THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLANCHED SOLDIER. Current affairs find their way into the Canon more directly than usual in this tale. It deals with a consequence of the Boer War, specifically a medical matter, having its origin in a field hospital much like the one Doyle himself managed during that conflict twenty-five years earlier. Its strength is as a medical tale rather than an instance of detection, as there is little for Holmes to do save to discern the anti-climactic truth and arrange a happy ending for the family of the ex-soldier who believed him to have a dread disease. “The Blanched Soldier” first appeared in Liberty, a New York magazine, for October 16, 1926, and in the Strand for November 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE. The first words of this story make it distinctive: it is written in the third person, not with Watson as narrator. It is in fact an adaptation of The Crown Diamond, a play by Doyle about Sherlock Holmes that was first produced in May 1921. The story saw print in the Strand that October, and in Hearst’s International Magazine in New York in November 1921. Both because of its awkward style (rigidly observing the dramatic unities, it simply describes what might be seen on a stage set), and because of its lack of originality in plot or circumstantial detail, the story is widely recognized as probably the weakest of all the Holmes tales. Nevertheless, it deserves some acclaim as the first new tale to be published since “His Last Bow” four years previously.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GABLES. Unhealthy sexuality (a young man becomes fascinated by an older woman) and the misuse of wealth make the atmosphere of this story distasteful, and there is little detecting for Holmes to do. The issue in this affair, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is blackmail at the point where relationships and money meet. The unusual character of Isadora Klein is probably the story’s strongest feature, though there is also some interest in the way Holmes examines the attempt to buy Mrs. Maberley’s house, contents and all, eventually realizing that a tell-tale manuscript is what the buyer was after. “The Three Gables” was first published in Liberty, New York, for September 18, 1926, and in the Strand for October 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE. Written during Doyle’s years as an advocate of spiritualism, this tale nevertheless presents a firmly materialist Holmes: “No ghosts need apply.” Among the Case-Book stories it is unusually strong and memorable, reminiscent of Holmes’s early adventures, although the title is deliberately lurid, the story something of a trick, for Holmes finds that the woman who has been sucking blood from her stepson’s neck is no sort of monster. “The Sussex Vampire” was first published in the January 1924 issues of both the Strand and (in New York) Hearst’s International Magazine.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GARRIDEBS. The appeal of this story depends heavily on the novelty of the grotesque surname “Garrideb.” Holmes is called in not to solve a crime but to render advice in the search for men of that name; when three of them stand in a row, a fortune is theirs to divide. Of course he finds the whole business to be a fraud, rather as was the League of the Red-Headed Men in a story written thirty years earlier, a story whose plot is largely borrowed for this one. The dramatic scene in which Watson is wounded is among the high emotional moments of the Canon. This tale was first published in Collier’s for October 25, 1924, and in the Strand for January 1925.
THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE. This story (which departs from the “Adventure of” style of title) presents a classic piece of deduction by Holmes, in which he works out from a chip on a stone bridge the true explanation for the death of Maria Gibson. It has to do with a gritty love triangle, a plot that seems unmistakably of the 1920s. The story also offers the Sherlockian one of the Canon’s finest paragraphs about other cases which Holmes addressed, but for which the world is not yet prepared. “Thor Bridge” was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both in the February and March issues of 1922; the first part ends with “We come at once upon a most fruitful line of inquiry.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN. Holmes makes his nearest approach to science fiction in this story, in which the unusual behaviour of a professor proves to be caused by a “serum” extracted from langur monkeys. Experiments with such injections of testicular extract began in the 1880s and attracted much attention in the 1920s, but they seem somehow too modern for Holmes’s attention, in a case that requires little action from him but does lead him to some philosophizing, and a hint that he might soon retire. The story was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both for March 1923.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE LION’S MANE. Sherlock Holmes himself is the narrator of this tale (his prose style is, however, revealingly similar to Watson’s). Its events take place on the Sussex coastline, after Holmes’s retirement to a “villa,” and involve the strange death of Fitzroy McPherson, which proves to be the result of a natural phenomenon rather than of human violence. The story has novelty (not least, the absence of Watson) to distinguish it, as well as the portrait of that “most complete and remarkable woman,” Maud Bellamy. “The Lion’s Mane” first appeared in Liberty for November 27, 1926, and in the Strand for December 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE VEILED LODGER. Holmes waxes philosophical in this sad tale, as does Doyle, who wrote it near the end of his life (it was published in Liberty for January 22, 1927, and the Strand for February 1927). Readers might reasonably feel a little cheated, for Holmes is called on to do no detecting at all, only a little speculating and a good deal of listening as Eugenia Ronder tells the dramatic story of how her face was ruined, so that she now lives behind a veil.
THE ADVENTURE OF SHOSCOMBE OLD PLACE. Original publication of the Canon came to an end with this story, appearing in Liberty for March 5, 1927, and the Strand for April 1927. It is a story of degeneration, death, and old bones, with the suspected murder proving to be nothing more serious than a fraud born of desperation. Still, its final paragraph tries to offer hope, speaking of “a happier note than Sir Robert’s actions deserved ... an honoured old age.” It harks back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, with the association of mysterious dogs and spooky death, and its highlight is the brief exciting scene in which Holmes lets a spaniel loose to bark at the mysterious occupant of a carriage. (The story was originally announced as “The Adventure of the Black Spaniel,” but never published under that title.) A return to the horse-racing milieu that gave “Silver Blaze” much of its novelty also adds interest to this story.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RETIRED COLOURMAN. Perhaps because of the word “retired” in the title, and because its theme is the hopelessness of old age, this story was put last in The Case-Book, although there were two tales still to come when it was first published in Liberty for December 18, 1926, and the Strand for January 1927. Doyle returns to his frequent theme of a love triangle, includes his only mention of chess (“one mark of a scheming mind”), makes Sherlock Holmes conduct one of his most clever, if inconsiderate, ruses, and offers perhaps the most chilling image in the entire Canon, the incomplete phrase scrawled on the wall of the death chamber by the two murder victims. The seven-word question with which Holmes nails the unsuspecting killer is a splendidly dramatic note for the story which a cover-to-cover reader of the Canon will encounter last.
IN WRITING THE SHERLOCK HOLMES tales, Arthur Conan Doyle invented the valuable literary genre of “linked” short stories: their plots are independent (so that they can be read in any order) but