The action again takes place in London, with rich scenes set in its foggy streets and in a huge, mysterious suburban house, Pondicherry Lodge. The case begins not with a murder but with a puzzle brought to Holmes by Miss Morstan: she has been receiving valuable pearls from an anonymous source, and now a mysterious message has arrived. Holmes finds the explanation only after a murder does occur and requires solution, to say nothing of a fine scene in which he and a borrowed dog, Toby, follow a literal scent through London. An even finer chase scene takes place along the Thames, through glinting sunlight and evening fog. Explanations follow, but the inevitable flashback (to India in the time of the 1857 Mutiny, an era that would appear again in “The Crooked Man”) is confined to a single chapter. Characters are excitingly drawn (Bartholomew Sholto is usually acknowledged to be a portrait of Wilde), and despite many improbabilities and fumbled details — the action shifts inexplicably from June to September within hours — the book can be said to deserve its immediate success and its continuing popularity.
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is popularly and loosely used for any part of the Holmes saga; it was the title of the second film starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and it has provided such distortions as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (an early collection of parodies), The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (a society of female enthusiasts), and The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But strictly it is the title only of one book, the first of five cumulations of the original short stories.
These twelve stories appeared in twelve consecutive issues of the Strand magazine, July 1891 through June 1892, helping to establish the new magazine’s reputation for first-class fiction. (They were also published in the American edition of the Strand, a month later in each case, and syndicated in American and British newspapers.) They also created a new genre: a series of stories involving the same character, each of which could, unlike the episodes of a serial, stand alone. When the sequence began, Sherlock Holmes was almost unknown; a year later he was the popular rage, and his creator was recognized as a successful author.
In October 1892, a collected volume of the Adventures was published by George Newnes, Ltd., the proprietors of the Strand, priced at six shillings (about $24 in today’s money). The first edition, ten thousand copies, was sold out by early in 1893, and succeeding editions have been in print ever since in both Britain and the United States (where the first edition is that of Harper & Brothers, 1892).
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes includes some of the best-known and, by general acclaim, the best of the Holmes tales, in particular “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League.” By the time of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” which is the fourth in the series, Doyle had established most of his bag of conventional tricks. That tale offers everything from the police baiting (in which Holmes mocks professional incompetence) to the obligatory moment at which the sleuth crawls about the scene of the crime with his magnifying glass. The formula “The Adventure of,” which begins the titles of more than half the stories, was used for the first time in the seventh of the series, “The Blue Carbuncle” — it had taken Doyle that long to recognize that he was writing to a genre. (“The Adventure of” is often omitted by commentators.) The slowness of that recognition explains both the frequent cross-references among these early stories (each one mentions some that had gone before, as the author reinforced the connections in the readers’ minds) and the peculiarities of the first story of all, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which is so little like a “typical” Holmes adventure.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA. First published in the Strand in July 1891, this tale involves romance as much as detection. Its structure indeed suggests opera, and appropriately so, as the heroine, Irene Adler, is an operatic contralto, entangled with a flamboyantly improbable king. Scholarship about the story has concentrated on determining the intended identity of “the king of Bohemia,” and on the logistics of Ms. Adler’s blackmail attempt. The chief influence of the story, however, has been the fancy that Holmes meant something erotic or even spiritual by the label “The Woman” he applied to her.
THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE. This tale, first published in the Strand for August 1891, is a classic of detection (in it Holmes makes his celebrated remark about the importance of trouser-knees) and bank robbery. For grotesquerie, on which Holmes prides himself and on which Doyle so often relied for his literary effects, it would be difficult to beat the story’s picture of Fleet Street choked with red-headed men of all tinctures. A striking reinterpretation of the tale is that of Samuel Rosenberg in Naked is the Best Disguise (1974), who identifies its motif of tunnelling, and its effeminate hero, as signs of a homosexual subtext.
A CASE OF IDENTITY. First published in the Strand for September 1891, this tale, with its curiously old-fashioned title, is nearly as insipid as its near-sighted heroine, Mary Sutherland — who, however, becomes the first of the “damsels in distress” whom Holmes rescues in so many of his cases. One might describe “A Case of Identity” as being Poe’s deceptively simple “Purloined Letter” in a setting of middle-class tedium, in which, as some punster has observed, the Angel is a devil.
THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY. The fourth of the original tales, first published in the Strand for October 1891, may plausibly claim to be the perfect Sherlock Holmes story, offering everything readers have come to love, from a railway journey to a scene in which Holmes throws himself into the mud to look at clues through his lens. Once the mystery is solved and the innocent man cleared, to the discomfiture of Lestrade, Holmes arranges for the guilty man to go free, in view of extenuating circumstances. This tale is one of several in which an Australian background plays a part.
THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS. They are the sign of the Ku Klux Klan, whose American villainies (a favourite theme throughout the Canon) lie behind the violence in this tale, first published in the Strand for November 1891. The story also offers a particularly rich list of unpublished cases, and a revealing scene in which Holmes berates himself for failing to save a threatened client’s life. Finally, it includes that splendid atmospheric line, “The wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney.”
THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP. Given to the world in the Strand for December 1891, this tale begins with a Watsonian domestic scene (the famous passage in which the doctor’s wife calls him James rather than John) and moves on to an opium den before its main plot begins to appear. The story, one of double life and deception (and one in which Doyle gives full play to his fascination with deformed faces), is about a middle-class journalist who enters the dirty and unrespectable world of begging. Ugly economic truths come unusually clear to the reader as Holmes works out what is going on. Also featured in this tale are feminine beauty, in the form of Mrs. Neville St. Clair, and couture.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE. Christopher Morley called this tale “a Christmas story without slush”; it was first published, presumably just before Christmas, in the Strand for January 1892. The tale has to do with a holiday goose, which in pre-refrigeration days must be eaten promptly and which proves to contain a stolen jewel. The comic Henry Baker is only an incident, and the actual thief is of no account. What matters in the story is its seasonal framework, from the “compliments” brought by Watson to Holmes on “the second morning after Christmas” to Holmes’s pardoning of the thief at the end because it is “the season of forgiveness.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND. Best known and probably most often dramatized of the short stories, this tale brings Holmes to the assistance of another damsel in distress. Her sister has already