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stress, the ailment was typically associated with the fainthearted and formed a precursor to the similar late 19th-century complaint of “hysteria”—also conventionally associated with women, and considered spurious by some. Victorian readers would have been familiar with the term as part of a whole lexicon devoted to the gray area surrounding our gray matter. Today, “brain fever” is sometimes employed to refer to certain symptoms of meningitis and encephalitis, but it has mostly fallen out of use.

THE NAVAL TREATY 139

The series of events

Almost 10 weeks previously, Percy Phelps’s uncle—the Foreign Minister Lord Holdhurst—entrusted his nephew with hand-copying a secret treaty between Britain and Italy. To contemporary readers this would have been thrillingly up to date: the “Triple Alliance” between Germany, Austria–Hungary, and Italy, in 1882, was a key part of the system of allegiances that would lead to World War I, and there was indeed a secret agreement between Italy and Britain in 1887.

It was clear to Phelps that the French or Russian embassies would pay handsomely for such classified information, so, as instructed by Holdhurst, he waited until his colleagues had all left work before carrying out the task. Feeling sleepy, Phelps rang the bell for some coffee and, to his surprise, it was the commissionaire’s wife, Mrs. Tangey, who took his order. When the coffee failed to arrive, Phelps went to discover the cause of the delay and found Mr. Tangey, the commissionaire, asleep at the front entrance with the kettle boiling over—and no sign of Mrs. Tangey.

Suddenly, the bell rang from the office Phelps had been working in. Panicked at the thought of someone being in the same room as the top-secret document, he dashed upstairs to discover that it had disappeared. Phelps realized the thief must have entered via the side door; he had used the main staircase and so would have seen him or her entering the building.

A policeman on duty outside the Foreign Office saw only one person, whose description fitted that of Mrs. Tangey, leave via the side door. Despite the commissionaire’s claim that his wife’s integrity was beyond reproach, Phelps chased her home. He and a Scotland Yard detective named Forbes questioned her about the document and she was searched, but nothing was found. Unsure what to do, Phelps made his way home, having missed the train he was supposed to have caught earlier with Joseph Harrison.

An impossible situation

Several stories above ground level and with no possible hiding places, Phelps’s office provides no clues. There were no footprints at the scene

The British Foreign Office sat at the heart of the Empire in Victorian Britain. It was a place of complex diplomacy and political maneuvering, and a prize target for international espionage.

of the crime (even though it was a wet night) and no evidence that someone had been smoking there, which disappoints Holmes since stray ash at a crime scene often provides his first clue (in A Study in Scarlet, (pp.36–45) he mentions making “a special study of cigar ashes”). The description of Phelps’s workplace fits the real Foreign Office—a grand classical building completed in the 1860s by the architect George Gilbert Scott. (Scott’s own grandson, Giles, was to design London’s red telephone booth—almost as much as an icon of the city as Holmes himself).

A conspiracy?

To learn more about the case, Holmes and Watson visit detective Forbes, who is distinctly unfriendly. He does reveal that Mrs. Tangey is of bad character, being a drinker with money problems, and that he suspects she knows something about the crime, although he has no proof. Other less likely suspects ❯❯

A cold hand seemed to close round my heart. Someone, then, was in that room where my precious treaty lay upon the table.

Percy Phelps

140 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

Mrs. Tangey

Commissionaire’s wife. Rushed from the scene after the treaty was stolen.

Mr. Tangey Charles Gorot

Commissionaire. Phelps’s colleague, of

At the Foreign Office French origin. Slept at

when the crime was the Foreign Office on the

committed. A surplus of night of the crime.

suspects, all with

opportunity or

motive.

Joseph Harrison Lord Holdhurst

Well-acquainted with Foreign Minister. Has Phelps. Has money worries international connections following losses on the and an intimate knowledge stock market. of the treaty.

are the commissionaire himself and Phelps’s colleague, Charles Gorot, whose French name has aroused suspicion, since it suggests a motive for passing the treaty to the French government. The fact that Gorot is a name “of Huguenot extraction” is relevant here, although unexplained in the story. The Huguenots were persecuted French Protestants who took refuge in England from the late 17th century, so it is unlikely that Gorot would maintain much allegiance to France. In any case, the hapless Forbes has amassed no real evidence against anyone.

On Downing Street, Lord Holdhurst tells Holmes that the treaty could not yet have fallen into Russian or French hands, since there would already have been dire consequences as a result—and as yet nothing has occurred. When Holmes remarks that the document may not have been passed on due to the thief succumbing to a “sudden illness,” Holdhurst seems to suspect his nephew, suggesting that it might be “an attack of brain fever, for example?”

After a nighttime intruder then tries to break into Phelps’s room at Briarbrae, Phelps begins to wonder whether there is some kind of real conspiracy against him. Holmes suggests Phelps come to London with him and Watson for the night, but at the last minute Holmes tells them that he has no intention of catching the train and is instead going to stay in Woking to “clear up” a few points.

At 221B Baker Street the next morning, Holmes returns bedraggled and wounded, but at the breakfast table he takes a theatrical relish in revealing, hidden under a plate cover, the original treaty. He then explains that after leaving Phelps and Watson the night before, he returned covertly to Briarbrae. There he had caught Joseph Harrison making his way into Phelps’s room, lifting a floorboard and trying to leave with the treaty, which he had hidden there during his earlier occupancy of the room.

THE NAVAL TREATY 141

I begin to believe that I am the unconscious centre of some monstrous conspiracy, and that my life is aimed at as well as my honour.

Percy Phelps

Case analysis

The main difficulty in this case lies in a surplus of evidence. As Holmes says, “What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.” Mrs. Tangey’s dubious character is a good example of this, and the treaty’s great importance is also misleading: the reader assumes that the theft of the document was planned with a clear political aim in mind, yet the haste with which Harrison steals the document in fact suggests a purely opportunistic crime. It is only at the end of the story that Harrison’s losses on the stock market, and therefore a motive for the crime, are revealed.

Many Holmesian scholars are dissatisfied with some of the details in this story, such as the extraordinary coincidence that Harrison enters the room precisely while Phelps is checking on the coffee, the fact that he decides to act so suddenly, and that he is not spotted leaving the building by the policeman. Also under scrutiny is the inexplicable fact that the treaty had to be hand-copied, given that mechanical methods of duplication already existed. Critics have even suggested that Harrison and Mrs. Tangey must have been in league with one another, but Conan Doyle offered as little subsequent comment on this theory as Holmes himself does within the narrative.

Enlightenmentman

Of interest in this story are hints about Holmes’s own world view. While discussing the crime with Phelps, Holmes digresses to briefly speculate on the nature of religion, saying, “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.” This comment—which Holmes refers to as a “deduction”—is inspired by his observation of a beautiful moss rose, and perhaps hints at a religious faith of his own. Holmes’s idealistic comments carry through to his and Watson’s train journey back to London. From the elevated section of railroad between Clapham Junction and Waterloo, he points out the “brick islands” of the Board Schools, ecstatically calling them “Beacons of the future! …Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.” Established after the Education Act of 1870, these were the first schools to be funded by taxpayers.

The overtly liberal perspective here—perhaps a reflection of Conan Doyle’s own opinions—tallies with an implicit criticism of a nepotistic Foreign Office. The word “nepotism” is derived from the Latin for nephew, which has particular resonance in this story. After all, Phelps owes his job to his uncle’s prominent position, and the chaos of this case begins after Holdhurst entrusts his nephew with such a valuable document. The criticism also reflects political shifts in Britain: although William Gladstone’s Liberal government was in power when “The Naval Treaty” was published in 1893, the story’s 1889 setting would imply that Conan Doyle was leveling his criticism at the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury’s previous Conservative administration. ■

Holmes frequently makes theatrical gestures, especially when proving his powers of deduction. Here, in Paget’s illustration for The Strand Magazine, he reveals the stolen treaty over breakfast.

DANGER IS

PART OF

MY TRADE

THE FINAL PROBLEM (1893)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: December 1893 US: December 1893

COLLECTION

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894

CHARACTERS

Professor Moriarty

Mathematics professor turned criminal genius; Holmes’s archenemy and nemesis.

Mycroft Holmes Elder brother of Sherlock Holmes.

Peter Steiler Landlord of the Englischer Hof hotel in Meiringen.

O

f all the Holmes tales written by Conan Doyle, none caused as much of a stir as “The Final Problem.” Most significantly, of course, it tells of Holmes’s untimely death, but it also features the infamous villain Professor Moriarty (pp.28–9)— the most brilliant of all criminal masterminds and Holmes’s nemesis.

When the story was published in The Strand Magazine, the reaction was consternation, shock, even outrage. Letter after letter of protest arrived on the desks of the Strand and Conan Doyle, with one woman famously beginning her note to the author with, “You brute!” In London, black armbands were

THE FINAL PROBLEM 143

I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression.

Dr. Watson

worn and the circulation of the Strand dropped so substantially that it almost closed down (see p.324).

Justifiable homicide

Conan Doyle was taken aback by his readers’ extreme reaction. Later he defended himself by saying, “It was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.” He had long felt that Holmes was taking up too much of his life, and churning out story after story to deadline was a demanding task that took precious time away from his serious literary work. Also, by 1893, both Conan Doyle’s father Charles and his wife Louise were seriously ill. Charles died in October, and that same month Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given just a few months to live—although in the end she survived for another 13 years (see pp.14–21).

It was while Conan Doyle and Louise were vacationing in the Alps in August 1893 that the author made the decision to kill off Holmes. “He is becoming such a burden to me,” he told a friend, “that it makes my life unbearable.” It was there, in the Swiss Alps, that he found the perfect location for a fittingly dramatic finale: the spectacular Reichenbach Falls. When he had finished writing the story, Conan Doyle wrote in his notebook simply: “Killed Holmes.”

The hunter hunted

In most of the other stories, Holmes is the hunter, sniffing out clues and finally cornering his quarry. However, in “The Final Problem” it is Holmes himself who is the prey, pursued relentlessly by the evil genius Moriarty. The entire tale is a chase in which Holmes must use his great skill not for his usual deductions, but instead to avoid capture. As Watson says, it is now as if Holmes himself were the criminal.

Watson engages us in the tragedy of Holmes’s death right from the start, opening with, “It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.” He says he has already stopped writing about Holmes and is only telling this story now because Moriarty’s brother, Colonel James Moriarty, is spreading false rumors, and he wants to set the record straight.

The last battle

The ground has already been laid for Holmes’s final disappearance from the world. He is no longer needed by society, or by Watson, in the way that he once was. Watson is not the disoriented young man who first met Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (pp.36–45); he is now married, with an established medical practice. The two no longer have the intimate relationship they once enjoyed, and see each other rarely. As for ❯❯

This lantern slide made in 1895 captures Victoria Station much as it would have looked to Holmes and Watson as they made their escape to mainland Europe, via Canterbury.

144 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

Holmes himself, he has successfully foiled the plans of many dangerous criminals. “I have not lived wholly in vain,” he declares prophetically; “the air of London is the sweeter for my presence.” But before he departs, there is one last villain to defeat— Moriarty, the greatest of them all.

One April evening in 1891, Watson is surprised by a visit from a clearly alarmed Holmes. When Watson asks what he is afraid of, Holmes answers, “Of air-guns.” As we later learn in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (pp.162–67), this is the silent, deadly weapon used by Moriarty’s marksman,

If I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit.

Sherlock Holmes

A criminal mind

In his creation of Moriarty, Conan Doyle was influenced by the theories of 19th-century Italian criminologist Cesar Lombroso (pp.310–15). Lombroso believed that some people inherit an irredeemably criminal nature, and that their nasty tendencies are evident in their appearance. Conan Doyle gave Moriarty all the benefits of nurture so as to emphasize the overwhelming effects of nature: Moriarty was born into privilege and became a mathematics prodigy and