Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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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