buried alive. The story comes nearer than any other in the Canon to being about rape, rather than murder or theft. Its unusual title (without “The Adventure of”) is no excuse for the faux pas that was made when it first appeared in the United States, in the American Magazine for December 1911; there it was headed “The Disappearance of Lady Carfax.” Under its right name it appeared in the Strand, also for December 1911.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEVIL’S FOOT. As in “The Reigate Squires,” Holmes in this case is taking a medically imposed vacation, this time in Cornwall, and conveniently finds himself in proximity to a mystery. Murder is not at first suspected in “the Cornish horror,” a phenomenon that rather reminds one of a spiritualist seance gone wildly wrong (but Doyle in 1910 was not yet active as a spiritualist). The most memorable aspect of the story may be the hideously contorted faces of the victims of radix pedis diaboli, a root hitherto unknown to science, but its most important feature is the scene in which Holmes holds justice higher than law and lets the culprit go. “The Devil’s Foot” was originally published in the Strand — in December 1910 in the British edition, in January and February 1911 in the American edition. (The first of those two episodes ended with “Hurry — hurry, before things get disarranged.”)
HIS LAST BOW. This story, which gives its title to the collection in which it later appeared, represents a departure from the style of all the previous Holmes tales. It is narrated in the third person, rather than by Watson; it introduces Holmes as a surprise, far into the narrative; it presents not the London-based consulting detective but a Holmes come out of retirement in Sussex; it is a story not of crime but of international espionage, with Holmes acting as a double agent on the eve of World War I. It takes place August 2, 1914, during the hours when the war was actually beginning, and it takes a jingoistic tone, having undeniably been written as war propaganda. One can hear Doyle’s voice from the beginning (“the most terrible August in the history of the world”) through the slurs on Germany, Irish separatists, and suffragist “Furies,” to the peroration about a cleansing “east wind.” Holmes as spy, under the pseudonym of Altamont, is little more convincing than Holmes as goateed American, but readers in 1917 may have been grateful for whatever they might get. The tale was subtitled “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes” when it appeared in the Strand for September 1917 and Collier’s for September 22, 1917, but became “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes” when His Last Bow appeared in book form. Doyle was indicating once again that he had had enough of him.
THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title is admirable, and Doyle may be given the credit for introducing the term case book in the context of a detective (it had previously been used chiefly for medical cases). Two or three of the stories are also first-rate, but in general this final collection is acknowledged to be weaker than the books that preceded it. Gibson and Green in their Bibliography say that Doyle was encouraged to write more about Holmes when he saw the early films that starred Eille Norwood as the detective, released beginning in 1921. “Norwood’s disguises were remarkable,” they say, “and his sphinx-like countenance suggested the idea for The Crown Diamond,” which was first a play and then the first of this final dozen stories to see print.
The tales — written, or at least published, over a much briefer period than those in The Return and His Last Bow — were completely rearranged for book publication. They were introduced with a preface, this time in Doyle’s voice rather than Watson’s, which first appeared in the Strand for March 1927, announcing a contest that invited readers to rank the stories and match Doyle’s own assessment. It survives as the lovely brief essay that assigns Holmes to “some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place” and yet fixes him firmly in history:
He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian Era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days.
The first edition of The Case-Book was published in Britain by John Murray, and in America by George H. Doran Co., in the middle of 1927.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS CLIENT. Sex (indeed, probably, prostitution) is the atmosphere and motivation in this tale, which takes its name not from any element of the plot but from the (unidentified) noble party who asks Holmes to take the case. It is a matter outside his usual range, for there is no mystery to solve. Rather, Holmes is supposed to persuade a well-to-do young lady that Baron Gruner, with whom she is infatuated, is a cad and worse. She will have none of his reasoning (he carries it off with dignity, despite his inexperience in such affairs), but violence intervenes, in the nasty old-fashioned form of vitriol-throwing: Gruner is marked for life by the attack of the wild Kitty Winter. This racy fare first appeared in Collier’s for November 8, 1924, and the Strand for February and March 1925 (the first part ending with the dramatic words “Murderous Attack Upon Sherlock Holmes”).
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLANCHED SOLDIER. Current affairs find their way into the Canon more directly than usual in this tale. It deals with a consequence of the Boer War, specifically a medical matter, having its origin in a field hospital much like the one Doyle himself managed during that conflict twenty-five years earlier. Its strength is as a medical tale rather than an instance of detection, as there is little for Holmes to do save to discern the anti-climactic truth and arrange a happy ending for the family of the ex-soldier who believed him to have a dread disease. “The Blanched Soldier” first appeared in Liberty, a New York magazine, for October 16, 1926, and in the Strand for November 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE. The first words of this story make it distinctive: it is written in the third person, not with Watson as narrator. It is in fact an adaptation of The Crown Diamond, a play by Doyle about Sherlock Holmes that was first produced in May 1921. The story saw print in the Strand that October, and in Hearst’s International Magazine in New York in November 1921. Both because of its awkward style (rigidly observing the dramatic unities, it simply describes what might be seen on a stage set), and because of its lack of originality in plot or circumstantial detail, the story is widely recognized as probably the weakest of all the Holmes tales. Nevertheless, it deserves some acclaim as the first new tale to be published since “His Last Bow” four years previously.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GABLES. Unhealthy sexuality (a young man becomes fascinated by an older woman) and the misuse of wealth make the atmosphere of this story distasteful, and there is little detecting for Holmes to do. The issue in this affair, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is blackmail at the point where relationships and money meet. The unusual character of Isadora Klein is probably the story’s strongest feature, though there is also some interest in the way Holmes examines the attempt to buy Mrs. Maberley’s house, contents and all, eventually realizing that a tell-tale manuscript is what the buyer was after. “The Three Gables” was first published in Liberty, New York, for September 18, 1926, and in the Strand for October 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE. Written during Doyle’s years as an advocate of spiritualism, this tale nevertheless presents a firmly materialist Holmes: “No ghosts need apply.” Among the Case-Book stories it is unusually strong and memorable, reminiscent of Holmes’s early adventures, although the title is deliberately lurid, the story something of a trick, for Holmes finds that the woman who has been sucking blood from her stepson’s neck is no sort of monster. “The Sussex Vampire” was first published in the January 1924 issues of both the Strand and (in New York) Hearst’s International Magazine.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GARRIDEBS. The appeal of this story depends heavily on the novelty of the grotesque surname “Garrideb.” Holmes is called in not to solve a crime but to render advice in the search for men of that name; when three of them stand in a row, a fortune is theirs to divide. Of course he finds the whole business to be a fraud, rather as was the League of the Red-Headed Men in a story written thirty years earlier, a story whose plot is largely borrowed for this one. The dramatic scene in which Watson is wounded is among the high emotional moments of the Canon. This tale was first published in Collier’s for October 25, 1924, and in the Strand for January 1925.
THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE. This story (which departs from the “Adventure of” style of title) presents a classic piece of deduction by Holmes, in which he works out from a chip on a stone bridge the true explanation for the death of Maria Gibson. It has to do with a gritty love triangle, a plot that seems unmistakably of the 1920s. The story also offers the Sherlockian one of the Canon’s finest paragraphs about other cases which Holmes addressed, but for which the world is not yet prepared. “Thor Bridge” was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both in the February and March issues of 1922; the first part ends with “We come at once upon a most fruitful line of inquiry.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN. Holmes makes his nearest approach to science fiction in this story, in which the unusual behaviour of a professor proves to be caused by a “serum” extracted from langur monkeys. Experiments with such injections of testicular extract began in the 1880s and attracted much attention in the 1920s, but they seem somehow too modern for Holmes’s attention, in a case that requires little action from him but does lead him to some philosophizing, and a hint that he might soon retire. The story was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both for March 1923.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE LION’S MANE. Sherlock Holmes himself is the narrator of this tale (his prose style is, however, revealingly similar to Watson’s). Its events take place on the Sussex coastline, after Holmes’s retirement to a “villa,” and involve the strange death of Fitzroy McPherson, which proves to be the result of a natural phenomenon rather than of human violence. The story has novelty (not least, the absence of Watson) to distinguish it, as well as the portrait of that “most complete and remarkable woman,” Maud Bellamy. “The Lion’s Mane” first appeared in Liberty for November 27, 1926, and in the Strand for December 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE VEILED LODGER. Holmes waxes philosophical in this sad tale, as does Doyle, who wrote it near the end of his life (it was published in Liberty for January 22, 1927, and the Strand for February 1927). Readers might reasonably feel a little cheated, for Holmes is called on to do no detecting at all, only a little speculating and a good deal of listening as Eugenia Ronder tells the dramatic story of how her face was ruined, so that she now lives behind a veil.
THE ADVENTURE OF SHOSCOMBE OLD PLACE. Original publication of the Canon came to an end with this story, appearing in Liberty for March 5, 1927, and the Strand for April 1927. It is a story of degeneration, death, and old bones, with the suspected murder proving to be nothing more serious than a fraud born of desperation. Still, its final paragraph tries to offer hope, speaking of “a happier note than Sir Robert’s actions deserved ... an honoured old age.” It harks back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, with the association of mysterious dogs and spooky death, and its highlight is the brief exciting scene in which Holmes lets a spaniel loose to bark at the mysterious occupant of a carriage. (The story was originally announced as “The Adventure of the Black Spaniel,” but never published under that title.) A return to the horse-racing milieu that gave “Silver Blaze” much of its novelty also adds interest to this story.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RETIRED COLOURMAN. Perhaps because of the word “retired” in the title, and because its theme is the hopelessness of old age, this story was put last in The Case-Book, although there were two tales still to come when it was first published in Liberty for December 18, 1926, and the Strand for January 1927. Doyle returns to his frequent theme of a love triangle, includes his only mention of chess (“one mark of a scheming mind”), makes Sherlock Holmes conduct one of his most clever, if inconsiderate, ruses, and offers perhaps the most chilling image in the entire Canon, the incomplete phrase scrawled on the wall of the death chamber by the two murder victims. The seven-word question with which Holmes nails the unsuspecting killer is a splendidly dramatic note for the story which a cover-to-cover reader of the Canon will encounter last.
