Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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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