By Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes's final twelve cases
Subject
Themes
Sherlock Holmes returns for one final sequence of cases, and the collection that results is not a triumphant reprise but something more complicated and, in many respects, more honest about what detection costs and what it cannot fix.
Sherlock Holmes returns for one final sequence of cases, and the collection that results is not a triumphant reprise but something more complicated and, in many respects, more honest about what detection costs and what it cannot fix. The twelve cases range across London, Hampshire, Cambridge,…
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927, belongs to the final years of the long Edwardian cultural hangover that followed the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. By the mid-1920s, Britain was a country transformed: the First World War had killed nearly a million British soldiers, fractured…
One of the most consistent preoccupations running through these final Holmes cases is the gap between what the law can do and what justice actually requires. Again and again, Holmes reaches a conclusion that is true and important and finds that the formal machinery of prosecution cannot reach it, or…
The word deception appears in these twelve stories not as a simple vice but as a tool that belongs to almost everyone in them: the criminals, the victims, and Sherlock Holmes himself. A striking feature of this final collection is how thoroughly Holmes's methods mirror the methods of those he…
The crimes and mysteries of this final collection are not spread evenly across society. They cluster along lines of wealth, class, and social mobility, and the stories are consistently interested in what money and position allow people to get away with, and what they permit them to attempt. The…
A striking number of the crimes in this final collection originate not in professional criminality or financial calculation but in the domestic passions of jealousy, desire, and the humiliation of love rejected or betrayed. The crimes that arise from these sources are often the most carefully…
Sherlock Holmes's method across these final twelve cases rests on a consistent intellectual principle: the detail that no one else has noticed is frequently the one that explains everything. This is not mere cleverness. It reflects a genuine epistemological commitment, a belief that the world…
Sherlock Holmes in this final collection of his cases is a man in the last and perhaps most revealing phase of his working life. He is no longer the electric, restless figure of his Baker Street years, though he remains entirely capable of that concentrated ferocity when a problem demands it. Two of…
Dr Watson appears throughout this final collection of Sherlock Holmes cases as the essential mediating presence between Holmes and the reader, though in two of the twelve stories Holmes takes over the narration himself. These absences, far from diminishing Watson, illuminate what he provides when…
Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard does not appear directly in these final twelve cases, but his presence is felt throughout in the institution he represents and the attitude of his colleagues. Lestrade belongs to an earlier chapter of Holmes's career, and in his place these stories offer a gallery…
Baker Street is the scene of a peculiar domestic tension when Watson arrives to find Holmes gaunt and exhausted, having gone days without food while pursuing Count Negretto Sylvius, a big-game hunter and habitual criminal now suspected of stealing the Mazarin Stone, a priceless yellow diamond…
Trevor Bennett, private secretary and intended son-in-law to Professor Presbury, a distinguished Cambridge physiologist, brings a case that is as strange as any Holmes has encountered. The Professor, now sixty-one, has become engaged to a woman much younger than himself and since a secret journey to…
An American lawyer who identifies himself as John Garrideb arrives at Baker Street with an improbable proposition. A wealthy eccentric named Alexander Hamilton Garrideb has left an estate worth five million dollars to be shared among three adult men bearing that unusual surname. The visitor claims…
A prize-fighter named Steve Dixie arrives at Baker Street to threaten Holmes with violence if he meddles in anything concerning Harrow. Holmes receives this with cool amusement, identifies Dixie as a known criminal, and finds his interest in the matter instantly sharpened. He and Watson call on Mrs…
Holmes is in retirement on the Sussex Downs when the science teacher at a local coaching establishment, Fitzroy McPherson, staggers up the cliff path from the beach and collapses at Holmes's feet, his back covered in dark livid weals as though he has been flogged with a wire scourge. He dies before…
A Brixton landlady named Mrs Merrilow comes to Baker Street with an unusual complaint about her lodger. For seven years a woman calling herself Mrs Ronder has lived in her house without ever fully showing her face, and in recent weeks she has been crying out in the night about murder and calling…
Sherlock Holmes in this final collection of his cases is a man in the last and perhaps most revealing phase of his working life. He is no longer the electric, restless figure of his Baker Street years, though he remains entirely capable of that concentrated ferocity when a problem demands it. Two of…
Dr Watson appears throughout this final collection of Sherlock Holmes cases as the essential mediating presence between Holmes and the reader, though in two of the twelve stories Holmes takes over the narration himself. These absences, far from diminishing Watson, illuminate what he provides when…
Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard does not appear directly in these final twelve cases, but his presence is felt throughout in the institution he represents and the attitude of his colleagues. Lestrade belongs to an earlier chapter of Holmes's career, and in his place these stories offer a gallery…
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Subject
Themes
Sherlock Holmes returns for one final sequence of cases, and the collection that results is not a triumphant reprise but something more complicated and, in many respects, more honest about what detection costs and what it cannot fix.