rather than by Watson; it introduces Holmes as a surprise, far into the narrative; it presents not the London-based consulting detective but a Holmes come out of retirement in Sussex; it is a story not of crime but of international espionage, with Holmes acting as a double agent on the eve of World War I. It takes place August 2, 1914, during the hours when the war was actually beginning, and it takes a jingoistic tone, having undeniably been written as war propaganda. One can hear Doyle’s voice from the beginning (“the most terrible August in the history of the world”) through the slurs on Germany, Irish separatists, and suffragist “Furies,” to the peroration about a cleansing “east wind.” Holmes as spy, under the pseudonym of Altamont, is little more convincing than Holmes as goateed American, but readers in 1917 may have been grateful for whatever they might get. The tale was subtitled “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes” when it appeared in the Strand for September 1917 and Collier’s for September 22, 1917, but became “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes” when His Last Bow appeared in book form. Doyle was indicating once again that he had had enough of him.
THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title is admirable, and Doyle may be given the credit for introducing the term case book in the context of a detective (it had previously been used chiefly for medical cases). Two or three of the stories are also first-rate, but in general this final collection is acknowledged to be weaker than the books that preceded it. Gibson and Green in their Bibliography say that Doyle was encouraged to write more about Holmes when he saw the early films that starred Eille Norwood as the detective, released beginning in 1921. “Norwood’s disguises were remarkable,” they say, “and his sphinx-like countenance suggested the idea for The Crown Diamond,” which was first a play and then the first of this final dozen stories to see print.
The tales — written, or at least published, over a much briefer period than those in The Return and His Last Bow — were completely rearranged for book publication. They were introduced with a preface, this time in Doyle’s voice rather than Watson’s, which first appeared in the Strand for March 1927, announcing a contest that invited readers to rank the stories and match Doyle’s own assessment. It survives as the lovely brief essay that assigns Holmes to “some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place” and yet fixes him firmly in history:
He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian Era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days.
The first edition of The Case-Book was published in Britain by John Murray, and in America by George H. Doran Co., in the middle of 1927.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS CLIENT. Sex (indeed, probably, prostitution) is the atmosphere and motivation in this tale, which takes its name not from any element of the plot but from the (unidentified) noble party who asks Holmes to take the case. It is a matter outside his usual range, for there is no mystery to solve. Rather, Holmes is supposed to persuade a well-to-do young lady that Baron Gruner, with whom she is infatuated, is a cad and worse. She will have none of his reasoning (he carries it off with dignity, despite his inexperience in such affairs), but violence intervenes, in the nasty old-fashioned form of vitriol-throwing: Gruner is marked for life by the attack of the wild Kitty Winter. This racy fare first appeared in Collier’s for November 8, 1924, and the Strand for February and March 1925 (the first part ending with the dramatic words “Murderous Attack Upon Sherlock Holmes”).
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLANCHED SOLDIER. Current affairs find their way into the Canon more directly than usual in this tale. It deals with a consequence of the Boer War, specifically a medical matter, having its origin in a field hospital much like the one Doyle himself managed during that conflict twenty-five years earlier. Its strength is as a medical tale rather than an instance of detection, as there is little for Holmes to do save to discern the anti-climactic truth and arrange a happy ending for the family of the ex-soldier who believed him to have a dread disease. “The Blanched Soldier” first appeared in Liberty, a New York magazine, for October 16, 1926, and in the Strand for November 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE. The first words of this story make it distinctive: it is written in the third person, not with Watson as narrator. It is in fact an adaptation of The Crown Diamond, a play by Doyle about Sherlock Holmes that was first produced in May 1921. The story saw print in the Strand that October, and in Hearst’s International Magazine in New York in November 1921. Both because of its awkward style (rigidly observing the dramatic unities, it simply describes what might be seen on a stage set), and because of its lack of originality in plot or circumstantial detail, the story is widely recognized as probably the weakest of all the Holmes tales. Nevertheless, it deserves some acclaim as the first new tale to be published since “His Last Bow” four years previously.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GABLES. Unhealthy sexuality (a young man becomes fascinated by an older woman) and the misuse of wealth make the atmosphere of this story distasteful, and there is little detecting for Holmes to do. The issue in this affair, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is blackmail at the point where relationships and money meet. The unusual character of Isadora Klein is probably the story’s strongest feature, though there is also some interest in the way Holmes examines the attempt to buy Mrs. Maberley’s house, contents and all, eventually realizing that a tell-tale manuscript is what the buyer was after. “The Three Gables” was first published in Liberty, New York, for September 18, 1926, and in the Strand for October 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE. Written during Doyle’s years as an advocate of spiritualism, this tale nevertheless presents a firmly materialist Holmes: “No ghosts need apply.” Among the Case-Book stories it is unusually strong and memorable, reminiscent of Holmes’s early adventures, although the title is deliberately lurid, the story something of a trick, for Holmes finds that the woman who has been sucking blood from her stepson’s neck is no sort of monster. “The Sussex Vampire” was first published in the January 1924 issues of both the Strand and (in New York) Hearst’s International Magazine.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GARRIDEBS. The appeal of this story depends heavily on the novelty of the grotesque surname “Garrideb.” Holmes is called in not to solve a crime but to render advice in the search for men of that name; when three of them stand in a row, a fortune is theirs to divide. Of course he finds the whole business to be a fraud, rather as was the League of the Red-Headed Men in a story written thirty years earlier, a story whose plot is largely borrowed for this one. The dramatic scene in which Watson is wounded is among the high emotional moments of the Canon. This tale was first published in Collier’s for October 25, 1924, and in the Strand for January 1925.
THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE. This story (which departs from the “Adventure of” style of title) presents a classic piece of deduction by Holmes, in which he works out from a chip on a stone bridge the true explanation for the death of Maria Gibson. It has to do with a gritty love triangle, a plot that seems unmistakably of the 1920s. The story also offers the Sherlockian one of the Canon’s finest paragraphs about other cases which Holmes addressed, but for which the world is not yet prepared. “Thor Bridge” was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both in the February and March issues of 1922; the first part ends with “We come at once upon a most fruitful line of inquiry.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN. Holmes makes his nearest approach to science fiction in this story, in which the unusual behaviour of a professor proves to be caused by a “serum” extracted from langur monkeys. Experiments with such injections of testicular extract began in the 1880s and attracted much attention in the 1920s, but they seem somehow
