By Arthur Conan Doyle
Holmes investigates a mysterious Indian treasure
Subject
Themes
Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street with a mystery she has been carrying alone for a decade. Her father, Captain Morstan, vanished from London in 1878 without trace. Six years later, anonymous packages began arriving each year, each containing a single lustrous pearl. Now she has received a letter: she is a wronged woman, and justice will be done. She is to come that evening to the Lyceum Theatre, bringing no police.
Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street with a mystery she has been carrying alone for a decade. Her father, Captain Morstan, vanished from London in 1878 without trace. Six years later, anonymous packages began arriving each year, each containing a single lustrous pearl. Now she has received a letter:…
The Sign of Four was published in 1890, at the height of British imperial expansion. The story draws directly on two of the defining events of the nineteenth-century British presence in India: the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the establishment and operation of the Andaman Islands penal colony, which…
The story opens with a demonstration of Holmes's method that establishes one of its central preoccupations. A pocket watch, recently cleaned, still yields its history to a sufficiently attentive examiner. Pawn-ticket scratches around the case, thousands of tiny marks around the winding hole, the…
The Agra treasure functions as the story's engine and its moral weight simultaneously. It originates in violence: the merchant Achmet was killed for it, the compact of the four was forged over his body, and the chain of betrayal, concealment, and obsession that follows spreads through two decades…
The Agra treasure does not originate in London. It comes from India, from a chest of jewels belonging to a Rajah, carried by a merchant through a country in upheaval, seized by soldiers during the Mutiny of 1857. Every character whose life is touched by the treasure is connected, directly or…
The legal outcome of the story is clear: Jonathan Small is arrested, charged, and will face trial. The moral situation is considerably less tidy. Small's account of his history presents a grievance that has a recognisable shape even if the methods he used to pursue it were violent and his final act…
Watson's internal conflict throughout the investigation is not about danger or professional loyalty; it is about money. He restrains himself from speaking to Mary Morstan not because he does not know how he feels but because the Agra treasure, if recovered, will make her one of the wealthiest women…
Sherlock Holmes approaches the case of the Agra treasure as a pure intellectual exercise, and from his first examination of Mary Morstan's documents to the final night chase down the Thames, he moves with the disciplined energy of a man for whom the problem itself is the reward. He grasps the…
Dr. Watson narrates the entire affair from his own perspective, and the account he gives is honest about his limitations as well as his strengths. He is a returned soldier, wounded at Maiwand and still carrying the effects of the campaign in his constitution, drawn into the investigation by…
Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street alone, having advertised for help without being told to, having assessed the situation she finds herself in, and having decided on a course of action. She is not passive in the face of her circumstances. Her father disappeared ten years before the story opens,…
Jonathan Small's life is a record of catastrophe and tenacity in roughly equal measure. He came to India as a young soldier from Worcestershire, lost his leg to a crocodile while swimming in the Ganges, was discharged from service, and drifted into work at an Agra plantation. He was not looking for…
Thaddeus Sholto occupies a peculiar position in the story: he is the man who summoned Mary Morstan, the man who tried to do right by a woman his father wronged, and the man who ends up in a police cell before the night is over. His role is brief and crowded with nervous energy, and he is one of the…
Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard represents official detective work in the story, and the portrait is not a flattering one. He arrives at Pondicherry Lodge with the confidence of a man who has worked a great many cases by the application of received methods, and he immediately begins constructing a…
Sherlock Holmes sits in his armchair at Baker Street, pressing a cocaine solution into his arm for the third time that day. Watson, who has watched this ritual for months with growing alarm, finally confronts him. Holmes is unmoved. His brilliant mind, he explains, rebels at stagnation. Without…
Holmes returns to Baker Street at half-past five in high spirits. Consulting the archive of The Times, he found that Major Sholto of Upper Norwood died on 28 April 1882. The timing is the key: Sholto denied knowing Morstan had returned to England, yet within a week of Sholto's death, anonymous pearl…
The cab pulls up at Pondicherry Lodge near eleven at night. The estate is surrounded by a high stone wall topped with broken glass, a single iron gate its only entrance. The porter McMurdo is immovable until Holmes recalls a boxing match where they once sparred together, and professional…
Watson escorts Mary Morstan home and reflects on his growing admiration for her, though he chides himself for entertaining romantic thoughts about a client. Returning to Pondicherry Lodge, he finds Holmes absorbed in the examination of the crime scene. Holmes has climbed onto the roof of the…
Watson wakes in the afternoon to find Holmes pacing Baker Street in barely restrained agitation. The Baker Street Irregulars have turned up nothing: the Aurora has vanished from every wharf and landing along the Thames. Holmes cannot eat, cannot sleep, and works through the night with chemical…
Jonathan Small sits handcuffed in the cabin of the police launch, the iron chest beside him, his expression showing more sorrow than anger. He tells Holmes plainly that he did not kill Bartholomew Sholto. Tonga fired the poisoned dart on his own initiative, without warning; Small was horrified when…
Sherlock Holmes approaches the case of the Agra treasure as a pure intellectual exercise, and from his first examination of Mary Morstan's documents to the final night chase down the Thames, he moves with the disciplined energy of a man for whom the problem itself is the reward. He grasps the…
Dr. Watson narrates the entire affair from his own perspective, and the account he gives is honest about his limitations as well as his strengths. He is a returned soldier, wounded at Maiwand and still carrying the effects of the campaign in his constitution, drawn into the investigation by…
Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street alone, having advertised for help without being told to, having assessed the situation she finds herself in, and having decided on a course of action. She is not passive in the face of her circumstances. Her father disappeared ten years before the story opens,…
Jonathan Small's life is a record of catastrophe and tenacity in roughly equal measure. He came to India as a young soldier from Worcestershire, lost his leg to a crocodile while swimming in the Ganges, was discharged from service, and drifted into work at an Agra plantation. He was not looking for…
Thaddeus Sholto occupies a peculiar position in the story: he is the man who summoned Mary Morstan, the man who tried to do right by a woman his father wronged, and the man who ends up in a police cell before the night is over. His role is brief and crowded with nervous energy, and he is one of the…
Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard represents official detective work in the story, and the portrait is not a flattering one. He arrives at Pondicherry Lodge with the confidence of a man who has worked a great many cases by the application of received methods, and he immediately begins constructing a…
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Subject
Themes
Mary Morstan arrives at Baker Street with a mystery she has been carrying alone for a decade. Her father, Captain Morstan, vanished from London in 1878 without trace. Six years later, anonymous packages began arriving each year, each containing a single lustrous pearl. Now she has received a letter: she is a wronged woman, and justice will be done. She is to come that evening to the Lyceum Theatre, bringing no police.