THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS. The British fear of Napoleon, emperor of France, even eight decades after his death, figures large in this story, though ultimately only as a red herring: the gem might have been hidden in busts of anyone, but Napoleon is a plausible subject for monomania, on which everyone except Holmes blames the curious incidents of vandalism. The tale gives an opportunity for Holmes to display his clear reasoning and, in the scene at the end where he triumphantly produces the pearl, his flair for drama as well. “The Six Napoleons” was first published in Collier’s Weekly for April 30, 1904, and the Strand for May 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTS. Improbable details abound in this story of a student who cheats on a university exam; the very procedure used to unmask the cheater, in which the don responsible calls in Holmes privately, is alien from the way a university would deal with such an incident. But as a logic puzzle the tale is splendid, giving Holmes the opportunity to choose from among three young men, the only possible suspects. At last he confronts the culprit, who confesses in a burst of emotion. The story first appeared in the Strand for June 1904 and Collier’s for September 24, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ. Holmes is made to appear politically somewhat retrograde in this tale of Russian nihilists, exiled revolutionaries of the kind much feared in the England of that generation. The story is not of the first rank, despite Holmes’s perception in understanding the dying words of the murdered secretary — “The professor, it was she” — and his ingenuity in scattering cigarette ashes so that the concealed murderess would leave footprints when she emerged. It was first published in the Strand for July 1904 and Collier’s Weekly for October 29, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE-QUARTER. Doyle’s beloved world of amateur sport (with which Holmes ostentatiously denies any familiarity) provides the background for this pathetic tale, in which mystery proves to be domestic tragedy. The comic portrait of the miser, Lord Mount-James, is hardly enough to make the tale a success. It appeared first in the Strand for August 1904 and Collier’s for November 26, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE. By 1904, Doyle had spent almost a decade tending to a dying wife, while he was in love with another woman. Two years later he would become president of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Thoughts on such matters clearly lay behind the writing of this story, about a brave woman who helps her lover kill her aristocratic but drunken husband. The story is also notable for its picture of Holmes seeing more than the official police can see as he inspects the bloody room at the Abbey Grange, and for its juxtaposition of free-minded Australians with decadent English. “The Abbey Grange” was first published in the Strand for September 1904 and Collier’s for December 31, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN. The title of this story is as intriguing as the story itself; its resonance can be seen in its mention in “The Naval Treaty,” along with the untold “Adventure of the Tired Captain.” The second stain is a clue that helps Holmes solve his case, which involves not the usual murder but a matter of espionage and statecraft, again recalling “The Naval Treaty.” By far the most interesting feature of the case is the beautiful Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope, who is faithful to her high-placed husband after her fashion. The story was first published in the Strand for December 1904 and Collier’s for January 28, 1905.
This novel may just be Doyle’s masterpiece; it may even be two masterpieces, for it consists of two almost entirely separate mystery novels, and the second of them, “The Scowrers,” is if anything more successful than the first, “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” which involves Sherlock Holmes in a way the second does not. J. Bliss Austin, prominent collector and scholar in Pittsburgh, felt such an affinity for the second book that he managed to become owner of the entire manuscript of The Valley of Fear — but then he was a vice-president of United States Steel, a company whose shadow can easily be felt in “The Scowrers,” a tale of the Pennsylvania coal and iron fields.
“The Scowrers” is set in the 1870s, in a time of technological and social change, and hence of conflict between the mostly Irish miners and labourers and their American-English bosses. One flower in the carbonized soil of the Shenandoah Valley (a metaphor repeatedly used in The Valley of Fear) was a fraternal and, eventually, terrorist group called the Mollie Maguires, largely a perversion of the otherwise legitimate Ancient Order of Hibernians. It has been the subject of several books, variously historical and fanciful, and of a 1969 film (The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery). The Mollies were eventually infiltrated by the new Pinkerton detective agency, in the person of agent James McParlan, and a number of them hanged for murder, including Jack Kehoe, the most prominent leader or “bodymaster.” Doyle learned the story of the Mollies from a somewhat partial source, Allan Pinkerton’s book The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), and while The Valley of Fear is not precisely a roman à clef, it follows the Pinkerton version of the story closely. Sherlockians have enjoyed speculating about which of the coalfield towns — Tamaqua, Pottsville, Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) or Mahanoy City — is the original of “Vermissa.” Bruce Kennedy and Robert Watson Douty explore such questions, and recreate the grim atmosphere of the Valley in those days, in their chapbook In the Footsteps of Birdy Edwards (1980). The Baker Street Irregulars carried out further inquiries during a weekend excursion to the area in 2004, resulting in the publication of an anthology, Murderland, the following year.
But none of this background is apparent in the first half of The Valley of Fear, which begins as a country-house murder mystery with Professor Moriarty lurking in the background. The seven chapters of “The Tragedy of Birlstone” give some scope for a mystery and its solution to develop, and for personal touches of a kind impossible in a short story, such as the curious behaviour of the late John Douglas’s devoted wife. The clue of the missing dumb bell is one of the most amusing, and hence unforgettable, in the whole Canon. Eventually, after the seven “Scowrer” chapters, an “Epilogue” returns the scene to England, and Holmes is seen brooding when — astonishingly — Moriarty is victorious after all.
The Valley of Fear was serialized in the Strand magazine from September 1914 through May 1915, after most of the tales that would later appear in His Last Bow. In the United States it was not carried by Collier’s, but instead appeared in the “Associated Sunday Magazines,” a group of newspaper supplements, beginning on September 20, 1914, and concluding on November 22. In book form it appeared in February in the United States (from George H. Doran Co.), and in June in England (from Smith, Elder & Co.). As Gibson and Green note in their Bibliography, there are a number of deliberate textual variations, some caused by the war with Germany, in which Britain (but not America) was engaged beginning late in 1914, some “for greater accuracy” in the American details.
This fourth collection of Canonical short stories is the smallest of all, containing but eight tales — and that figure includes “The Cardboard Box,” originally published as one of The Memoirs but suppressed from 1894 until this volume appeared in 1917. The stories were somewhat rearranged from the order in which they had been originally published. The British edition was published by John Murray, apparently because Smith, Elder & Co. thought seven or eight stories too few to make a worthwhile book. The American edition appeared simultaneously, from George H. Doran Co. The subtitles of the two editions differ slightly: in Britain it was Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, and in the United States A Reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes. Many