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

by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  Then there is the question of Moriarty. Right away we hear of the archvillain whom readers of the series would instantly remember as the man they thought had plunged their detective hero to his watery death twenty years before. But in that story, “The Final Problem,” Watson responds to Holmes’s question about the Professor by saying he had never heard of him. Here, in “the early days at the end of the ‘eighties,”’ well before the unpleasant incident at Reichenbach Falls, Watson knows all about him. This contradiction could be the result of negligence, but that seems unlikely. If we assume that Conan Doyle hadn’t forgotten what he had written earlier, he must have thought he had more to gain from the inclusion of Moriarty’s name than he would lose by the glaring inconsistency of Watson’s knowledge of him. What The Valley of Fear gained was a sense of menace supplied by the mere mention of the Napoleon of crime. If Holmes had never managed to connect Moriarty with a crime several years after the date of this story, the implication that Holmes won’t connect him this time must hang over this scene like a dark cloud. If Moriarty is out to get Douglas, we must fear that he will succeed, as in fact he does. Moriarty’s name is a guarantee of ultimate doom. It’s the beginning of fear, and a guarantee that its span stretches far past the valley in Pennsylvania.

  After The Valley of Fear was published, Conan Doyle contributed one more story, “His Last Bow,” in ,1917 before collecting the series of tales written since The Return into a new volume entitled His Last Bow. When it was published in late 1917, its title implied once again that readers had seen the last of the remarkable consulting detective. But again, Conan Doyle, for whatever reason, had a change of heart. Over the next ten years he wrote a series of stories at odd intervals that was published in 1927 as The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. This group presents a unique problem in Conan Doyle scholarship: The poor quality of many of them, the details that differ significantly from the earlier stories, and the erratic characterization of Holmes himself, all lead us to ask if all of these stories were actually written by Conan Doyle himself? A number of devoted Holmes critics have concluded that several stories are spurious. The evidence for such conclusions rests primarily on an examination of the texts themselves. What biographical support there is for this contention is very slender. What we know is that Conan Doyle was so hard up for plots for his detective stories that he suggested a public contest for ideas to turn into Holmes adventures. He wrote in his autobiography that “the difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story really needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do. One cannot without effort spin plots at such a rate. They are apt to become thin and break” (Memories and Adventures, pp. 91-92). The editor of the Oxford editions of all the stories, Owen Dudley Edwards, states that he hardly ever questioned changes editors suggested to him (A Study in Scarlet, p. viii), but that is disputed by Cameron Hollyer’s study of the letters between Conan Doyle and his publisher in “Author to Editor: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Correspondence with H. Greenhough Smith.” But on the other hand, when William Gillette, an American actor, first went on stage in New York with a play titled Sherlock Holmes, he asked Conan Doyle’s permission to allow Holmes to be married. Conan Doyle replied, “You may marry or murder or do what you like with him” (Howlett, “The Impersonators: Sherlock Holmes on Stage and Screen,” Beyond Baker Street, p. 188). Also he was careful in crafting the details of all his writing. The slapdash skid marks all over some of these stories are at great variance with the rest of his writing. All of these facts warrant at least the strong suspicion that many of these last stories were written by Conan Doyle but then changed, perhaps by someone much younger who may have thought the old-style Holmes stories weren’t sophisticated enough.

  This supposition, however, is complicated by a couple of things we know about Conan Doyle. First, despite his reputation for hating Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle knew he would be best remembered for his remarkable sleuth; we can’t doubt that he was quietly proud of his creation. We wouldn’t think, therefore, that he would consent to letting a patently inferior work bear his name unless he produced it himself. And some very inferior stories have been in the canon now for nearly seventy-five years. Second, Conan Doyle has claimed he wrote the stories; he was an honorable man when honor meant something. We have the stories in his handwriting. For someone else to have written them, or even materially changed them, would mean that Conan Doyle conspired with someone whose identity has yet to be discovered to defraud the world about his involvement in what, for better or for worse, would be his chief legacy. In the absence of any hard facts to the contrary, it’s hard to believe that such a man would do this.

  But it’s also hard to believe that such a conscientious writer produced the stylistic turn-around some of these stories represent. Take, for example, the story most at odds with all the facts about Holmes and Watson that Conan Doyle had established over nearly forty years, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” It was an adaptation of his earlier unpro duced play about Holmes, The Crown Diamond. When polls of various Holmes Societies are taken about the relative merit of the stories, it regularly places last. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. First, it’s one of only three stories in which neither Holmes nor Watson is the narrator. A third-person narrator works for many kinds of fiction, but not for these stories, which depend so much on their realism that many people thought Sherlock Holmes was alive, and societies now devoted to him self-consciously maintain that whimsical illusion. A narrator like the one in “The Mazarin Stone” accentuates the fictional quality of the story, most unwelcome to many Holmes admirers.

  In addition, the story is a rehash of several plot elements that had previously appeared in the Saga. Watson reminds us that the decoy bust of Holmes, in case we’ve forgotten, appeared earlier in “The Empty House”: “We used something of the sort once before,” he says. There, it was used to fool Colonel Sebastian Moran, “the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced,” who carried a new weapon, the air-gun. In “The Mazarin Stone” the bust fools Sam Merton, about whom Holmes says, “Possibly you have heard of his reputation as a shooter of big game.” Sam, as Holmes refers to him several times (another un-Holmesian trait), has just bought an air-gun. Then at the story’s conclusion, Holmes slips the jewel into the pocket of Lord Cantlemere. This plot element of putting a stolen item under a client’s very nose for him to find was used in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” and again in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

  This repetition of plot elements wouldn’t be so suspicious in itself. After all, in many of the stories since The Return, Conan Doyle had recycled plots. “The Mazarin Stone,” however, is also full of details inconsistent with all the other tales. Early in the story we hear of a waiting room and a second exit in the apartment at 221B Baker Street, things Conan Doyle had neglected to mention before. The choice of the name “Negretto Sylvius”—the Italian word for “black” and Latin for “woods”—happens to be the name of a rival magazine (Blackwood’s) that once accepted a submission by Conan Doyle but then never published it. This was not the sort of witty wordplay that Conan Doyle engaged in. The way Holmes talks in this story doesn’t sound at all like the dignified figure we’ve come to know over the previous fifty stories. He’s become a kind of jokester right out of the music halls. And when Holmes sends Watson to contact someone at Scotland Yard, he tells him to see Youghal, as if we’re supposed to know who he is, yet it’s a name we’ve never heard before.

  In addition to all this, the plot is perhaps the weakest of all the Holmes stories. It depends on a number of accidents, rather than ingenious deductions or a carefully laid trap into which the criminal inevitably falls. Why, for instance, would any crooks who had stolen a world-famous gem worth a hundred thousand pounds bring it with them to the apartment of Sherlock Holmes, whose address was surely well known among members of the underworld? How could any but the dimmest of bulbs have mistaken one of those early gramophones for a real violin in the next room? Or
have failed to notice Holmes exchanging places with the wax bust of himself in the same room? Or attempt to exchange the jewel in Holmes’s apartment, even if he were playing the violin in the next room? The whole thing is preposterous. We might say about this story what Samuel Johnson once said to a man who asked his opinion about a book the man had written: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

  To give one more example, consider “The Adventure of the Three Gables.” There Holmes taunts a servant, whom he calls by her first name (“Oh, Susan! Language!” and “Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff”), two things a gentleman never does, and Holmes is every inch a gentleman. To make matters worse, he sarcastically refers to her as “the fair Susan.” He also twice insults a black man, whom he also calls by his first name, by claiming he has a peculiar smell. Most repugnant of all, a character in this story refers to the black man as “the big nigger”; it’s true that the term is spoken by a pompous and dim-witted policeman, but it seems inconceivable for the man who wrote the appeal for racial harmony in “The Yellow Face” and the indictment of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Five Orange Pips” to have penned this. In addition to obvious affronts like these, the prose style itself furnishes more subtle clues that an unseen hand may have been at work. After you’ve read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Conan Doyle’s prose, you become so accustomed to its rhythms, its diction, its tone, that sudden departures from his style jump out at you. Almost nothing about either of “The Mazarin Stone” or “The Three Gables” has the true ring of Conan Doyle’s style about them.

  One could suggest that, after all, these stories were written at the end of Conan Doyle’s life, by which time his creative powers had begun to flag. He was also in ill health during these years. This might be a reasonable explanation, were it not that some of these last stories still show remarkable power. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” for example, are superior to some of the stories in the first two volumes of Holmes’s exploits. Some of the other less successful stories also have passages of considerable power, making a judgment that parts were written by someone other than Conan Doyle extremely difficult to sustain.

  Not everything in The Case Book is cartoon fiction, however. In “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” Holmes solves no crime, nor does he even clear up any sort of mystery. The lodger, a woman who had been horribly disfigured by a lion while trying to kill her husband, simply wants to confess her crime of years ago before taking her own life. Holmes, after listening to the confession, dissuades the lady from ending it all by telling her “your life is not your own.” Days later she sends him the bottle of poison she was planning to swallow to show him he has saved her from despair. We see in this story that Conan Doyle chose to make Holmes fulfill functions other than just avenging crimes. Here he takes on the role of priest, hearing a last confession before giving a secular absolution. By the time of this story, Conan Doyle was nearly seventy. Like most people, he grew sadder as he grew older. In addition to the usual woes that afflict us all, he suffered a few not everyone experiences. He lost his first wife in 1906 after a long illness, his son and his brother to World War I, and he saw the devastation that war wrought on a whole generation of young English men. He may well have come to think that gallivanting around the countryside peering at footprints and carriage tracks was ultimately a trivial pursuit for his fictional creature. If he were to continue to write stories about Holmes, Conan Doyle wanted him to serve some higher purpose than just putting away the odd criminal or two. Unfortunately, paragons of virtue rarely make good reading. While Holmes is out saving souls, he is not performing the feats most readers have come to expect of him, and many are left cold by this change of mission.

  The Case Book brings to an end the development of a forty-year relationship between two of the most oddly paired characters in fiction. Most of that time the personal relationship between Holmes and Watson was unstated. Victorian men weren’t accustomed to express emotion, especially about their male friends. Before his resurrection, Holmes scarcely noticed Watson, save to chide him for placing the wrong emphasis on his accounts, or for bungling a reconnaissance on which Holmes has sent him, or for completely misdeducing some obvious string of inferences. We’ve seen a couple of scenes where that pattern was broken by a show of feeling by Holmes, but the ultimate epiphany of Holmes’s emotion for Watson occurs in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after Watson has been shot by Killer Evans. The passage bears repeating in full.

  Then my friend’s wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.

  “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!”

  It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation (p. 580).

  This is the closest Holmes ever comes to expressing love for another human being. It’s all the more touching because he has been so aloof from ordinary human passions for most of his life. When we imagine him in his retirement, in proud isolation on Sussex Downs, tending his bees, creatures who are the very emblem of passionless, mechanical activity, do we not feel, mixed with our admiration, a hint of sorrow that his life has been largely untouched by love, that his remarkable personality never found its soul mate? Of course looking at the imagined life of a fictional character this way is clearly out of bounds for ordinary literary criticism. There’s always been something special about Sherlock Holmes, however, that has inspired this sort of speculation into his unwritten life. Early on, admiring readers and critics adopted the convention that Holmes was a real person, who never died. Naturally this is tongue in cheek, as we know that Holmes never really lived, and if he had, he’d be 150 years old now, a bit long for even his iron constitution to hold out. But in another sense, those admirers are right: Sherlock Holmes is still alive, and always will be as long as human affairs have mysteries at their center, and readers feel the impulse to identify with heroes who are braver, bolder, and more clever than they are.

  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 almost 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.”

  A NOTE ON CONVEYANCES

  During the course of their adventures, Holmes and Watson travel in a number of different vehicles. During the period of the stories, London had more than 8,000 horse-drawn carriages of many types. These are the ones that appear most often:

  Landau: This heavy, four-wheeled carriage accommodated four people, who sat on facing seats; the coachman drove four horses from a raised front seat. The top of the carriage was in two sections that could be folded down or removed, and the bottom was cut away at the ends so that the door was the lowest point on the body. The landau was popular in England starting in the eighteenth century.

  Hansom: The driver sat above and behind the closed carriage of this light, two-wheeled vehicle and spoke through a trapdoor to passengers, who entered from the front through a folding door and perched on a seat for two positioned above the axle. The hansom was in wide use as a public cab.

  Brougham: This light four-wheeled carriage was usually drawn by one horse. The low, closed body appeared cut away in front, though there were many variations in the basic design. Inside was a two-passenger seat; a third passenger could ride up front with the driver.

  Trap:
This two-wheeled carriage on springs was drawn by one horse.

  Dog-cart: Called a dog-cart because its back seat could be converted into a compartment for carrying a dog, this two-wheeled horse cart had two seats placed back to back.

  The generic term cab can refer to any of the above, but it mainly describes two-wheelers. A four-wheeled, two-horse vehicle is more likely to be called a coach. Generally, four-wheeled carriages offered a smoother ride, with more privacy, while a dog-cart or trap offered the greatest speed. When the game was afoot, though, the first vehicle that presented itself often had to do.

  To travel to places outside London, Holmes and Watson take the train. Waterloo, Charing Cross, Paddington, Victoria, London Bridge, Woolwich, Aldersgate, Gloucester Road, Blackheath, High Street, King’s Cross, Euston, and Metropolitan are all railway stations in London. Sometimes speakers drop the word “station”; when a character says she arrived at Waterloo or Victoria, she means the railway station. The names of railway stations outside London are generally the name of the town where the train stops.

  THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES