Klan, whose American villainies (a favourite theme throughout the Canon) lie behind the violence in this tale, first published in the Strand for November 1891. The story also offers a particularly rich list of unpublished cases, and a revealing scene in which Holmes berates himself for failing to save a threatened client’s life. Finally, it includes that splendid atmospheric line, “The wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney.”
THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP. Given to the world in the Strand for December 1891, this tale begins with a Watsonian domestic scene (the famous passage in which the doctor’s wife calls him James rather than John) and moves on to an opium den before its main plot begins to appear. The story, one of double life and deception (and one in which Doyle gives full play to his fascination with deformed faces), is about a middle-class journalist who enters the dirty and unrespectable world of begging. Ugly economic truths come unusually clear to the reader as Holmes works out what is going on. Also featured in this tale are feminine beauty, in the form of Mrs. Neville St. Clair, and couture.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE. Christopher Morley called this tale “a Christmas story without slush”; it was first published, presumably just before Christmas, in the Strand for January 1892. The tale has to do with a holiday goose, which in pre-refrigeration days must be eaten promptly and which proves to contain a stolen jewel. The comic Henry Baker is only an incident, and the actual thief is of no account. What matters in the story is its seasonal framework, from the “compliments” brought by Watson to Holmes on “the second morning after Christmas” to Holmes’s pardoning of the thief at the end because it is “the season of forgiveness.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND. Best known and probably most often dramatized of the short stories, this tale brings Holmes to the assistance of another damsel in distress. Her sister has already died in mysterious circumstances in a lonely country house, and now she too is threatened. Freudians delight in this story, with the obvious sexual threat posed by a selfish stepfather, and the story’s climax comes after one of those late-night vigils in the dark, when Holmes conquers an improbable snake, a “swamp adder.” (Much has been written by Sherlockians about its species and the likelihood that it could drink milk and respond to a whistle.) The flavour of exotic India adds grotesquerie to the English countryside as it subtracts realism from the tale, which was first published in the Strand for February 1892.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMB. Doyle becomes luxuriously gruesome in this story, beginning it in Watson’s consulting-room as he (incompetently) treats an amputation. Then the patient — Victor Hatherley, whose profession of engineer was just the new thing for a smart, practical young man in the 1890s — tells the story of how he lost his thumb to a meat cleaver, and Holmes identifies the crime and the criminal for whom the attack on Hatherley was a mere incident. The story was first published in the Strand for March 1892.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR. One can hear an echo of Doyle’s early social and romance tales in this story, which first appeared in the Strand for April 1892. The title is a novelty, for there is no acknowledged bachelor in the story. At its centre is a society wedding; in the background, events no less romantic that took place in the American west. Holmes, seeming not to share the Victorian impression of America as uncouth, speaks of the future “quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes” as the hope for civilization. The story includes such other beloved details as Holmes’s snub of a nobleman who suggests that the detective has not worked at such a social level before (“No, I am descending”) and the arrival of “ancient and cobwebby bottles” to accompany a catered supper at 221B Baker Street.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET. Unusual for being set amid snow, this tale — which first appeared in the Strand for May 1892 — is one of several jewel-theft adventures in the early Canon. It also has a spicy sexual subplot, and brings Holmes into indirect contact with one of those mysterious quasi-royal personages who figure in several of the stories. How plausible it is for any such personage to pawn state property (with a most respectable banker) for private advantage, and how plausible it is for a corner to break off such a coronet with an audible crack, it may be best for the reader not to inquire.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES. This next of the “damsel in distress” tales, published in the Strand for June 1892, presents the first of the “four Violets,” women — more or less distressed — who share that given name and appear in Holmes’s cases. Violet Hunter, the governess puzzled about a household where she is compelled to cut off her beautiful red hair, is in fact a strikingly strong and interesting woman, whom writers have sometimes imagined as a possible mate for Holmes. The story is an admirable venture into the Gothic genre, with its isolated house, intimations of madness in the attic, feminine fear, and final bloodshed.
THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
A second series of twelve “adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” as they were first called, appeared in the Strand beginning in December 1892 and continuing through December 1893. Again, the American edition of the Strand carried them a month later, and they also appeared shortly afterwards in Harper’s Weekly (except for “The Final Problem,” which was published in McClure’s as well as in the Strand).
As soon as the series was complete, it was published in book form as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The first American edition, from Harper & Brothers, contained all twelve of the 1892–93 stories, but the first British edition, from George Newnes, Ltd., omitted “The Cardboard Box,” which was then dropped from all subsequent book editions of The Memoirs, including a “second issue” from Harper in September 1894.
THE ADVENTURE OF SILVER BLAZE. Set against the irresistibly colourful background of horse racing, and provided with some of the most dramatic dialogue anywhere in the Canon, this story is a favourite and has been dramatized often. It provides the “dog in the night-time” incident, which in non-Sherlockian contexts is the most frequently quoted of Holmes’s sayings, and for Sherlockians it provides the vexing mathematical puzzle of the train whose speed Holmes could calculate to the nearest one-half mile per hour, as well as many interesting anomalies in the details of racing colours and regulations. Further, in the original publication, it provides the most popular of all Sidney Paget illustrations, showing Holmes and Watson in their railway carriage, in classic poses. The story, first published in the Strand for December 1892, and reprinted in Harper’s Weekly for February 25, 1893, has a surprise ending of a kind that could hardly be improved upon.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CARDBOARD BOX. First published in the Strand for January 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for January 14 of that year, this story involves fine detective work and a very satisfactory outcome. It also involves a double murder (the severing of the victims’ ears, a mutilation of the kind Doyle used again and again in his writings, is particularly grotesque) and one motivated by sexual jealousy. Presumably for such reasons, Doyle chose to suppress the story soon after its publication, not to restore it for twenty-three years. He told an acquaintance in 1903 that “a tale involving sex was out of place in a collection designed for boys.” Later he called it “sensational” and (which it is not) “weak.” It may well be that his real reason for suppressing the story was its grimness; unlike most detective stories, it has nothing like a happy ending.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE YELLOW FACE. This tale, first published in the Strand for February 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for February 11, 1893, is one of the less popular of the early stories, perhaps because Holmes’s attempts at detection in it are utterly unsuccessful. The background references to the American South are less convincing than those in “The Five Orange Pips,” and what it says about relations between the races makes many readers uncomfortable. The story’s greatest
