Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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be glad to learn that he is still alive and well....”
Shortly after His Last Bow was published, Doyle wrote an article, “Some Personalia about Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” which appeared in the Strand for December 1917. It was later revised as a chapter in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924). Clearly intended as an epilogue to the entire Canon, the existence of this article makes it clear that His Last Bow was intended to be, indeed, Holmes’s last bow. It leaves open, however, the question of which sort of “bow” the author had in mind: the kind an actor takes at a curtain call, or the kind the dying Robin Hood drew to shoot an arrow to his final resting place.
THE ADVENTURE OF WISTERIA LODGE. Like “The Naval Treaty,” the only Canonical short story that is longer, this one was first published in the Strand in two parts: “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles,” September 1908, and “The Tiger of San Pedro,” October 1908. Collier’s Weekly published the two parts August 15, 1908, under the title “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles.” The titles for the two parts survive in modern editions; the title “Wisteria Lodge” for the full story was first used when His Last Bow was published in book form. This tale was “a difficult story to write,” Gibson and Green say obiter in their book Bibliography, and it shows, being long and confusing. The horrible face at the window and the shocking relics of voodoo that serve as clues along the way are hardly sufficient to redeem the story, nor is the sudden appearance of “Don Murillo,” the deposed Latin American dictator.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE. A background of Italian-American mafia activity makes this story a favourite with many readers, though its early pages, in which Holmes reassures a distressed landlady and puzzles over the identity of her mysterious lodger, is in fact more typical of the Canon. The “cipher” which proves to be Italian has excited much commentary; whichever way Holmes counted the letters, they don’t seem to come out right. The story was first published in the Strand in two parts, in March and April 1911 (a month later in the American edition), and retains a division into Parts I and II.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS. Mycroft Holmes, last seen in “The Greek Interpreter,” returns in this story, bringing his brother a case which, like two or three others, involves espionage and international intrigue rather than domestic crime. Apart from its supposed political importance, the case is of interest chiefly for the ingenious disposal of a body atop an Underground train — and of course for the presence of the dead man’s fiancée, one of the four Canonical Violets. “The Bruce-Partington Plans” (the title referring to the blueprints for the Bruce-Partington submarine, a thoroughly up-to-date invention in 1908) appeared first in the Strand for December 1908 and Collier’s for December 12 of the same year.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE. The title is sensational; the story is a splendid one, drawing on Doyle’s medical background (and drawing on Watson’s medical mediocrity) to present a Holmes who is feigning fatal illness to ensnare a clever adversary. Such detail is given about the ruse that there is hardly room for the mystery itself, and it is not even quite clear who Victor Savage was or why he was killed. “The Dying Detective” was first published in Collier’s for November 22, 1913, and immediately off printed as a Christmas greeting pamphlet from the advertising department of Collier’s. It also appeared in the December 1913 issue of the Strand.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX. Comedy and Gothic melodrama figure more in this story than in most other Canonical tales — the comedy in Watson’s clumsy attempts to play detective, acting on Holmes’s behalf in Montpellier; the melodrama in Holmes’s frantic prying open of the coffin in which the missing lady is about to be buried alive. The story comes nearer than any other in the Canon to being about rape, rather than murder or theft. Its unusual title (without “The Adventure of”) is no excuse for the faux pas that was made when it first appeared in the United States, in the American Magazine for December 1911; there it was headed “The Disappearance of Lady Carfax.” Under its right name it appeared in the Strand, also for December 1911.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEVIL’S FOOT. As in “The Reigate Squires,” Holmes in this case is taking a medically imposed vacation, this time in Cornwall, and conveniently finds himself in proximity to a mystery. Murder is not at first suspected in “the Cornish horror,” a phenomenon that rather reminds one of a spiritualist seance gone wildly wrong (but Doyle in 1910 was not yet active as a spiritualist). The most memorable aspect of the story may be the hideously contorted faces of the victims of radix pedis diaboli, a root hitherto unknown to science, but its most important feature is the scene in which Holmes holds justice higher than law and lets the culprit go. “The Devil’s Foot” was originally published in the Strand — in December 1910 in the British edition, in January and February 1911 in the American edition. (The first of those two episodes ended with “Hurry — hurry, before things get disarranged.”)
HIS LAST BOW. This story, which gives its title to the collection in which it later appeared, represents a departure from the style of all the previous Holmes tales. It is narrated in the third person, rather than by Watson; it introduces Holmes as a surprise, far into the narrative; it presents not the London-based consulting detective but a Holmes come out of retirement in Sussex; it is a story not of crime but of international espionage, with Holmes acting as a double agent on the eve of World War I. It takes place August 2, 1914, during the hours when the war was actually beginning, and it takes a jingoistic tone, having undeniably been written as war propaganda. One can hear Doyle’s voice from the beginning (“the most terrible August in the history of the world”) through the slurs on Germany, Irish separatists, and suffragist “Furies,” to the peroration about a cleansing “east wind.” Holmes as spy, under the pseudonym of Altamont, is little more convincing than Holmes as goateed American, but readers in 1917 may have been grateful for whatever they might get. The tale was subtitled “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes” when it appeared in the Strand for September 1917 and Collier’s for September 22, 1917, but became “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes” when His Last Bow appeared in book form. Doyle was indicating once again that he had had enough of him.
THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title is admirable, and Doyle may be given the credit for introducing the term case book in the context of a detective (it had previously been used chiefly for medical cases). Two or three of the stories are also first-rate, but in general this final collection is acknowledged to be weaker than the books that preceded it. Gibson and Green in their Bibliography say that Doyle was encouraged to write more about Holmes when he saw the early films that starred Eille Norwood as the detective, released beginning in 1921. “Norwood’s disguises were remarkable,” they say, “and his sphinx-like countenance suggested the idea for The Crown Diamond,” which was first a play and then the first of this final dozen stories to see print.
The tales — written, or at least published, over a much briefer period than those in The Return and His Last Bow — were completely rearranged for book publication. They were introduced with a preface, this time in Doyle’s voice rather than Watson’s, which first appeared in the Strand for March 1927, announcing a contest that invited readers to rank the stories and match Doyle’s own assessment. It survives as the lovely brief essay that assigns Holmes to “some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place” and yet fixes him firmly in history:
He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian Era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days.
The first edition of The Case-Book was published in Britain by John Murray, and in America by George H. Doran Co., in the middle of 1927.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS CLIENT. Sex (indeed, probably, prostitution) is the atmosphere and motivation in this tale, which takes its name not from any element of the