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Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened.

Sherlock Holmes

206 A LEGEND RETURNS

Holmes (Jeremy Brett), Watson (Edward Hardwicke) and Lestrade (Colin Jeavons) examine the rug in the 1986 ITV episode of “The Second Stain.”

Holmes back to the crime scene. As it turns out, the police, convinced that their investigation is as good as over, had started clearing up the crime scene that morning, only to find something mysterious. The carpet, which had been stained with Lucas’s blood at one corner, must have been moved shortly after he was murdered, as the location of the stain on the wooden floor does not correspond with the one on the carpet. When Holmes says it is clear that the carpet has been turned around, there is an opportunity for some dry wit from the Scotland Yard inspector, who remarks, “The official police don’t need you, Mr. Holmes, to tell them that the carpet must have been turned round.” Still, he does want Holmes to explain who did it and why. Holmes suggests that Lestrade interrogates the officer who has been guarding the house, but while the inspector is busy in the other room, Holmes and Watson quickly search under the carpet for possible secret floor cavities, and discover a hinged compartment— which, disappointingly, is empty. Just as Lestrade returns, Holmes faultlessly resumes his former “languid,” bored posture. It turns out that Lestrade’s guarding officer, Constable MacPherson, had indeed let in a visitor—a “very respectable, well-spoken young woman”—on the previous evening.

The penultimate act

When Lestrade announces to the shamed constable, “It’s lucky for you, my man, that nothing is missing, or you would find yourself in Queer Street,” there is a deep dramatic irony, since the reader, together with Holmes and Watson, knows with great certainty that something is indeed “missing” from the room, and that this disappearance is crucial to the case. It is also worth noting Conan Doyle’s reference to “Queer Street” here—a colloquial expression that refers to Carey Street, where the bankruptcy courts were once located. Charles Dickens had used the expression to refer specifically to bankruptcy in Our Mutual Friend (1864), but its wider meaning of being in financial difficulty had already been employed in literature by Conan Doyle’s friend Robert Louis Stevenson, in his novel

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), when the upright Mr. Enfield remarks, “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

The reader soon realizes that the “handsome” visiting woman was unquestionably Lady Hilda. And when Holmes holds up something to the stunned constable—which turns out to be Lady Hilda’s face cut out of a portrait—Holmes declares, “Come, friend Watson, the curtain rings up for the last act.”

Dramatic timing

Holmes and Watson head straight to Trelawney Hope’s residence, where Holmes asks Lady Hilda to hand over the letter, reassuring her that her husband need not know of

THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN 207

her involvement in the affair. After listening to Lady Hilda’s various denials, Holmes threatens to inform her husband, who will be home in 15 minutes. Holmes plays a waiting game before Lady Hilda ultimately relents; she produces “a long, blue envelope” that contains the letter, then proceeds to tell her story.

Lucas had somehow come into the possession of a compromising letter that Lady Hilda had written before her marriage to Trelawney Hope. He was using it to blackmail her, saying he would show it to her husband unless she was prepared to exchange it for the document that was hidden in the dispatch-box. Lucas had heard about the letter through a spy in the Cabinet, and Lady Hilda had agreed to the deal in order to protect her dignity.

That fateful Monday night, while Lucas and Lady Hilda were exchanging letters, they had been surprised by the sudden arrival of Madame Fournaye, and Lucas had quickly thrust the political letter into a hiding place beneath the carpet. A violent scuffle broke out between the jealous, knife-wielding Madame Fournaye and Lucas. Lady Hilda fled the scene. It was not until the next morning that Lady Hilda learned of Lucas’s murder, and having learned from Holmes the serious implications of the document’s falling into the wrong hands, she then returned in secret to Lucas’s house to retrieve the letter from its hiding place.

When Trelawney Hope and Lord Bellinger burst in, Holmes announces that he is convinced that the letter was not taken at all but surreptitiously returned to the dispatch-box. Bellinger is stunned to find it where Holmes suggests, and asks how the letter managed to be returned. To this Holmes roguishly remarks, “We also have our diplomatic secrets.”

A nod to Dupin

Despite Holmes having solved the crime while preserving the dignity and reputation of Lady Hilda, there is a pronounced loose end here: although Holmes’s own reputation for demonstrations of unorthodox

Social scandal

Lady Hilda’s secret and compromising letter threatens her reputation as well as her marriage, if it were made public.

Lucas acquired the

letter and used it to

blackmail Lady Hilda by threatening to make it public knowledge.

Lady Hilda was forced to exchange her letter for the highly sensitive

political document in her husband’s dispatch-box.

International scandal

A letter of highest political importance has disappeared, and risks international scandal, political ruin, and even war.

I would not bring one shadow on his life, and this I know would break his noble heart.

Lady Hilda

brilliance allows him to get away with the dramatic “re-appearing act” of the letter, his silence also means that the reader never finds out the identity of Lucas’s Cabinet informant. More importantly, Lord Bellinger is left without so much as an inkling that such a spy exists.

Holmes’s final moves in this case are, most likely, a play on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 tale “The Purloined Letter,” in which the loss of a vitally important note leaves the Paris police utterly flummoxed, before Poe’s famous detective (the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin) reveals that it had been in the thief’s letter-rack the whole time. It is fitting that here, in a case purporting to be the last ever— and which concludes The Return of Sherlock Holmes—Conan Doyle should allude not only to one of Holmes’s key sources, Dupin, but specifically to the last of the three tales in which Dupin appears. And the fact that this intricate story should turn so neatly on suggestion as well as deception—the letter’s importance misleading both the ministers and the reader into believing that it must have traveled much farther afield than it really did—gives good justification for why Conan Doyle named it as one of his favorite cases. ■

HOLMES

A BOW

TAKES

210 HOLMES TAKES A BOW

Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel stories are serialized in The Strand Magazine.

DEC 1905

JUL 1906

Conan Doyle’s first wife, Louise (“Touie”), dies from Event in

tuberculosis.

the lives of Holmes and Watson

Conan Doyle publishes “The Case of Mr. George Edalji”—which leads to the real-life subject’s exoneration from the charge of cattle-maiming.

1907

Sidney Paget,

The Strand Magazine

illustrator of Sherlock Holmes, dies at age 47.

JAN 1908

SEP 1907

Conan Doyle marries his “close friend,” Jean Leckie.

SEP 1908

The stories later collected in His Last Bow start to appear in The Strand Magazine.

Edward VII

dies at age 68, and George V becomes king.

MAY 1910

1912

Conan Doyle publishes his science fiction novel The Lost World (p.345).

IN THIS CHAPTER

NOVEL

The Valley of Fear, 1915

COLLECTION

His Last Bow, 1917

Wisteria Lodge The Red Circle The Bruce-Partington Plans The Dying Detective The Disappearance of Lady

Frances Carfax The Devil’s Foot His Last Bow

I

n the preface to the 1917 collection His Last Bow, Watson describes Holmes’s retirement in England’s South Downs, and yet the collection’s final, eponymous tale has him returning to action as a secret agent on the eve of World War I. Chronologically, that story is also Holmes’s final outing anywhere in the canon—the other stories in His Last Bow are set much earlier, while the action in The Valley of Fear, the final novel, occurs in 1888.

In the national interest

The tension in the tales of His Last Bow bears the imprint of the impending trauma of World War I. “The Bruce-Partington Plans”—a gripping tale of espionage set in 1895, featuring Holmes’s brother Mycroft—is an early example of the “spy thriller” genre. Submarines, which are key to this story, would not play a serious part in warfare until the start of World War II, in 1939. The story “His Last Bow” in which Holmes outsmarts the German spy Von Bork, is set two days before Britain declared war on Germany, after the latter’s invasion of Belgium, and it is imbued with pathos and foreboding.

Belgium was elsewhere in Conan Doyle’s thoughts, too. In 1909, influenced by the work of his friend Roger Casement, a human rights activist, he wrote against King Leopold II’s exploitation of Africa in The Crime of the Congo; his later chronicles of the Western Front would be focused on the Belgian battlefields.

Conan Doyle’s shift to support Irish Home Rule in late 1911 may also have been influenced by

INTRODUCTION 211

The short story

“His Last Bow” last chronological Conan Doyle’s friend

(pp.246–47) appears appearance in the Conan Doyle Roger Casement

in The Strand canon (see “His Last publishes The Valley is executed

Magazine.

Bow,” pp.246–47) of Fear (pp.212–21). for treason.

AUG 1914 1915 AUG 1916 SEP 1917 SEP 1914 APR 1916 1917 OCT 1917

The Valley of Fear Conan Doyle’s The Conan Doyle Conan Doyle

starts appearing in British Campaign publishes accounts publishes the

serialization in The in France and of the 1916 battles, collection His

Strand Magazine. Flanders 1914 including the Battle Last Bow.

appears in The of the Somme.

Strand Magazine.

Casement, who was executed for treason in 1917. Despite the author’s family roots, Ireland itself never features in the canon. Holmes impersonates a specifically Irish-American character in “His Last Bow,” however, and The Valley of Fear features the “Scowrers,” a secret criminal society based on the notorious “Molly Maguires,” an Irish-American labor organization thought to have been responsible for terrorist acts in the coalfields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Real-life detection

Conan Doyle considered his 1905– 1906 “Sir Nigel” series, set during the Hundred Years’ War of the 14th–15th century, to be his “high-water mark in literature.” Most of Conan Doyle’s work at this time was far more contemporary and politically engaged—he made a second run for Parliament in 1906 and published the articles “The Case of Mr. George Edalji” and “The Case of Oscar Slater,” interventions on behalf of two wrongfully convicted men of foreign origin whose cases he had investigated. In taking up their causes, Conan Doyle rose nobly above the racial prejudice of his day. On the other hand, Holmes stories such as “Wisteria Lodge” feature blatant ethnic stereotyping, while the deadly poison in “The Devil’s Foot” associated Africa with horror, despair, and death.

A new age of crime

The advent of a harder, more violent era, complete with organized crime gangs, is reflected in the eight stories of His Last Bow. “The Red Circle” contains a second reference to the Mafia (the first was in 1904’s “The Six Napoleons”). And, like The Valley of Fear, the story features an undercover man from the real-life Pinkerton Detective Agency, the first US detective organization, which had been founded in 1850.

Elsewhere in the collection, Watson has to go it alone in Europe in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” before Holmes reveals himself in the guise of a French laborer. In this story, the detective is fairly cynical about the doctor’s detection skills, and in “The Dying Detective” he fools his friend into thinking that he has contracted a fatal disease. Yet when Holmes has a real brush with death, in “The Devil’s Foot,” it is Watson’s quick-witted intervention that saves the day. ■

A GREAT BRAIN

AND A HUGE ORGANIZATION HAVE BEEN TURNED TO THE

EXTINCTION

OF ONE MAN

THE VALLEY OF FEAR (1915)

214 HOLMES TAKES A BOW

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Novel

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: The Strand Magazine, September 1914

NOVEL PUBLICATION

George H. Doran, February 1915

CHARACTERS

John “Jack” Douglas

Fearless, intelligent, and good-natured Irish-American living in Sussex. The entire plot hangs on his backstory and multiple identities.

Ivy Douglas John’s beautiful, young second wife.

Inspector Alec MacDonald

Young Scottish Scotland Yard detective.

Fred Porlock Member of Moriarty’s network, and informer for Holmes.

Cecil James Barker House-guest and wealthy English friend of John Douglas.

Ted Baldwin Member of the Scowrers who tries to assassinate Douglas.

Professor James Moriarty

Holmes’s unseen archenemy, in cahoots with the Scowrers.

Ettie Shafter John’s first wife, who he married in Pennsylvania.

Chapter 1

Holmes and Watson Chapter 3

decipher a coded The Sussex police Chapter 5

message from begin to investigate Mrs. Douglas

Fred Porlock, an agent the murder and then and Cecil Barker

of Moriarty. It reveals decide to call in tell Holmes and

that a man called Scotland Yard and MacDonald their

Douglas is in danger. Sherlock Holmes. version of events.

PART 1

Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 6

Inspector MacDonald Holmes discovers Holmes is sure

arrives at 221B Baker that Douglas is Barker and

Street and announces somehow linked Mrs. Douglas have

that John Douglas has to America, and lied, and stresses

been murdered. He finds a single the importance

is not convinced that dumbbell in of the missing

Moriarty is involved. his room. dumbbell.

H

olmes receives a coded message from an informer working within Professor Moriarty’s criminal network, about a man called Douglas who is in imminent danger. Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard then calls: John Douglas, an American, has been murdered at his home, Birlstone Manor, in Sussex. Holmes suggests that Moriarty is involved, but the inspector is not convinced.

Holmes, Watson, and MacDonald travel to Douglas’s home. The victim has been shot in the face with a sawn-off shotgun. Curiously, his wedding ring is missing, and a card marked “V. V. 341” is beside the body. A houseguest, Cecil Barker, points out a bloody footprint, indicating that the killer escaped through the window and swam across the moat. Barker suspects the involvement of a secret society from Douglas’s past—the dead man had told his wife Ivy, “I have been in the Valley of Fear. I am not out of it yet.”