By Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes returns from the dead.
Subject
Themes
Three years after the world believed him dead at the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes steps out of a book collector's disguise in Dr Watson's study, and the doctor faints for the only time in his life. The detective never fell: he threw Professor Moriarty into the abyss with a wrestling trick, scaled the cliff, and wandered the world as a Norwegian explorer while Moriarty's lieutenants still hunted him. The murder of the young aristocrat Ronald Adair, shot in a locked room with no weapon found, draws him home. Around a wax bust of himself, turned every quarter-hour by the faithful Mrs Hudson, Holmes builds a trap that catches Colonel Sebastian Moran, the dead Professor's chief of staff, firing a silenced air-gun at his own image. With the last shadow of the old enemy imprisoned, the partnership resumes: Watson sells his practice, returns to Baker Street, and the great years of detection begin again.
Three years after the world believed him dead at the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes steps out of a book collector's disguise in Dr Watson's study, and the doctor faints for the only time in his life. The detective never fell: he threw Professor Moriarty into the abyss with a wrestling trick,…
The thirteen adventures returned a dead man to life. In December 1893 the story called The Final Problem had sent Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls locked in Professor Moriarty's arms, because Arthur Conan Doyle, weary of the character who overshadowed his historical novels, wrote to his…
Again and again the cases drive a wedge between what the law can do and what justice requires, and the detective steps into the gap. The clearest statement comes with Charles Augustus Milverton, the king of blackmailers. Technically he is within the law's grasp, but practically he is untouchable,…
Truth, in these adventures, is never delivered by the obvious story. It hides inside the detail that refuses to fit, and the whole method of detection amounts to a discipline of noticing what everyone else explains away. The police reason forward from the plausible: a young solicitor inherits a…
Nearly every tragedy in these cases grows from a secret kept too long, and the pattern is so persistent that concealment itself becomes the true villain of the collection. Elsie Cubitt extracts a promise from her husband never to ask about her American past, believing silence will protect their…
The most celebrated partnership in detective fiction is rebuilt from its lowest point. The cases open with Watson doubly bereaved, a widower who still visits crime scenes out of fidelity to a dead friend's methods, and the reunion in his study is staged as the emotional summit of the whole…
Crime in these adventures rarely wears a criminal's face. Its most dangerous practitioners are men of conspicuous gifts and impeccable surfaces, and the cases return obsessively to the moment when ability turns rotten. Colonel Sebastian Moran is the pattern case: Eton and Oxford, a distinguished…
Sherlock Holmes returns from three years of presumed death with his powers undimmed and his legend enlarged. The man who steps out of an old book collector's disguise in Watson's study has thrown Moriarty from the Reichenbach ledge with baritsu, scaled a cliff under falling rocks, wandered Tibet as…
Dr John Watson begins these adventures as a man doubly bereaved. His wife has died, and for three years he has believed his closest friend dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. Grief has not extinguished his old instincts: he still reads the criminal news with care and carries his Baker…
Stanley Hopkins is the young face of Scotland Yard's future, a police inspector of about thirty for whose career Holmes professes high hopes, and who in turn declares himself the pupil of a master. He appears in three of the most demanding cases, the harpooning of Black Peter, the killing at Yoxley…
Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is the longest-serving official foil to Sherlock Holmes, and these adventures catch his relationship with the great amateur at its warmest. He is present at the moment of Holmes's resurrection, summoned to the empty house in Park Lane to take Colonel Sebastian…
Colonel Sebastian Moran is the last and deadliest remnant of Professor Moriarty's organisation, the reason Sherlock Holmes spent three years pretending to be dead. His card in Holmes's index reads like a model career turned inside out: son of a former British Minister to Persia, educated at Eton and…
Mrs Hudson, the landlady of 221B Baker Street, occupies the smallest space and one of the most secure places in these adventures. She appears seldom and speaks barely at all, yet the whole edifice of the detective's life rests on her patience, and at the collection's opening she is entrusted with a…
Charles Augustus Milverton is the villain who disturbs Holmes more than any murderer. Fifty years old, plump and perpetually smiling, with a large intellectual head, a round hairless face and keen grey eyes glittering behind broad gold-rimmed glasses, he resembles a benevolent Mr Pickwick until one…
London buzzes with the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, a young aristocrat found shot through the head in his locked room at 427 Park Lane in the spring of 1894. No weapon lies near the body, no one has entered or left, and the only clues are the card winnings spread before him. Adair had…
Hilton Cubitt, a plain-dealing Norfolk squire of Riding Thorpe Manor, brings Holmes a child's puzzle with sinister weight: rows of dancing stick figures chalked on his window-sills and doors and scrawled on paper left upon the sundial. A year earlier Cubitt married Elsie Patrick, an American who…
Dr Thorneycroft Huxtable, founder of the Priory School near Mackleton, staggers into Baker Street and collapses insensible on the hearthrug. When brandy revives him, he reveals a catastrophe: Lord Saltire, the ten-year-old son and heir of the Duke of Holdernesse, one of the greatest subjects of the…
A card on the Baker Street table announces Charles Augustus Milverton of Appledore Towers, Hampstead, and Holmes flings it down in disgust. Milverton, he tells Watson, is the worst man in London, the king of blackmailers, who buys compromising letters from treacherous valets and genteel ruffians,…
While Holmes pursues researches into early English charters in a great university town in 1895, the nervous tutor Hilton Soames of the College of St Luke's arrives in pitiable agitation. Tomorrow begins the examination for the valuable Fortescue Scholarship, and Soames is an examiner. That afternoon…
A telegram of splendid incoherence opens the affair of the missing three-quarter: "Please await me. Terrible misfortune. Right wing three-quarter missing; indispensable to-morrow." Its sender proves to be Cyril Overton, the sixteen-stone captain of the Cambridge University rugby team, distraught…
The most important international case of Holmes's career begins with two visitors of European fame in the modest Baker Street sitting-room: Lord Bellinger, twice Premier of Britain, austere and dominant, and the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, Secretary for European Affairs, elegant and harried.…
Sherlock Holmes returns from three years of presumed death with his powers undimmed and his legend enlarged. The man who steps out of an old book collector's disguise in Watson's study has thrown Moriarty from the Reichenbach ledge with baritsu, scaled a cliff under falling rocks, wandered Tibet as…
Dr John Watson begins these adventures as a man doubly bereaved. His wife has died, and for three years he has believed his closest friend dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. Grief has not extinguished his old instincts: he still reads the criminal news with care and carries his Baker…
Stanley Hopkins is the young face of Scotland Yard's future, a police inspector of about thirty for whose career Holmes professes high hopes, and who in turn declares himself the pupil of a master. He appears in three of the most demanding cases, the harpooning of Black Peter, the killing at Yoxley…
Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is the longest-serving official foil to Sherlock Holmes, and these adventures catch his relationship with the great amateur at its warmest. He is present at the moment of Holmes's resurrection, summoned to the empty house in Park Lane to take Colonel Sebastian…
Colonel Sebastian Moran is the last and deadliest remnant of Professor Moriarty's organisation, the reason Sherlock Holmes spent three years pretending to be dead. His card in Holmes's index reads like a model career turned inside out: son of a former British Minister to Persia, educated at Eton and…
Mrs Hudson, the landlady of 221B Baker Street, occupies the smallest space and one of the most secure places in these adventures. She appears seldom and speaks barely at all, yet the whole edifice of the detective's life rests on her patience, and at the collection's opening she is entrusted with a…
Charles Augustus Milverton is the villain who disturbs Holmes more than any murderer. Fifty years old, plump and perpetually smiling, with a large intellectual head, a round hairless face and keen grey eyes glittering behind broad gold-rimmed glasses, he resembles a benevolent Mr Pickwick until one…
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Subject
Themes
Three years after the world believed him dead at the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes steps out of a book collector's disguise in Dr Watson's study, and the doctor faints for the only time in his life. The detective never fell: he threw Professor Moriarty into the abyss with a wrestling trick, scaled the cliff, and wandered the world as a Norwegian explorer while Moriarty's lieutenants still hunted him. The murder of the young aristocrat Ronald Adair, shot in a locked room with no weapon found, draws him home. Around a wax bust of himself, turned every quarter-hour by the faithful Mrs Hudson, Holmes builds a trap that catches Colonel Sebastian Moran, the dead Professor's chief of staff, firing a silenced air-gun at his own image. With the last shadow of the old enemy imprisoned, the partnership resumes: Watson sells his practice, returns to Baker Street, and the great years of detection begin again.