hint that he might soon retire. The story was first published in the Strand and in Hearst’s International Magazine, both for March 1923.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE LION’S MANE. Sherlock Holmes himself is the narrator of this tale (his prose style is, however, revealingly similar to Watson’s). Its events take place on the Sussex coastline, after Holmes’s retirement to a “villa,” and involve the strange death of Fitzroy McPherson, which proves to be the result of a natural phenomenon rather than of human violence. The story has novelty (not least, the absence of Watson) to distinguish it, as well as the portrait of that “most complete and remarkable woman,” Maud Bellamy. “The Lion’s Mane” first appeared in Liberty for November 27, 1926, and in the Strand for December 1926.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE VEILED LODGER. Holmes waxes philosophical in this sad tale, as does Doyle, who wrote it near the end of his life (it was published in Liberty for January 22, 1927, and the Strand for February 1927). Readers might reasonably feel a little cheated, for Holmes is called on to do no detecting at all, only a little speculating and a good deal of listening as Eugenia Ronder tells the dramatic story of how her face was ruined, so that she now lives behind a veil.
THE ADVENTURE OF SHOSCOMBE OLD PLACE. Original publication of the Canon came to an end with this story, appearing in Liberty for March 5, 1927, and the Strand for April 1927. It is a story of degeneration, death, and old bones, with the suspected murder proving to be nothing more serious than a fraud born of desperation. Still, its final paragraph tries to offer hope, speaking of “a happier note than Sir Robert’s actions deserved ... an honoured old age.” It harks back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, with the association of mysterious dogs and spooky death, and its highlight is the brief exciting scene in which Holmes lets a spaniel loose to bark at the mysterious occupant of a carriage. (The story was originally announced as “The Adventure of the Black Spaniel,” but never published under that title.) A return to the horse-racing milieu that gave “Silver Blaze” much of its novelty also adds interest to this story.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RETIRED COLOURMAN. Perhaps because of the word “retired” in the title, and because its theme is the hopelessness of old age, this story was put last in The Case-Book, although there were two tales still to come when it was first published in Liberty for December 18, 1926, and the Strand for January 1927. Doyle returns to his frequent theme of a love triangle, includes his only mention of chess (“one mark of a scheming mind”), makes Sherlock Holmes conduct one of his most clever, if inconsiderate, ruses, and offers perhaps the most chilling image in the entire Canon, the incomplete phrase scrawled on the wall of the death chamber by the two murder victims. The seven-word question with which Holmes nails the unsuspecting killer is a splendidly dramatic note for the story which a cover-to-cover reader of the Canon will encounter last.
IN WRITING THE SHERLOCK HOLMES tales, Arthur Conan Doyle invented the valuable literary genre of “linked” short stories: their plots are independent (so that they can be read in any order) but the central characters and settings continue. A detective is the perfect figure to appear in such a structure, for he remains unchanged while a succession of clients bring their various problems to him.
Because Holmes appears in all the stories, Watson in all but two, and several other characters repeatedly, it is easy for the reader to see the tales as fragments of biography. Enthusiasts, either believing or pretending to believe, have speculated and written endlessly about Holmes’s accomplishments and character, and about the deeds he may have performed which Doyle (or Watson) unaccountably failed to record. In addition, it is easy to see themes and characteristics that appear in story after story, some with gradual changes over the decades from A Study in Scarlet to the final, sad tales published in 1927.
Readers who see the Canon as a unit, rather than as unconnected stories, have felt the need for reference books that help them trace the developments and locate specific names or incidents. An early alphabetical guide of this kind was Jay Finley Christ’s An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1947). It was valuable, but idiosyncratic and, even with two supplements, inadequate. A modern successor is Good Old Index (1987), by William D. Goodrich. Both are keyed to the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes. Some devotees prefer The Canonical Compendium (1999) by Stephen Clarkson, with references to several editions of the Canon. Rather different, and enjoyable as well as useful, is Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (1977), which concentrates on proper names and some matters of Victorian daily life, defining them and indicating the story (but not the precise page) that gives each its interest to a reader of the Canon.
“What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” asked Edgar W. Smith in his first essay as editor of the Baker Street Journal (1946). His answer began with discussion not so much of Holmes as of Holmes’s time, but then it turned to the figure of the great detective himself:
Not only there and then, but here and now, he stands before us as a symbol — a symbol, if you please, of all that we are not, but ever would be. His figure is sufficiently remote to make our secret aspirations for transference seem unshameful, yet close enough to give them plausibility. We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued.
That is a lot to ask of a human being, or even of a literary approximation of a human being, and yet enthusiasts continue to ask it. Perhaps it would be better first to take the measure of Holmes as a man — “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known,” Watson is made to call him, borrowing a phrase first used by Plato about Socrates.
Holmes reports that his ancestors were “country squires” and that a grandmother was a sister of “Vernet, the French artist” (presumably Émile Jean Horace Vernet, 1789–1863). His older brother Mycroft appears significantly in two of the stories, and is glimpsed in a third. Otherwise, the reader knows nothing of Holmes’s family or background beyond vague hints about his university education. The Canon provides an outline of his career, from his early cases as an amateur (“The ‘Gloria Scott’” and “The Musgrave Ritual”) through his establishment in London as a consulting detective; his meeting with Watson in (probably) January 1881; ten years of professional success; his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach in 1891; his return from supposed death three years later; a further nine years of professional work; his retirement to Sussex, from which he emerged for counter-espionage work (“His Last Bow”) in 1912–14. During his active career he is said to have handled thousands of cases, only a handful of which are chronicled. The great stretches of time unaccounted for — if one accepts Holmes as a historical figure, and the tales as fragments of his biography — are an immense temptation to the tale-spinner and the scholar alike.
HIS LIMITATIONS. Sherlock Holmes is first presented in A Study in Scarlet as a tall, thin, flamboyant, and eccentric student in the pathology laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, where he is developing a practical test for bloodstains. By Chapter II he is rooming with Watson at 221B Baker Street, and before long Watson, puzzled about his companion, tries to set out his “limits” in a famous chart:
1. Knowledge of Literature. — Nil.
2. “ “ Philosophy. — Nil.
3. “ “ Astronomy. — Nil.
And so on. Eventually he discovers that Holmes is “a consulting detective,” who believes in keeping in the “lumber-room” of his brain only such information as he is likely to need.
