The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

So before introducing Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle did something curious in the stories leading up to it. Knowing that the Professor was due to appear at the end of the second series of twelve Holmes stories, Conan Doyle included the following passage in the second story, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”:^a “He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime.” Then in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle describes Moriarty in this passage: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans” (p. 559). These passages are quite similar. It’s clear that the being at the source of the outstretched filaments, though undescribed, must be a spider; the second passage only makes more explicit what was already implied in the first one. The first passage, I neglected to state, describes Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle could hardly make an explicit link between Holmes and so repulsive a creature as a spider, but his language has made that link despite his reticence. This is the first in a series of parallels Conan Doyle set up between Holmes and his nemesis. It was necessary for Moriarty to have as exalted a stature in the criminal world as Holmes has in his. Holmes himself says, “I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal” (p. 560). When Holmes continues, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill” (p. 560), he expresses more than just respect for an adversary. His admiration is a kind of self-approval as well. When Holmes contemplates Moriarty, he sees an image of himself reflected in a perverse mirror. First, they look alike: Moriarty, like Holmes, is “extremely tall and thin” (p. 560). They share a taste for French painting. In a later novel, The Valley of Fear, we are told that Moriarty owns a work by Jean Greuze, paid for, it is implied, with ill-gotten wealth. Holmes expresses throughout the stories a decided preference for Gallic art, no doubt because his grandmother was the sister of French painter Emile Vernet (1789-1863). Holmes refers to the Professor as “the Napoleon of crime” (p. 559). Setting aside for the moment that such a phrase would be redundant for many an Englishman at the time, the only other reference Holmes makes to Napoleon is in the later story “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” where he compares himself to the Little Corsican. Except for the “criminal strain” that “ran in his blood” (p. 559), Moriarty might have become a highly esteemed colleague or even a soul mate.

Although on the simplest plot level, Holmes and Moriarty exist as two separate figures, on another level we are invited to see them as two sides of a single coin, like Milton’s “knowledge of good and evil,” “two twins cleaving together, leap[ing] into the world” or, in this case, out of this world. Europe’s greatest detective and its greatest criminal locked arm in arm, tumbling together into eternity over a vast abyss, form as powerful an image of the mysterious duality of good and evil as the framework of these stories allows. It recalls the structure of Shakespearean tragedy, where the expulsion of evil always requires the sacrifice of some human good.

It is probably impossible today to gauge the effect this final scene had on readers. Now every reader knows that Holmes did not meet his end at Reichenbach Falls, if only because of the huge number of pages still to read after “The Final Problem.” Even if we were momentarily deluded, we would soon find out that Mr. Sherlock Holmes returned from Switzerland, resumed his crime-fighting career, and finally retired to a country farm in Sussex, where he tended bees. This sheds a completely different light over our feelings for him. Instead of a tragic hero whose final sacrifice redeemed his society, he has faded into what Conan Doyle called in the Preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes that “fairy kingdom of romance,” existing forever in the secure confines of an impossibly safe world.

At the time, Holmes’s death made an enormous impact on the reading public. Bank clerks and shopkeepers wore black armbands in mourning for the late consulting detective, and storms of letters poured into the Strand and to Conan Doyle himself, urging the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle writes of one woman who sent him a letter beginning “You brute!” But Conan Doyle was adamant in his refusal even to consider taking up his pen to revive his fallen hero.

So from 1893 until 1901 the reading public had to accept the idea that they had read the last of the remarkable sleuth. But then a young friend of Conan Doyle named Fletcher Robinson told him about an old legend from Dartmoor in England’s West Country, near Robinson’s boyhood home. The tale involved a spectral hound that haunted one of the local families. Conan Doyle and Robinson hatched out a plot together, which Conan Doyle then turned into a book. He saw right away that to solve the mystery at the heart of this legend, he would need to revive Sherlock Holmes. He wrote letters to his mother telling her he was writing “a real creeper” in which “Holmes is at his very best.” So in August 1901 the Strand printed the first installment of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Much advertised in advance, that issue of the magazine sold 30,000 extra copies. People lined up for blocks around the printer’s building on Southampton Street in order to get their copy of the magazine before it was shipped to their local newsstand or bookstore.

They weren’t disappointed, and few readers since have been either. The Hound of the Baskervilles is to my mind the best of all the Holmes stories. Most readers will agree with Conan Doyle that Holmes is at his best here. Watson, too, was never better: He acquits himself well in all the tasks Holmes gives him, even to the point of getting Holmes’s unqualified approval. The minor characters are for the most part well drawn, and the plot is skillfully paced. Conan Doyle wonderfully sustained a mood of danger and dread that hangs over the story until the very end. He also created perhaps the most dramatic line in all the Holmes stories. What reader hasn’t felt a tingle along the spine upon reading Dr. Mortimer’s hushed confession: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” When first published in the Strand, that line ended one of the monthly installments. Readers had a whole month to savor the salutary thrill of that horror. I imagine thousands of them reading the line over and over, recapturing that pleasurable shudder before they bought the next chapter the following month. I confess to indulging in that guilty pleasure myself.

Most impressive of all is the masterful way in which Conan Doyle uses language to create symbols that reverberate throughout the novel. The short stories provide little opportunity for any sort of symbolic development, and nothing in either of the two earlier novels could be said to rise to any symbolic level. But The Hound of the Baskervilles contains several symbols. The hound is as much a symbol of an implacable force that punishes human sins as it is a flesh-and-blood creature. As a character in the Baskerville legend, the hound is an instrument for retributive justice, haunting only the heirs of Hugo Baskerville, but as symbol it extends its baleful sphere to all of us. Like Moby Dick, it’s a reminder of an evil that lies at the center of existence, with which humans must eternally wrestle.

The story also makes the moor a character in itself, having as much effect on the action as any of the living beings. Exactly what it symbolizes isn’t easy to say, as it’s in the nature of symbols to defy easy summary, but Stapleton gives an indication. “You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious” (p. 662). Watson goes further: “Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track” (p. 627).

The story seems to be set in 1889, long before Holmes’s fatal tumble at Reichenbach Falls. Holmes notes that the date on Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick, 1884, was five years ago. In his Sherlock Holmes Commentary, Martin Dakin makes a persuasive case from a number of clues in the story that it is actually post-Reichenbach, and that Watson may have had good reasons to hide the true date, but this is the one of those puzzles that only scholars worry over. On the face of it we’re intended to see this as an old case Watson simply hadn’t recounted before. Conan Doyle hadn’t yet decided to bring his greatest creation back from his watery grave. That decision was some way off. But being back in the company of Holmes for this grand episode, after nearly a decade of absence, must have made his heart grow fonder of his problem child. Great things lay just ahead.

Kyle Freeman, a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast for many years, earned two graduate degrees in English literature from Columbia University, where his major was twentieth-century British literature. He has seen just about all the Holmes movies of the last sixty years, as well as the television series with Jeremy Brett. Now working as a computer consultant, he constantly puts into practice Sherlock Holmes’s famous statement “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”