a volume issued in March 1891 by P.F. Collier. Copyright protection in the United States did not extend (until July 1, 1891) to the works of foreign authors, and it quickly became open season on The Sign of the Four. Donald Redmond’s 1990 book Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates: Copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930 is largely a study of how this one book was published and republished. He writes: “From 1890 at least until 1924 The Sign of the Four was never out of print. From 1894 until the eve of the First World War five to ten different versions were on sale simultaneously.”
Because the piratical publishers worked fast and cheap, errors and verbal variations crept into their texts, some of which have survived into modern editions. The most famous, a reference to “crows” (rather than “crowds”) at the Lyceum Theatre, inspired Newton Williams, an early student of textual variations, to dub his work “the great crow hunt.” Such variation even extends to the title of this novel, which was The Sign of the Four in Lippincott’s, but lost a definite article to become The Sign of Four in the Spencer Blackett edition and the Collier piracy (apparently typeset from the Spencer Blackett text). The four-word title is more widely used today. Green and Gibson assert in their Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983) that “the author originally used the longer title though preferred the shorter one.”
Under either title it is a splendid novel, vastly more mature than its predecessor. Presenting Sherlock Holmes for a return appearance, though still clearly not foreseeing that he had created an industry, Doyle crafted a tightly knit plot that can be recognized as a detective story in modern terms. But the love interest, linking Dr. Watson with the client in the case, Mary Morstan, is still conspicuous, alternating with detective work: Holmes and adventure yield the stage to Watson and love five times through the book’s eleven chapters. Miss Morstan makes an early impression on Watson, he moons over her, he sees her become more and more responsive to his attentions, and at the end of the narrative he reveals to Holmes that he has proposed marriage and she has accepted. So neat is the tying-up of loose ends, after so brief a courtship, that one recognizes the author’s intent to write Watson out of Holmes’s life, ending their companionship and ruling out any future adventures.
The action again takes place in London, with rich scenes set in its foggy streets and in a huge, mysterious suburban house, Pondicherry Lodge. The case begins not with a murder but with a puzzle brought to Holmes by Miss Morstan: she has been receiving valuable pearls from an anonymous source, and now a mysterious message has arrived. Holmes finds the explanation only after a murder does occur and requires solution, to say nothing of a fine scene in which he and a borrowed dog, Toby, follow a literal scent through London. An even finer chase scene takes place along the Thames, through glinting sunlight and evening fog. Explanations follow, but the inevitable flashback (to India in the time of the 1857 Mutiny, an era that would appear again in “The Crooked Man”) is confined to a single chapter. Characters are excitingly drawn (Bartholomew Sholto is usually acknowledged to be a portrait of Wilde), and despite many improbabilities and fumbled details — the action shifts inexplicably from June to September within hours — the book can be said to deserve its immediate success and its continuing popularity.
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
The title “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is popularly and loosely used for any part of the Holmes saga; it was the title of the second film starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and it has provided such distortions as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (an early collection of parodies), The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (a society of female enthusiasts), and The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But strictly it is the title only of one book, the first of five cumulations of the original short stories.
These twelve stories appeared in twelve consecutive issues of the Strand magazine, July 1891 through June 1892, helping to establish the new magazine’s reputation for first-class fiction. (They were also published in the American edition of the Strand, a month later in each case, and syndicated in American and British newspapers.) They also created a new genre: a series of stories involving the same character, each of which could, unlike the episodes of a serial, stand alone. When the sequence began, Sherlock Holmes was almost unknown; a year later he was the popular rage, and his creator was recognized as a successful author.
In October 1892, a collected volume of the Adventures was published by George Newnes, Ltd., the proprietors of the Strand, priced at six shillings (about $24 in today’s money). The first edition, ten thousand copies, was sold out by early in 1893, and succeeding editions have been in print ever since in both Britain and the United States (where the first edition is that of Harper & Brothers, 1892).
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes includes some of the best-known and, by general acclaim, the best of the Holmes tales, in particular “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League.” By the time of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” which is the fourth in the series, Doyle had established most of his bag of conventional tricks. That tale offers everything from the police baiting (in which Holmes mocks professional incompetence) to the obligatory moment at which the sleuth crawls about the scene of the crime with his magnifying glass. The formula “The Adventure of,” which begins the titles of more than half the stories, was used for the first time in the seventh of the series, “The Blue Carbuncle” — it had taken Doyle that long to recognize that he was writing to a genre. (“The Adventure of” is often omitted by commentators.) The slowness of that recognition explains both the frequent cross-references among these early stories (each one mentions some that had gone before, as the author reinforced the connections in the readers’ minds) and the peculiarities of the first story of all, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which is so little like a “typical” Holmes adventure.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA. First published in the Strand in July 1891, this tale involves romance as much as detection. Its structure indeed suggests opera, and appropriately so, as the heroine, Irene Adler, is an operatic contralto, entangled with a flamboyantly improbable king. Scholarship about the story has concentrated on determining the intended identity of “the king of Bohemia,” and on the logistics of Ms. Adler’s blackmail attempt. The chief influence of the story, however, has been the fancy that Holmes meant something erotic or even spiritual by the label “The Woman” he applied to her.
THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE. This tale, first published in the Strand for August 1891, is a classic of detection (in it Holmes makes his celebrated remark about the importance of trouser-knees) and bank robbery. For grotesquerie, on which Holmes prides himself and on which Doyle so often relied for his literary effects, it would be difficult to beat the story’s picture of Fleet Street choked with red-headed men of all tinctures. A striking reinterpretation of the tale is that of Samuel Rosenberg in Naked is the Best Disguise (1974), who identifies its motif of tunnelling, and its effeminate hero, as signs of a homosexual subtext.
A CASE OF IDENTITY. First published in the Strand for September 1891, this tale, with its curiously old-fashioned title, is nearly as insipid as its near-sighted heroine, Mary Sutherland — who, however, becomes the first of the “damsels in distress” whom Holmes rescues in so many of his cases. One might describe “A Case of Identity” as being Poe’s deceptively simple “Purloined Letter” in a setting of middle-class tedium, in which, as some punster has observed, the Angel is a devil.
THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY. The fourth of the original tales, first published in the Strand for October 1891, may plausibly claim to be the perfect Sherlock Holmes story, offering everything readers have come to love, from a railway journey to a scene in which Holmes throws himself into the mud to look at clues through his lens. Once the mystery is solved and the innocent man cleared, to the discomfiture of Lestrade, Holmes arranges for the guilty man to go free, in view of extenuating circumstances. This tale is one of several in which an Australian background plays a part.
