I like books in which things happen, and then keep on happening.
—VINCENT STARRETT, AUTHOR OF The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
If you’ve never read any Sherlock Holmes mystery stories, this omnibus of the four longer adventures will introduce you to the world’s one and only “consulting detective.” If you already know of Sherlock Holmes from the recent (and very entertaining) movies and television series, you will discover that there is no substitute for the original and best. In either case, you needn’t avert your eyes from this opening essay, for it avoids “spoilers” or revealing anything likely to mar the first-time reader’s enjoyment.
Not that knowing “who done it” or how matters all that much. People who treasure these stories return to them because of the charm of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing and for the pleasure of being, once more, in the company of the great detective and his great-hearted friend and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson. Gaslight and hansom cabs, foggy nights in Victorian London, the snug bachelor quarters at 221B Baker Street—these are what rereaders come back for. The canonical adventures, consisting of four novels and fifty-six short stories, make up the best comfort literature in the world.
I myself first discovered Sherlock Holmes as a boy of ten, on a dark and stormy night in November, when I huddled under blankets with a paperback of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Two days later I rode my bicycle to the public library and signed out a worn one-volume edition of the master detective’s complete adventures. Tremulous with excitement, I immediately sat down at a secluded desk near an old-fashioned radiator and turned to A Study in Scarlet, described on its title page as “a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department.” Ever since, I—and many others all around the world—have never stopped reading and rereading those reminiscences.
Even now, just murmuring the titles in this Penguin omnibus delivers a little jolt of anticipatory excitement: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), The Valley of Fear (1915). Not only do these four longer adventures offer mystery, they are also richly abundant in humor, romance, social realism, Gothic horror, and even frontier myth. In them Conan Doyle, borrowing elements from nineteenth-century “sensation” fiction, incorporates ancient curses, dark doings at the outposts of empire, criminal masterminds, blackmail, and revenge. The novels are, in short, wonderfully extravagant in plot, setting, and atmosphere, as well as absolutely essential to a full understanding of Holmes and Watson. I love them and you will too.
Nonetheless, compared with the tightly composed short stories, these book-length cases are structurally awkward. Three contain protracted “flashbacks” that are effectively separate stories in themselves. Conan Doyle resorts to these historical narratives—which can be quite gripping all on their own—to explain the reasons behind the murders that Holmes has just solved. While The Hound of the Baskervilles doesn’t feature one of these extensive tailpieces, its central chapters nonetheless focus on Watson without Holmes. This is a little like Hamlet without the prince.
There are several possible reasons why Conan Doyle adopted such a cumbersome framework. During the 1880s the French detective story writer Émile Gaboriau enjoyed immense popularity in England, and he employed just this odd structure for his books. Monsieur Lecoq, for instance, includes such a long explanatory flashback that one modern edition simply drops the second half of the novel entirely. An additional reason may be, quite simply, Conan Doyle’s own passion for history. Even though Sherlock Holmes’s exploits made him rich and famous, he much preferred to write historical fiction. He relished re-creating an era in detail and would happily immerse himself in background research for months, piling up facts and data with which to give his narratives authenticity.
So even though A Study in Scarlet turned out to be the young writer’s first published novel, it was soon succeeded by far more ambitious, and much bulkier works, such as Micah Clarke (1889), set in the seventeenth century, and The White Company (1891), set in the fourteenth. The latter, a chivalric romance, was Conan Doyle’s own favorite among his novels, especially when read in tandem with its prequel Sir Nigel (1906). To modern eyes, these books’ battle sequences still shine, but far too many pages linger over the minutiae of period manners, costume, and weaponry. As Hesketh Pearson observed in a biography of Conan Doyle: “To the end of his life it never occurred to him that the accumulation of detail, however accurate or picturesque, does not vivify an age but nullifies it.”
That lifelong love for history, coupled to an uneasy fascination with American life, reemerges in A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, where the second halves are, respectively, a western set in Utah with a titillating sexual theme (Mormon polygamy) and a laconic, hard-boiled account of violence and class warfare in the mining community of “Vermissa Valley, USA.” Some readers may recognize Conan Doyle’s principal literary sources for these dime-novel episodes: “The Story of the Destroying Angel,” part of New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Stevenson, and The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1887) by Allan Pinkerton.
Matters are slightly different in the other two novels. In The Sign of Four a similar flashback—in this case to India and the Andaman Islands—is better integrated into the plot, being a criminal’s confession made in the presence of Holmes, Watson, and the police. Conan Doyle presumably drew inspiration for this book’s treasure story plot from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), which centers on the theft of an Indian jewel and the sinister events that later ensue in peaceful England. This leaves The Hound of the Baskervilles, generally regarded as the most aesthetically pleasing of the longer stories because it preserves the unities of time, place, and action, and doesn’t get bogged down in ex post facto accounts of earlier events. Instead, Conan Doyle briskly relates the legend of a Dartmoor hell-hound in just a single chapter at the beginning of the novel, then immediately connects that eighteenth-century backstory to the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the discovery of footprints near his body. When Holmes asks his informant, Dr. Mortimer, whether these last were from a man or a woman, he receives the most thrilling reply in modern literature: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” As a ten-year-old I knew that writing, or reading, couldn’t get any better than that.
Nonetheless, this spooky novel—even though a popular candidate for the “best mystery ever” trophy—suffers from that bothersome interval in the middle, when Holmes is absent and one must make do with Watson’s discoveries both at Baskerville Hall and on the nearby moor. Almost every reader surrenders to the brooding power of the ominous landscape—those ancient stone huts, the deadly Grimpen Mire, the eerie sounds and lights in the darkness—while also wishing that the great detective would reappear. Holmes is where our heart is.
And yet. While Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional character of modern times, and the most filmed as well, he truly would be nothing without Watson, his chronicler, his Boswell, his friend. Christopher Morley—founder of that quintessential Sherlockian society, the Baker Street Irregulars—once called their collected adventures “a textbook of friendship.” The stories record how Holmes saved Watson from going to seed and how the good doctor gradually humanized a great thinking machine. Moreover, as their exploits together continued, this dynamic duo gradually stepped off the page into real life. As Vincent Starrett said of them in his poem “221B”: “Here dwell together still two men of note/ Who never lived and so can never die.” So real do Holmes and Watson seem even now that people still write to Baker Street pleading for their advice and help.
I myself would never trouble those busy men with my problems unless, of course, I were in really serious trouble. But I would certainly argue that these accounts of their adventures are, as much as any Keatsian urn, a joy forever. Nevertheless, it was a very near thing that they were ever recorded at all.
A STUDY IN SCARLET AND THE SIGN OF FOUR
Before he created the most illustrious residents of Baker Street—whom he nearly called J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker— Arthur Conan Doyle had already written a novel that was lost in the mail and contributed excellent short fiction to various magazines. “The Captain of the Pole-Star” (1883), set in the Arctic, is one of the most haunting Victorian tales of the supernatural. But the young writer could hardly think of quitting his day job as a doctor in Southsea. A Study in Scarlet was turned down by one publisher after another, until it was finally accepted by Ward, Lock, and Co., who offered to buy the British copyright for a derisory twenty-five pounds. Out of desperation, Conan Doyle took the paltry sum, then still had to wait a year before his short novel came out in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Today, that annual may be the most valuable magazine in the world. Only thirty-three copies are known to exist and many are tattered or incomplete. If a truly fine copy were to appear on the market today, it might bring a quarter of a million dollars. Or more.
The 1887 Beeton’s containing A Study in Scarlet sold moderately well, and the novel was later republished as a book, with rather crude illustrations by Conan Doyle’s artist father. And that was all. There was no great hoopla, no recognition of a new star in the nascent detective story firmament.
Yet from the very first page, Conan Doyle’s storytelling mastery—the genial narrative voice, the fast-moving action—sweeps the reader along. In short order we learn that John H. Watson has been an army doctor, was grievously wounded at the battle of Maiwand in the Second Afghan War, and now, broken in health, has wearily returned to England. In London—“that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”—he falls into “a comfortless, meaningless existence,” spending his money profligately until he finally recognizes the need to economize. One day he encounters an old acquaintance who tells him about a chap looking for someone to share digs with in Baker Street.
Watson and Holmes meet at St. Bart’s hospital, where Holmes’s first recorded words are “I’ve found it!,” that is, the English for “Eureka,” exclaimed by Archimedes when he suddenly grasped the displacement of liquids as he sat down in his bath. This is significant because the Holmes stories are leavened throughout with classical tags, biblical references, and literary allusions, as well as perplexing inconsistencies—Was Watson wounded in the leg or the arm?—and myriad tantalizing lacunae. Did Holmes attend Oxford, Cambridge, or some other university? Arguing about such questions and other points of dialectical hullaballoo provide never-ending joy to the members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the many other literary sodalities devoted to the study of the “canon.”
The lanky young chemist’s reaction to his discovery of a test for bloodstains is also a hint of things to come. “His eyes fairly glittered as he spoke, and he put his hand over his heart and bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination.” Sherlock Holmes is nothing if not theatrical; he loves to dazzle and amaze. Some scholars, who play the game that the stories are factual if incomplete biography, speculate that young Holmes was once an actor, perhaps appearing in Hamlet—a play he often quotes from—and that he might possibly have gone on tour in the United States, which would account for his knowledge of that country. Who can say?
Watson, however, is surprised when this distinctly histrionic fellow glances at him and declares, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” How, the doctor wonders, did he know that? When the pair set up bachelor quarters at 221B Baker Street, Watson continues to be puzzled by his new roommate. What does Holmes do for a living? Why do all these strange people come to call? Sometimes the man spends hours just lying upon a sofa in the sitting room, “hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.” Not for the first time will Watson be proved wrong in his deductions.
Nonetheless, putting on his diagnostician’s hat, he takes to studying Holmes, listing his strengths and weaknesses, noting his profound knowledge of chemistry and crime. Then, one day, Watson happens upon a magazine article entitled “The Book of Life,” which “attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way.” To Watson’s incredulity, his flatmate reveals that he is its author. In fact, Holmes admits that he possesses “a turn both for observation and deduction” and has consequently established himself as a “consulting detective.” He serves as the court of last resort when Scotland Yard is stymied. Utterly astonished, Watson interjects that he had no idea such individuals existed “outside of stories,” thus subtly imputing to Holmes and himself the reality of flesh and blood.
A few pages later a letter from Inspector Tobias Gregson arrives announcing the discovery of a dead man at Lauriston Gardens. The body, it turns out, is that of Enoch J. Drebber, most recently a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. Why was Drebber in London? Since there is no obvious wound, how was he killed? And for what reason? On the wall of the empty room is scribbled, in blood, the single word “Rache.” I’ll say no more about what happens, beyond pointing out our first glimpse of Holmes at a crime scene:
He whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.
Conan Doyle admitted that Holmes’s armchair wizardry—as when, in “The Blue Carbuncle,” he concludes from an old hat that a man’s wife has ceased to love him—was derived from the example of his own medical school teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was renowned for both his theatricality and his ability to make startling and accurate deductions upon first meeting a new patient. That said, Holmes the sleuth-hound, nosing about on the ground and talking to himself, derives from Gaboriau’s Père Tabaret, who behaves in just this manner in L’Affaire Lerouge (which, as more than one scholar has noticed, could almost be loosely translated as “A Study in Scarlet”).
On the way back to Baker Street, Holmes interviews the police constable who discovered the murder and from him learns about a drunk found on the street nearby. At this point he interrupts with an utterly enigmatic question: “Had he a whip in his hand?” Most readers are likely to say to themselves, “What? Where did that come from?” Obviously, Holmes has registered some significant detail which has escaped our attention. But he doesn’t tell us what it is. Instead, he withholds his deductions until the right moment for their revelation, thus generating that feather touch of irony running throughout these stories (and most golden-age detective fiction): Holmes always knows more than we do. As he once sternly told Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” What is meaningful to the detective invariably remains mysterious to the reader.
In A Study in Scarlet Holmes also flaunts his familiarity with the entire “calendar of crime,” remarking, for instance, that in interpreting the Lauriston murder “the cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist.” (In later stories Watson matches such name-dropping, frequently referring to cases “for which the world is not yet prepared”: What would we give to know more about “The lighthouse, the politician and the trained cormorant” or “The Amateur Mendicant Society” or, best of all, “the giant rat of Sumatra”!) Besides his scientific superiority and criminal expertise, Holmes here exhibits his fundamentally bohemian nature as well. Like a bored aesthete, he listens distractedly, even disdainfully, to Inspector Gregson’s report on the testimony of Enoch Drebber’s landlady. “‘It’s all quite exciting,’ said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn. ‘What happened next?’” The condescension is unmistakable—and yet Holmes has actually learned a vital piece of information.
A Study in Scarlet proves noteworthy, too, for the first appearance of the Baker Street Irregulars, the London street urchins who can go anywhere and overhear anyone, and who consequently serve the detective as a city-wide surveillance system. Most important of all, Watson discovers his own new vocation: Near the story’s end, he tells Holmes, “You should publish an account of the case,” and then adds, “If you won’t, I will for you.” The detective shrugs. “You may do what you like, Doctor.”
The initial characterization of Holmes as part Babbage calculating machine, part decadent aesthete is reinforced in The Sign of Four. This novel opens with the shocking scene of the detective injecting himself with a hypodermic syringe. “Which is it today?” Watson sarcastically inquires. “Morphine or cocaine?” To which Holmes languidly answers, “It is cocaine,” then adds, “a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?” As disturbing as this vignette can seem to modern sensibilities, bear in mind that cocaine was then regularly prescribed for depression and that Holmes’s mild dose would cost him only pennies. In fact, he isn’t really a drug addict; he’s an adrenaline junkie.
By this time the doctor and the detective have been residing together for some while, and Watson knows all too well the moodiness and melancholy of the bored Holmes: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work . . . I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” Holmes requires the constant intellectual challenge of a mystery, the exhilaration of the chase. In The Sign of Four he finds abundant cerebral and physical excitement, culminating in a headlong pursuit down the Thames River after a one-legged man and his devilish (though anthropologically unlikely) companion. How devilish? At one point, Holmes says quietly to the armed Watson, “Fire if he raises his hand.” In context, this is one of the most electrifying sentences in the canon.
What, though, led Conan Doyle to bring back Holmes, given that he probably never intended to write about him again after A Study in Scarlet? It is a remarkable story. In 1889 J. M. Stoddart of Lippincott’s Magazine, published out of Philadelphia, traveled to London in search of new material for his pages. He invited two rising young authors to dinner at the Langham Hotel—which now displays a plaque commemorating the evening—and quickly signed up both for short novels. So Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Arthur Conan Doyle produced The Sign of the Four (in later British editions, The Sign of Four, 1890). The latter book’s portrait of the fussy and hypochondriacal Thaddeus Sholto is, in part, an affectionate caricature of Wilde.
Early in this second novel, Conan Doyle establishes a distinct contrast between Holmes as inhuman “automaton” and the all-too-human Watson, who early on admits to “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents.” This would suggest that one of the doctor’s vices—obliquely alluded to in A Study in Scarlet—is sexual promiscuity (another, we later surmise, is gambling). After Watson meets Mary Morstan, who has come to Holmes for help, he calculates that “she must be seven-and-twenty now—a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience.” This certainly sounds like the practiced libertine. Yet Watson falls in love with Miss Morstan at first sight, simply, purely, and totally.
Nothing if not atmospheric, The Sign of Four depicts London as a kind of Arabian Nights realm of wonders, Baghdad on the Thames. The novelist Graham Greene once confessed that of all the Holmes adventures only “that dark night in Pondicherry Lodge, Norwood, has never faded from my memory.” From the beginning Conan Doyle exerted his considerable descriptive powers (in part because, still living in Southsea, he knew London largely from maps):
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light, which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed.
Consider two details in this passage, the first being Conan Doyle’s jarring repetition of the verb “threw.” This is probably an indication of the high speed with which he habitually scribbled his Holmes stories. Even by nineteenth-century standards, Conan Doyle could be an astonishingly facile writer. In this instance he signed the contract for The Sign of Four on August 30, 1889 and delivered the manuscript just a month later; A Study in Scarlet was written almost as fast. To complete a short story would seldom require more than a couple of days. Once a plot had been worked out, the actual writing could be done in a single draft, with perhaps a few light corrections afterward. Second, let me draw your attention—as Holmes might say—to the phrase “flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.” This is another of those many covert allusions that thicken the texture of Conan Doyle’s writing. In this instance, the image is drawn from the Venerable Bede, who in a famous passage of his Ecclesiastical History of England (circa AD 731) compares the meaningless life of a pagan to a sparrow that flies from a stormy winter’s night into a warm mead hall and then, all too quickly, passes back into the surrounding darkness.
In The Sign of Four Mary Morstan brings Holmes several mysteries: What happened to her father after Captain Morstan arrived in London from military service in the East and suddenly vanished? Why has she received a lustrous pearl of great price on each of her birthdays over the past six years? Could there be any importance to a scrap of Indian paper inscribed with four interlinked crosses and the words “the sign of the four”? (To this last, the contemporary response would be “Duh.”) And, most immediately pressing, who is the mysterious correspondent asking to meet her at seven that evening “at the third pillar from the left” of the Lyceum Theater? She may bring two friends, if she feels insecure, but no police. Of course, Watson and Holmes agree to accompany their new client.
Much will happen that night, but eventually the nervous Thaddeus Sholto will guide the little company to Pondicherry Lodge, once the home of his late father Major Sholto and currently that of his twin brother Bartholomew. At the gates they are stopped by a former prizefighter named McMurdo, now working as a bodyguard. Here Holmes discloses an unexpected detail from his past: As an amateur he once boxed against McMurdo, who remembers his “cross-hit . . . under the jaw.” The pugilist then tells the detective, “You’re one who has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.” (The “fancy” is a slang term for the fight game.) Are there, then, no limits to Holmes’s abilities? His subsequent acrobatics on the roof of Pondicherry Lodge will actually be compared to those of Blondin, the aerialist who walked across a wire suspended over Niagara Falls. Detective, aesthete, human calculating machine, actor, music and art lover, bibliophile, boxer, acrobat—Holmes is obviously far more than “a theorist,” as the obnoxious Inspector Athelney Jones here calls him. A few chapters further on Holmes even scrapes together a meal of oysters and grouse, telling Watson, “you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper!”
Just as A Study in Scarlet is thematically a study of obsession in various forms—passionate love, religious fanaticism, long-planned revenge, detectival relentlessness—so The Sign of Four puts forth a series of ethical stress tests, as Conan Doyle probes the complexities of the riven human heart and conscience. One character is faced with a life-or-death moral dilemma. Another sacrifices his honor for a treasure he never uses. Watson falls in love but tortuously hesitates to declare himself. Holmes himself assumes so many radically different personae that they begin to imply multiple personalities. Thaddeus Sholto is effeminate and generous, while his twin is brutally masculine and miserly. Even the instinctively kind Watson experiences a visceral, but psychologically suspicious, loathing for a disabled military man whose early history closely mirrors his own. As for the villains: they emerge from the shadows as grotesque figures out of medieval allegory or Freudian nightmare.
While The Sign of Four is intimately connected to the turmoil and bloodshed of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, its main action takes place in 1888. The 1880s were themselves a particularly violent decade in English history, one that included a series of Fenian dynamite bombings, an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria (by a man who hated the number four), and, most infamously, the 1888 Whitechapel “Jack the Ripper” murders: at one point Holmes analyzes a letter just as the police analyzed those of the vicious serial killer. This was also the period when scientists began to chart and tabulate human behavior, when Alphonse Bertillon measured skulls (anthropometry) for indications of latent criminality, and Cesare Lombroso argued that crime was an atavistic throwback to the primitive savage. Such classification and typology are regularly alluded to throughout the story. Watson clearly believes in these phrenological pseudo-sciences: Mary Morstan’s face, he writes, indicated “a refined and sensitive nature.” But Holmes will have none of it: “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
Not least, Holmes’s second published case proffers the first iteration of what would become his best-known, and most repeated, aphorism: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” From this viewpoint, much of The Sign of Four certainly does seem improbable or even impossible, like the Muslim-Sikh name Mahomet Singh. But these cavils will occur to the reader only later. Once begun, there’s no resisting the sheer rush, the nonstop narrative excitement of this dark and wondrous tale.
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES AND THE VALLEY OF FEAR
You might have thought that the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would have been greeted with huzzahs from a grateful public. No such luck. The Sign of Four proved only modestly successful. Conan Doyle was still pinning his publishing hopes on The White Company and other “serious” books. But having few patients for his new London medical practice and needing money, in 1891 he decided to submit some short stories to a recently established magazine called The Strand. The first was titled “A Scandal in Bohemia” and opened with the tantalizing sentence: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” In the resourceful and daring Irene Adler, the sleuth of Baker Street truly meets his match: she turns out to be far more than just “the daintiest thing under a bonnet.” In the following months, “The Red-Headed League,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Speckled Band” would finally make Conan Doyle famous and Sherlock Holmes immortal. As the grateful editor of The Strand proclaimed, he had found “the greatest natural-born storyteller of the age.”
But fairly soon Conan Doyle began to tire of these trivial entertainments; they kept him from “better things.” Only the writer’s formidable mother persuaded him to continue writing about Holmes and Watson for a while longer. In “The Greek Interpreter” he even doubled the narrative’s star power by introducing Sherlock’s lazy, corpulent, and smarter older brother Mycroft, whose specialty is “omniscience” and who sometimes “is the British government.” And then finally, inevitably, he introduced Holmes’s most dangerous and implacable foe, the criminal genius Professor James Moriarty. When, despite the entreaties of friends, family, and editors, Conan Doyle irrevocably determined to kill off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893), he arranged for the detective to confront the Napoleon of Crime on the treacherous paths high above Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. The two enemies grappled and, to all appearances, tumbled into the gulf below. Having elected to sacrifice his life to preserve the world from evil, Holmes—once merely an inhuman calculating machine and bohemian aesthete—had now become, in Watson’s words, “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”
Thereafter, among other projects, Conan Doyle took to chronicling the glorious and comic exploits of the Napoleonic soldier Etienne Gerard (in their way, they are as good as the Holmes stories), while The Strand ran a series of mysteries solved by Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, the first of the so-called rivals of Sherlock Holmes. But the world wanted the one, the only. While on a golfing holiday Conan Doyle learned from a younger friend named Bertram Fletcher Robinson about the supernatural folklore of Dartmoor, including occasional sightings of a spectral dog of death. Together the two writers began to sketch out “a real creeper.” Before long, Conan Doyle concluded that this was a case for Sherlock Holmes.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) deals with ancient terrors in a desolate landscape of moor and bog, where—to borrow some phrases from that devoted Sherlockian T. S. Eliot—the Grimpen Mire affords no secure foothold and the visitor is menaced by monsters and deadly enchantment. It is a tale, above all, about an aristocratic family haunted by a monstrous beast that brings terror and violent death. Conan Doyle dedicated the book to Robinson, who claimed he’d written parts of it and who sometimes called himself its joint author. No one will ever know for sure the extent of his probably minimal involvement. Still, only one thing really mattered: Holmes was back! Unfortunately, his creator hadn’t actually resurrected the great detective. Instead Conan Doyle subtitled his book “Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” and set this chilling case sometime before the fatal encounter with Moriarty. Then Watson had memorialized his friend in words originally applied to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo. As The Hound opens, one can again hear echoes of Platonic dialogue in some of the detective’s exchanges with his old friend:
“Is it then stretching our inference too far to say the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”
“It certainly seems probable.”
Humankind, as the philosophers tell us, swings between the bestial and the angelic, partaking of both flesh and spirit. Throughout The Hound of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle plays up the metaphysical, and practical, issues surrounding the relationship of the body and the soul. Holmes’s informant Dr. Mortimer analyzes human skulls for “supra-orbital development” and indications of atavism. When the great detective meditates over a map of Devonshire, he claims to travel there “in spirit.” An escaped convict presents “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face . . . it might have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.” Another villainous character turns out to be “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” When an ominous-seeming figure is dimly glimpsed standing on the summit of a rocky tor, we are left wondering if it is just a passing hiker or the devil surveying this fallen world.
Despite Holmes’s warning in The Sign of Four, Watson continues to judge people by their physiognomies and the good doctor is wrong in almost every instance. For example, he concludes, quite mistakenly, that the “dry glitter” in a servant’s eyes and the “firm set of his thin lips” indicate “a positive and possibly harsh nature.” Throughout the novel people continually find themselves confused or deceived by appearances. That animal-like escaped prisoner is mistaken for the aristocratic Sir Henry Baskerville. Dr. Mortimer isn’t sure which gentleman at 221B is the sleuth and which his chronicler. A London cabman drives a bearded passenger who claims to be, but isn’t, Sherlock Holmes. A young woman named Beryl Stapleton initially assumes that Dr. Watson must be Sir Henry. One of the novel’s French commentators, Pierre Bayard, even argues that Holmes fails to identify the actual villain. And then there’s the monstrous hound: Is it real or imagined? Out on the moor a shaken Watson hears a “long, low moan, indescribably sad. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again.” Could this be a spectral predator hot on the trail of Sir Henry Baskerville—or the whimper of a beast in pain?
The legend of the hound began with the kidnapping and intended rape of a local girl by the eighteenth-century Sir Hugo Baskerville. Continued violence against women—a crucial theme in A Study in Scarlet and many of the short stories—takes multiple forms here as the reader learns of unhappy marriages, thwarted love affairs, and abusive, even sadistic relationships. (Little wonder that Conan Doyle would become a leading voice in divorce law reform.) Yet this richly layered novel also turns on inheritance in multiple senses, whether of property and money, genetic traits, or a family curse. In its construction, the book nearly resembles a case file or murder dossier, since Conan Doyle assembles a panoply of documents: a tattered manuscript, newspaper reports, a warning message made from words cut from printed sentences, the account of a witness cross-examined in the manner of a trial lawyer, Watson’s dispatches to Holmes, Watson’s own journal, various telegrams, handwritten notes, and letters. One character is even a professional typist and her father obsessed with legal briefs. All this written documentation, so representative of modern order and rationality, is nonetheless eclipsed by the elemental forces of Nature at her most hostile and threatening.
While The Hound of the Baskervilles is both structurally more unified than the first two Holmes novels and compelling throughout, it does exhibit minor flaws. Besides the long absence of Holmes in the middle, we also learn the identity of the villain well before the novel’s end. No matter. This isn’t just a mystery, this is Mystery, a spiritual confrontation with sinister forces as fog rolls across an ancient and haunted terrain:
There was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes’s elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralysed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.
In some lights, The Hound of the Baskervilles could be categorized as a tragic regional novel, like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: the desolate landscape—“the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky”—dominates the merely human characters. By contrast, The Valley of Fear (1915) presents itself as a modern novel about business, not just because its second half deals with management/worker clashes, but also because it focuses throughout on contracts, on pledges and oaths, on marital promises and other binding commitments.
John Dickson Carr, the grandmaster of the locked-room whodunit (or rather howdunit), once named The Valley of Fear as his favorite Sherlock Holmes novel and called it “a very nearly perfect piece of detective-story writing.” The critic Anthony Boucher seconded that judgment, maintaining, “Here is Holmes as the perfect thinking mind, in cryptanalysis, in observation, in deduction. And here, more than in any other Canonical story that comes to mind, is Holmes at his most completely charming. . . . There is, in fact, more overt humour here than is usual in the Canon; there is a certain fey quality in this Holmes.”
Humor? Holmes laughs regularly during his numerous exploits and he often slyly mocks his friend (“Really, Watson, you excel yourself”), but here, for once, it is the good doctor who temporarily triumphs. The scene opens at Baker Street with an encrypted message that needs to be deciphered, but is quickly followed by an extended discussion of a certain Napoleon of Crime:
“‘You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?’
“‘The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—’
“‘My blushes, Watson!’ Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
“‘I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.’
“‘A touch! A distinct touch!’ cried Holmes. ‘You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson.’”
Note the allusion to the swordplay in Hamlet, first employed in A Study in Scarlet but now part of the repartee between this prince of detectives and his Horatio. All this talk of Professor Moriarty, however, underscores that this novel, like the others, is set before the events chronicled in “The Final Problem.” Of course, by now contemporary readers had known for over a decade that Holmes was never really dead. Yielding to popular demand and substantial financial incentives, Conan Doyle had finally explained, in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903), how the great detective actually survived his meeting with Moriarty and what he had earlier called, with moving understatement, “the final discussion of those questions that lie between us.” After his “great hiatus” (spent partly in Tibet under the name Sigerson), Holmes eventually returned to solve numerous subsequent mysteries before retiring to keep bees on the Sussex Downs. Nonetheless, as here, Watson sometimes reaches back to record an older case.
By chapter 3, Holmes, Watson, and two go-getting policemen have arrived at Birlstone Manor, where the master of the house has been found dead in the library. Apparently John Douglas was surprised by an intruder who used a sawed-off shotgun to blow away most of his face. There are, however, some puzzling elements to this apparently run-of-the-mill burglary turned homicide: What is the meaning of the strange mark branded on Douglas’s arm? Why has one half of a set of dumbbells gone missing? And why does the oddly cheerful Mrs. Douglas speak so intimately with her husband’s friend Cecil Barker? Inevitably, Holmes proclaims, “in all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study.” Of course, attentive readers will smile, remembering that he has made almost precisely the same assertion about the crimes in each of the other novels. For all his vaunted rationality, Holmes is susceptible to bursts of lyrical enthusiasm (for music, art, Nature), to melancholy observations about life, and to exclamatory hyperbole when in the middle of a case.
The Valley of Fear is the most metafictional of the novels. It is a book filled with other books and carefully manufactured texts, where truth is stage-managed and nothing is natural. Police inspectors allude to Watson’s published works and coyly remark, “when the time comes we’ll all hope for a place in your book.” One important character refers to Watson as “the historian of this bunch” and then hands him a substantial manuscript with the air of a writing student soliciting the attention of a published author. The man even insists, “You’ve never had such a story as that pass through your hands before, and I’ll lay my last dollar on that.” In part 2 Watson presents that gritty hard-boiled narrative, a third-person account of a rebellious young bravo’s induction into a murderous Irish-American secret society called the Scowrers. Like some fearsome provincial Moriarty, its leader, “Bodymaster” McGinty, has spies everywhere and “every whisper goes back to him.” His word is law among the lawless.
In tone the two halves of The Valley of Fear are radically different. “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” as the first part is called, prefigures those elaborately contrived puzzle-murders of the 1920s and ’30s, in which witty amateur detectives solve impossible crimes. But the second part, “The Scowrers,” could have been published in Black Mask; it is abrupt and violent in word, action, and denouement, almost a foreshadowing of Dashiell Hammett’s brutal Red Harvest. Among Conan Doyle’s contemporaries it somewhat resembles a social-realist novel by Jack London or Upton Sinclair, while some aspects of its plot call to mind Conan Doyle’s nasty stories about the murderous pirate Captain Sharkey.
In Conan Doyle’s work, violence—usually in conjunction with ill-gotten wealth—nearly always originates outside England’s green and peaceful land, typically in gangsterish America. Consequently Holmes, like the medieval knights his creator idolized, often works to preserve the civilized values of the British Empire against barbarity and disorder. That said, The Valley of Fear is only partly about the danger of lawlessness. On closer inspection, both halves are built around a tangled spiderweb of promises, oaths, and pledges. No matter what the cost or how long it takes, contracts—whether honorable or ignoble—must always be fulfilled.
Throughout, Conan Doyle sets up, and quickly skates over, a series of moral ambiguities. Under what circumstances, if any, can a man stand by and allow bloodshed to occur without acting? Does Sherlock Holmes himself cause the death of two men? Is John Douglas’s wife betraying him with his best friend? And, most troubling of all, has Holmes’s deductive genius actually been subverted by Moriarty to assist the professor’s nefarious purposes? An epilogue, set amid the seeming security of Baker Street, adds further twists to this most intricate, most Heisenbergian of all the Sherlock Holmes novels. After all, nearly every element in the narrative is susceptible to multiple interpretations, so much so that reality itself comes to seem labile, any truth undecidable. Even more than in the other novel-length adventures, Conan Doyle actually avoids neat and tidy closure. Mysteries remain. The modern world has arrived.
Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote, “So elementary a form of fiction as the detective story hardly deserves the dignity of a preface.” But are the Holmes adventures so “elementary”? I’m writing this during the centennial year of The Valley of Fear. Over the past century and more, the Sherlock Holmes “canon” has received the kind of microscopic attention usually bestowed on the Bible, Shakespeare, and James Joyce. Every word has been studied, every angle explored, multiple interpretations expounded. There have been annotated editions, scholarly editions, and even manuscript editions of the stories; there are critical studies, journal articles, and Internet rants about Holmes; conferences and blogs are devoted to every aspect of his life and times.
I myself have contributed to this plenty. In 2002 I was invested into the Baker Street Irregulars and given the canonical name “Langdale Pike.” Pike is a journalist, a gossip columnist really, who appears in arguably the worst Sherlock Holmes story, “The Three Gables.” Since then I’ve written playful accounts of Pike’s various misadventures, a book about Arthur Conan Doyle, and presented numerous talks on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Still, most important of all, I’ve been privileged to share with many others—artists and scientists, businessmen and bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors, people of every age and from every walk of life—a common delight in the world of 221B Baker Street. After you read these four novels, and then go on to the short stories, you might want to be part of that world too.
In the end, though, it is worth remembering that Holmes’s adventures, while inviting endless annotation and exegesis, chiefly aim to provide, as Conan Doyle once said, “distraction from the worries of life.” So turn to A Study in Scarlet, let the introduction be made—“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes”—and settle back with a contented sigh. The game is afoot!
MICHAEL DIRDA