This change in Holmes makes him more human. He has weaknesses; he makes mistakes; he succumbs to emotions from time to time, even ugly ones. His character becomes more interesting to his readers and his creator alike when it evolves and deepens. The vehicle for this change can only be his relationship with Watson. The development of that relationship will be one of the themes that most interested Conan Doyle in these late stories. We’ll see further examples of it later.
In addition to the changes in Holmes, one also notices about
The Return
that many of the plots are remakes of older ones. As noted earlier, “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” reprises “The Blue Carbuncle.” “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” uses the same trick of feigning fire found in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The Second Stain” recaps several earlier themes. The important letter of state that goes missing recalls the same kind of letter in the “The Naval Treaty”; it is also returned to its owner as if it had never been gone, again like the one in “The Naval Treaty”; the theme of blackmail over an indiscreet love letter recalls “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” repeats elements of “The Greek Interpreter.” The pressure to come up with new plots had always been the source of Conan Doyle’s irritation with the Holmes stories. Without such new plots, and under a time limit to come up with them, he simply recycled some golden oldies.
He also returned to the oldest theme in detective fiction, revenge. It’s a prominent theme in both the first two series and again in this one. “The Empty House” revolves around Colonel Sebastian Moran getting revenge on Holmes for Moriarty’s death. Jonas Oldacre of “The Norwood Builder” wants revenge on the woman who rejected his romantic attentions thirty years previously, so he stages his own death and frames her son for it. Abe Slaney kills Hilton Cubitt in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” because Cubitt fired at him first while Slaney was talking to Mrs. Cubitt, a woman he had once wooed in the United States. Although he didn’t set out to revenge his lost love, the end result proved to be exactly that. The title character of “Charles Augustus Milverton” is murdered by a woman he had ruined because she wouldn’t pay him blackmail. And perhaps worst of all, by allowing Milverton’s murder and shielding his killer, Holmes himself resorts to revenge on Milverton for upsetting Holmes’s calculations to catch him.
One last note about
The Return
before we turn to the next series of stories,
His Last Bow.
While everyone has his or her favorites among the stories, a number are always bridesmaids, never brides. No one ever champions “The Adventure of the Three Students” or “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” as the problems Holmes solves in those stories seem so trivial. The latter story, while dull as a detective yarn, becomes more interesting when one learns that Conan Doyle’s first wife, Louise, was an invalid for the last years of her life. During this time, Conan Doyle formed a strong attachment to another woman, Jean Leckie, who moved to a house near the Conan Doyles. Conan Doyle saw her whenever he could, but from all we know about them, their love was strictly platonic. A year after the death of Louise, Conan Doyle and Jean married. The story of the rugby player who keeps his sick wife in a secret hideaway merges the two women in Conan Doyle’s life into one. While this story may not appeal greatly to us, we can be sure it had a special resonance for its conflicted creator.
After
The Return,
Conan Doyle thought again that he was through with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The last story in the volume, “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” begins by claiming that Holmes “has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs.” Conan Doyle never committed himself to another series of stories. He wrote his publisher in March 1908, however, that he would contribute a number of occasional new Holmes tales, to be called “Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes,” but at his own pace, subject to no time pressure. These stories, as that initial title suggests, would reflect particular concerns of Conan Doyle going beyond exciting whodunit plots. Holmes would be made the vehicle for exploring changes in the modern world and other themes especially interesting to Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle began the first such story, “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” just days after King Leopold II had given up personal control of large areas of the Congo to Belgium in March 1908. A year later Conan Doyle wrote a blistering indictment of the Belgian treatment of the people of the Congo, but his first go at the cruelties of the African empire came in this thinly disguised fictional form. The plot concerns a dictator who has ruined a small country, fleeing with much of its wealth. Six months after the events in the beginning of the story he is found dead in a Madrid hotel in what is assumed to be a revenge murder by the widow of a diplomat he had killed. Watson tells us, “We could not doubt that justice, if belated, had come at last.” To Conan Doyle the story takes a stand against the immoralities of nation-plundering; to most readers, the story induces heavy sleep.
The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson,
a complete list of articles published about the Holmes cycle, had yet to show a single article about this story as late as 1974 (though several have been written since). When Conan Doyle set his Holmes stories the task of reflecting world concerns, rather than providing exciting mysteries, his readers weren’t so eager to follow.
In this story Conan Doyle continues to humanize Holmes. He gives him little work to do. In fact, because Holmes is so competitive with the local Inspector Baynes, they nearly cancel each other out, leaving it to the dictator’s gardener to save the day. Though still capable of remarkable insight and brilliant deductions, Holmes isn’t the superman he appeared to be in the early tales. His list of mistakes will grow in this series, setting up a new pattern that in its turn will be broken to surprise us.
The second story in the cycle to be published, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” appeared in December 1908.
a
Conan Doyle was very much concerned about the laxity of the government’s defense of Britain against the growing power of other European nations, particularly Germany. This story functions as a cautionary tale for ministers oblivious to mounting danger. It also continues the theme of Holmes as ordinary mortal. He has to ask Mycroft for the names of the spies most likely to be involved in the matter; we recall that in “The Adventure of the Second Stain” he knew them without having to ask. Although he makes some clever deductions about the reason for the odd placement of the body of Cadogan West and the absence of blood at the presumed murder scene, he’s completely off-track about West’s involvement. He has been steered away by Mycroft from the true source of treason, the brother of Sir James Walter, because the elder Holmes can’t imagine that a long-time government minister could be involved in any kind of intrigue against his government. Sir James is protected by the same kind of “he’s one of us” feeling that later sheltered Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Don ald Maclean when they were Soviet moles working inside British Intelligence. Holmes suspects everyone but the real villain. When he discovers the truth, Holmes says to Watson, “ ‘You can write me down an ass this time, Watson,’ said he. ‘This is not the bird that I was looking for.’ ”
This story adds to the growing list of crimes Holmes is ready to commit in order to get at the source of worse crimes. Although there’s talk of getting a warrant to search the premises of Hugo Oberstein, Holmes concludes that the evidence he has wouldn’t persuade a magistrate. When Watson agrees to be the lookout while Holmes once again turns to breaking and entering, a moment of personal affection follows that in some ways is more rewarding to readers than another demonstration of Holmes as supersleuth. “He sprang up and shook me by the hand. ‘I knew you would not shrink at the last,’ said he, and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen.”
In February 1909, two months after this story was published Conan Doyle was recuperating from an illness when a Cornish boatman said something to him that must have stung him, for he repeated the incident many times in later years. “ ‘I think, sir,’ the boatman said, expressing the popular reaction to the resumption of Holmes’s career, ‘when Holmes fell over the cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.”’
(Memories and Adventures,
p. 116). This implied criticism spurred Conan Doyle to set his next story in Cornwall. “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” published in December 1910, combines a number of themes. First, Holmes returns to his old form by solving a string of baffling murders. The adventure also deepens the relationship between Holmes and Watson, as Holmes would have either been killed or driven insane had not Watson pulled him out of the deadly vapors to which Holmes had subjected them both as an experiment. We have never seen Holmes so vulnerable. Holmes’s face, “white, rigid and drawn with horror,” his “clammy forehead” and “unsteady voice” testify to his mortality. The terrors of the hallucinatory visions produced by the spell of the drug show us that even his admirably balanced mind might sink into madness. Watson’s response to Holmes’s apology is one of the more touching rewards of the entire series. “ ‘You know,’ I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before, ‘that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.’ ” Only one other passage, to come a few years later, equals this intensity of feeling between the two men.
Further, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” revisits another personal theme mentioned earlier: Conan Doyle’s long platonic love for Jean Leckie. One of the murderers in this story, Leon Sterndale, has had a long platonic love for Brenda Treginnis. “For years I have loved her. For years she has loved me.... For years Brenda waited. For years I waited.” She is killed, however, by her brother, Mortimer, who was hoping just to drive her insane so that he could inherit the family estate. Sterndale then avenges her death by forcing Mortimer Treginnis to breathe the same deadly fumes that Mortimer had used to kill his sister. Sterndale’s grief at the death of his beloved is so profound that once again Holmes becomes justice itself, letting the broken man go in peace, with the full assent of Watson and every reader with an ounce of pity.
Not long after this story, Conan Doyle had another occasion to change his writing in reaction to outside commentary, this time from a highly learned source. In 1912 Ronald Knox, who later became well known as a monsignor in the Catholic Church, published a talk he had given the year before to a student union about the eleven points common to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Conan Doyle read it, then sent Knox a polite, appreciative letter in response. But in his very next story, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” he intentionally set out to break the patterns so astutely adduced by Knox. No one likes to think his or her mind is an open book to other people. In the previous stories, the plots had mysteries for the reader to try to solve, but the framework for those plots was predictable. In “The Dying Detective” Conan Doyle varied some of those predictable elements. First, the story doesn’t begin as usual in Baker Street, but in Watson’s rooms during his marriage. Then the first words spoken are from the heretofore silent Mrs. Hudson, Holmes’s landlady. Holmes doesn’t have a visitor bring him a case, nor does he go out to survey the scene of any mystery: The action comes to him. But then Conan Doyle plays a really crafty trick on us. After reading of his rheumatism and seeing the series of mistakes Holmes had made in the last few stories, we have been conditioned to the physical weaknesses age has visited on him. When he seems to be dying from a rare tropical disease, his infirmity is believable. Then Conan Doyle turns the tables on our expectations when Holmes, once again his invincible old self, pops up, calmly lights a cigarette, and informs a killer that the jig is up.
Conan Doyle continued until 1917 to publish the stories that ultimately formed
His Last Bow.
He took a break after publishing “The Dying Detective” in December 1913 to start a more substantial project. Out of the blue, and to the delight of his publisher, Conan Doyle wrote to the
Strand
in January 1914 that he had already written half of a new Sherlock Holmes novel. The last time he sent the
Strand
a Holmes novel,
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
sales of the magazine shot up by 30,000 copies. Conan Doyle finished his first and only draft by mid-April, but the novel didn’t appear in serialization in the
Strand
until September, after the Great War had begun. The last chapter concluded in May 1915. It was also serialized in the United States by the Associated Sunday Newspapers, which published a Sunday magazine as a supplement to the regular newspaper, much like
Parade Magazine
in the United States today. The U.S. version was printed once a week, while in England the
Strand
published chapters once a month, so the novel actually first appeared in full in the United States.
Conan Doyle expressed his apologies to his English editors for contributing only this trifling distraction instead of something more important to the war effort. He was doubly wrong: On the one hand, he could scarcely have provided anything more conducive to public morale than a new adventure by the always reassuring Sherlock Holmes, which gave citizens something to take their minds off the grisly business across the Channel. On the other hand, this particular novel ends with the implication that the forces of darkness are unconquerable, a disquieting thought in the face of the implacable Hun facing the Allies across the trenches.
Conan Doyle writes in the preface to
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete
Long Stories (1929) that
“The valley of Fear
had its origin through my reading a graphic account of the Molly McQuire [sic] outrages in the coal-fields of Pennsylvania.” That account was Allan Pinkerton’s
The Molly Maguires and the Detectives,
published in 1877, which details the experiences of James McParlan, a Pinkerton employee who masqueraded as James McKenna to build a case against a group of lawless Irish labor terrorists in Pennsylvania. Conan Doyle became a friend of Pinkerton’s son William, who apparently confided some information about his father’s career that Conan Doyle used in his new novel. When
The valley of Fear
was published, Pinkerton considered suing Conan Doyle for using this confidential information without asking permission. Exactly what Conan Doyle learned from Pinkerton we don’t know, but it’s one of those nice ironies that the son of the most famous American detective should have unwittingly provided information that formed an adventure of the world’s most famous fictional detective.