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Holmes finds a dumbbell at the crime scene, noting that they come in pairs. He then matches Barker’s slipper to the bloody footprint. Convinced that both Barker and

THE VALLEY OF FEAR 215

Chapter 7

Barker is trapped into revealing the truth about the murder. Douglas appears and tells his story.

Chapter 2

McMurdo finds work as a bookkeeper, and makes himself known to the leader of a gang called the “Scowrers.”

Ivy Douglas are lying, Holmes sets a trap, telling Barker the moat will be drained in the morning. Hiding nearby that night, Holmes, Watson, and MacDonald witness Barker fishing a bundle from the moat.

Caught in the act, Barker admits that the dead man was actually Douglas’s would-be assassin, shot in a struggle. With his features obliterated, they dressed him in Douglas’s clothes, and threw his clothes in the moat, weighed down by the missing dumbbell. Holmes then dramatically calls Douglas forth from a hidden room.

Chapter 4

McMurdo and other Scowrers are on trial for the beating, but several “witnesses” provide alibis for them, and they are set free.

PART 2

Chapter 6

McMurdo tells his fellow Scowrers that a Pinkerton agent called Birdy Edwards is after them, and volunteers to trap the man.

Epilogue

Holmes learns that Douglas/ McMurdo/Edwards has been lost overboard a ship, murdered by agents of Moriarty working with the Scowrers.

Chapter 1

Twenty years earlier, John McMurdo travels by train from Chicago to Vermissa Valley, Pennsylvania, and finds lodgings.

Chapter 7

The trap set by McMurdo is actually for the Scowrers, and McMurdo reveals himself to be Birdy Edwards.

Chapter 3 Chapter 5

McMurdo is initiated into McMurdo witnesses the Scowrers and helps them the gang members beat up a newspaper editor. murder a mine manager.

Moriarty was commissioned by Edward’s enemies to kill him. At Holmes’s urging, Edwards and Ivy board a ship for South Africa, but off St. Helena (where Napoleon was exiled) Edwards is lost overboard. A note arrives for Holmes, which simply reads, “Dear me!”—a mocking use of one of Holmes’s favorite expressions, in this and other stories. “There is a master hand here,” says Holmes. “…You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one.” The Napoleon of crime has indeed struck. ■ Douglas hands Watson a written testimony. His real name is Birdy Edwards and, 20 years ago, he had been a private detective with the famous American agency, Pinkerton’s. Under the name of John McMurdo, he had infiltrated Lodge 341 of a secret society of murderers, the “Scowrers,” a corrupt faction of Freemasonry in “the Vermissa Valley”—“V. V.”, the Valley of Fear—in Pennsylvania. Edwards brought the gang to justice, but some of its members escaped, including the dead man, an old rival of his named Ted Baldwin.

216 HOLMES TAKES A BOW

T

he fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel may be a suitably resounding end to the great detective’s exploits in the longer story form, but it also bears the signs of Conan Doyle’s famous disenchantment with his creation. While Holmes aficionados may be disappointed that their hero is absent for half the narrative, the adventure is nonetheless an intriguing one, which cleverly channels real-life events in the US into a typically baffling English country house murder mystery.

Just like The Hound of the Baskervilles (pp.152–61) a decade earlier, The Valley of Fear also appeared in monthly instalments in The Strand Magazine. These prompted the usual enthusiastic response from Holmes fans, but ultimately the response to the novel was not the unqualified success that The Hound of the Baskervilles had been. Even its admirers would be unlikely to disagree that The Valley of Fear is a book of two halves: a slightly uneasy marriage of a detective puzzle and an espionage adventure. As in A Study in Scarlet (pp.36–45) and The Sign of Four (pp.46–55), the first section of the book details a crime, and the second relates the circumstances that set

We think in the CID that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this Professor.

Inspector MacDonald

that crime in motion. The Valley of Fear has familiar themes too: namely a dark past abroad finally catching up with someone, and the deeds of an organized crime network in America. Conan Doyle had explored both of these ideas previously in several of his short stories, such as “The Five Orange Pips” (pp.74–9), and “The Adventure of the Red Circle” (pp.226–29). Such a deep fascination with organized crime in America was uncharacteristic of British writers of this period, apart from Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), who, unlike Conan Doyle, was no stranger to the far side of the Atlantic himself.

Holmes in fine form

The opening sections, dealing with Holmes’s investigation and solving of the murder, are as adroitly put together as anything in the canon, and as complicated yet satisfying as ever. From the very start, Conan Doyle adopts a more humorous tone than usual, as Holmes frequently

In the US Civil War Pinkerton agents like these were employed as Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguards. By the time of The Valley of Fear they were often being used as strike-breakers.

teases the doctor. The novel opens with the two men in conversation: “I am inclined to think—” begins Watson; “I should do so,” interrupts Holmes, pointing out the doctor’s language has inadvertently implied that he wasn’t thinking at all.

The detective is in his element when he receives a coded message from a criminal informer, Fred Porlock. He identifies Porlock as an agent of his greatest adversary, Professor Moriarty, and compares the two men for Watson’s benefit: “Picture to yourself the pilot-fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion—anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable.” He is clearly looking forward to the challenge ahead as he describes his archenemy in admiring tones: “The greatest

THE VALLEY OF FEAR 217

schemer of all time... the controlling

Deciphering the coded message brain of the underworld.” As Watson puts it, after several dull

Watson asks what can

weeks, “here, at last, there was a

be done with a cipher

fitting object for those remarkable

powers which, like all special gifts,

message without the

cipher, and Holmes turns

become irksome to their owner

this absence into a clue. As the author did not include the cipher (the volume to which the message refers)

when they are not in use.”

The teasing reveal

he surely anticipated that

Holmes owns a copy. The

book must therefore be a

The highlight of any Holmes story—

one that retains its charm despite

its repeated use—is the moment at

which Holmes theatrically reveals

common household title.

Its length and the number of columns suggest a

to Watson the reasoning behind

reference work.

a particularly baffling piece of deduction. This is always presented by Conan Doyle in delayed fashion, usually with Holmes first making some striking and apparently random statement, so that both Watson and the reader are eager to hear its justification. In The Valley of Fear this comes when Holmes announces at the breakfast table, “A great big, thumping, obtrusive, uncompromising lie—that’s what meets us on the threshold... The whole story told by Barker is a lie. But Barker’s story is corroborated by Mrs. Douglas... They are both lying and in a conspiracy.”

At the time this statement is made, Conan Doyle has allowed us to connect some facts but not— inevitably—as cleverly or completely as Holmes. Our awareness that we are incapable of reaching the correct conclusion only confirms Holmes’s almost supernatural abilities. For example, Barker says he heard the gunshot at 11:30 pm. The housekeeper says she heard what she thought was the sound of a door slamming half an hour earlier. But only Holmes makes the correct deduction: what she actually heard was the real gunshot.

The theatrics continue when Holmes asks Watson and the inspector to hide with him in the ❯❯

The first number in the cipher message, 534, is likely to indicate a page number. If so, the book to which it refers is a long one.

13 and all the subsequent numbers must refer to the placing of individual words on page 534 within Column Two.

The Bible is the first possible cipher, but there are too many different editions to be sure of a page number. Both

the dictionary and Bradshaw’s (a book of train timetables) are dismissed for their limited number of words, before Holmes alights on

Whitaker’s Almanac

and tests his theory to find he is indeed correct.

Watson suggests that C2 refers to “Chapter the Second,” but as the page is already known, this must mean Column Two.

The words in the message are critical but too obscure to appear in the column in question, so have been written directly.

218 HOLMES TAKES A BOW

Groombridge Place is the moated manor house that Conan Doyle used as the model for Douglas’s home, Birlstone Manor. Living at nearby Crowborough, the author was a frequent visitor.

bushes for several hours in the dark, refusing to tell them why. When MacDonald asks for an explanation, Holmes replies, “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life. Some touch of the artist wells up within me and calls insistently for a well-staged performance.” Holmes’s discovery is worth the wait: he has already found the bundle in the moat and put it back so Barker can be caught retrieving the evidence.

The most shocking reveal is yet to come. To the further astonishment of Watson and MacDonald, Holmes turns to Ivy Douglas, saying: “I should strongly recommend that you ask Mr. Douglas to tell us his own story.” Thus the supposedly dead man emerges from his hiding place and hands Watson a bundle of papers that comprise a written account called “The Valley of Fear.”

Back to reality

With the murder mystery solved, Conan Doyle embarks on a long flashback, just as he did in A Study in Scarlet. Once again, Holmes vanishes from the narrative, and now the reader relives Douglas’s adventures among the “Scowrers” in America. Echoing Conan Doyle’s earlier use of authentic legend in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Scowrers were based on a real-life 19th century Irish-American secret society, the Molly Maguires (p.220). The Mollies were active in the Pennsylvania mining communities until a series of violent incidents resulted in 20 of their members being hanged. Much of the evidence against them was provided by a detective from the Pinkerton agency, James McParland—the model for John McMurdo. Conan Doyle heard about the Mollies and McParland from the American detective and writer William John Burns, who visited the author at his home in the village of Crowborough.

On completing the manuscript, Conan Doyle apologized to his publisher for providing lightweight reading material when World War I was looming large in everyone’s thoughts—not least in those of the author himself. But Strand editor Herbert Greenhough Smith thought that the public needed some relief after the flood of war reports in the press, and an exciting diversion featuring the nation’s favorite detective could be precisely the kind of escapism readers were looking for. He was right: sales of the magazine with the first installment were as buoyant as ever. War or no, readers had not lost their appetite for Holmes and Watson.

Conan Doyle was aware that moving Holmes offstage for a great part of the novel would not be to the taste of all his readers, but he defended the decision to his editor as a necessary one. Many fans, however, expressed their deep disappointment at the absence of Holmes. It is for this reason that, in spite of The Valley of Fear’s gritty storyline and cutting humor, it is among the least regarded of the Holmes novels, which also perhaps explains the relative dearth of film and television adaptations.

In all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study.

Sherlock Holmes

THE VALLEY OF FEAR 219

Love and hate

When Holmes and Watson go to Sussex to investigate Douglas’s murder, they are put up at a local inn, the Westville Arms, and share what Watson describes as “a double-bedded room.” This was apparently “the best that the little country inn could do for us,” but it is not clear from Watson’s description whether the room had one double or two single beds. Holmes has sometimes been portrayed as a repressed homosexual—in Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and (in the view of some fans) the BBC television adaptation Sherlock (2010– ) for example—but Conan Doyle clearly depicts Holmes as an asexual ascetic. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes admits to Watson that he is “not a whole-souled admirer

The Strand Magazine was designed to appeal to a new white-collar, middle-brow audience, who typically traveled to and from work by train. The Holmes stories were just the ticket.

of womankind.” The exception, of course, is Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (pp.56–61), whose more “male” qualities of intelligence and ingenuity earned her the detective’s respect.

That Holmes adores Watson, and that the plainly heterosexual doctor returns the compliment, is not in doubt. Conan Doyle himself intended a platonic friendship, although his successors may— and do—speculate.

Arguably, Holmes has almost as strong a relationship with his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, as with Watson, but this is a love/hate affair. Holmes is horrified by his nemesis’s criminality, but in thrall to the genius at work in his evil acts. The detective cannot help but reluctantly admire the professor’s extraordinary genius—as he tells Watson, the professor possesses “a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations”— for it is the one intellect that matches his own. Of all his foes, therefore, Moriarty is the only one who ❯❯

James McParland

Birdy Edwards, one of the most unusual characters in the entire Holmes canon, was based on a real person, James McParland. Born in County Armagh, Ireland in 1843, he traveled to New York in 1867 and worked as a laborer and then a policeman before moving to Chicago, where he owned a liquor store. When that business was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, he became a private detective for the legendary Pinkerton’s agency, founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish American.

McParland is best known for his success against the clandestine group, the “Molly Maguires,” in the 1870s. Using the name James McKenna, he gained the confidence of the group, but was appalled when it used information he supplied in assassination attempts. He also became disenchanted with coal mine operators who wished to exterminate the Mollies. However, unlike his murdered fictional counterpart in The Valley of Fear, Birdy Edwards, James McParland died in bed, at the Mercy Hospital in Denver in 1919.