CAR
May 2009
THE STORIES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, known as “the Canon” in allusion to a term used by Bible scholars, were written by Arthur Conan Doyle over a period of some forty years, from 1887 to 1927. They include four novels and five volumes of short stories, for a total of sixty tales. According to a report by Charles E. Lauterbach in 1960, the Canon contains a total of 660,382 words. Later, in the computer age, researcher Les Moskowitz was able to determine (2005) that they use 20,426 different words.
The sixty stories, and the collections in which they appear, are considered here in “Canonical” order, the order in which they are usually published in collected editions. It corresponds closely, but not exactly, to the order in which they were first published.
Sherlockians sometimes resort to a set of four-letter abbreviations for the story titles that were devised by Jay Finley Christ and first published in connection with his Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes, 1947. They are widely used in footnotes and sometimes even in text about the stories, either in all capitals (ABBE for “The Abbey Grange”) or, less often, in the upper-and-lower-case format which Christ used: Abbe, Blac, Engr, RedC, 3Stu, and so on.
The novel which began Doyle’s writings about Sherlock Holmes was published at the end of 1887 as the principal contents of Beeton’s Christmas Annual for that year, a paperback published by Ward Lock and Co., London. The magazine also included a couple of short plays, as well as advertisements. Few copies remain, and Beeton’s has become the best-known treasure for which Sherlockian collectors long. Prices are high though not stratospheric; a newly discovered copy (without covers) sold for £18,600 at an auction in Oxford, England, in 2008. Three facsimile editions have been produced: one in 1960 jointly by the Baker Street Irregulars and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one in 1987 by British publisher John Michael Gibson, and a 1987 reprint of the BSI facsimile issued by Magico Magazine of New York. Descriptions of the original and the facsimiles, which can be distinguished from the real thing in subtle ways, appear on Randall Stock’s website at www.bestofsherlock.com. A Study in Scarlet was subsequently published in a trade edition by Ward Lock (1888), and it, too, has been reproduced in facsimile (1993). The first American edition came from J.B. Lippincott Co. in 1890. Several magazine appearances are also recorded.
Detective stories not having been fully invented in 1887, it is hardly surprising that this first Sherlock Holmes novel does not follow what have come to be the conventions. Indeed, in an early chapter Holmes must virtually explain to Dr. Watson what it is that he does. Watson, as the narrator, devotes the first two chapters to introducing himself and the hero, whom he meets in a memorable scene in the pathology laboratory at “Bart’s” (St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London). Only in Chapter III (of fourteen chapters, divided between two Parts) does a murder engage their attention.
The murder is virtually solved by Chapter VII of Part I, which is intriguingly subtitled “Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department.” The scene changes in Part II, “The Country of the Saints,” which is narrated in third person rather than first. The action now takes place on the “great alkali plain” of western America, a region unknown to geography, and in the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake City, Utah. A sweet young romance is interrupted by the lecherous demands of the Mormon establishment, leading to events more characteristic of a Western than of a detective tale. There is much about horses, ravines, rifles, and the purity of womanhood. The vicious and colourful behaviour attributed to the Mormons in these chapters is less than historically accurate, as Jack Tracy has concisely shown in Conan Doyle and the Latter-Day Saints (1979), but provides splendid motivation for the murder that is finally explained in the last chapter of the book.
The crude dramatics of both Parts echo Doyle’s other early novels rather than the more sophisticated Holmes stories he would write later. Similarly, the prominence of the love interest and frontier adventure detract, in a modern reader’s mind, from what fails to be a pure detective story, although they will have striking echoes in The Valley of Fear, written almost thirty years later. But the introduction of the principal characters (and their delineation in such passages as the famous “Sherlock Holmes — His Limits”) are entirely convincing. Watson is shown as a respectable doctor; Holmes as a brilliant, unsystematic, easily bored young man; and Lestrade of Scotland Yard as a self-important plodder. And such details as the comic constable John Rance and the moment when Holmes is taken in by an “old woman” show Doyle already in full command of his medium.
J.B. Stoddart of Lippincott’s Magazine, preparing to launch a British edition of his Philadelphia-based publication, took the young Doyle out for dinner August 30, 1889, along with another young author, Oscar Wilde. Both were commissioned to write novels for Lippincott’s. Wilde’s eventual product was The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Doyle’s was The Sign of the Four, which appeared in British and American editions of the magazine in February 1890. Shortly afterwards it was issued in book form (no. 266 in the “Lippincott’s Magazine Series”) and that October in an edition from the firm of Spencer Blackett, classified by at least some bibliographers as the true first edition. There were also several newspaper serializations once the three-month exclusive rights purchased by J.B. Lippincott & Co. in England had expired.
In the United States, where Lippincott had rights in perpetuity, offprints from the magazine were also published, but the first identifiable American book edition was also the first in a long string of piracies (that is, unauthorized publications): a volume issued in March 1891 by P.F. Collier. Copyright protection in the United States did not extend (until July 1, 1891) to the works of foreign authors, and it quickly became open season on The Sign of the Four. Donald Redmond’s 1990 book Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates: Copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930 is largely a study of how this one book was published and republished. He writes: “From 1890 at least until 1924 The Sign of the Four was never out of print. From 1894 until the eve of the First World War five to ten different versions were on sale simultaneously.”
Because the piratical publishers worked fast and cheap, errors and verbal variations crept into their texts, some of which have survived into modern editions. The most famous, a reference to “crows” (rather than “crowds”) at the Lyceum Theatre, inspired Newton Williams, an early student of textual variations, to dub his work “the great crow hunt.” Such variation even extends to the title of this novel, which was The Sign of the Four in Lippincott’s, but lost a definite article to become The Sign of Four in the Spencer Blackett edition and the Collier piracy (apparently typeset from the Spencer Blackett text). The four-word title is more widely used today. Green and Gibson assert in their Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983) that “the author originally used the longer title though preferred the shorter one.”
Under either title it is a splendid novel, vastly more mature than its predecessor. Presenting Sherlock Holmes for a return appearance, though still clearly not foreseeing that he had created an industry, Doyle crafted a tightly knit plot that can be recognized as a detective story in modern terms. But the love interest, linking Dr. Watson with the client in the case,