ADVENTURE OF THE STOCK-BROKER’S CLERK. The Strand in March 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for March 11, 1893, presented this tale of a clever robbery and a man who impersonates his own brother. It uses a theme that had already appeared in “The Red-Headed League” — distracting an innocent man with highly paid busy-work to allow thieves to have a clear shot at their booty. Perhaps because much of the action takes place in inelegant Birmingham, or because Hall Pycroft the clerk is so colourless, the story is not highly regarded.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ‘GLORIA SCOTT.’ After ten brief paragraphs of introduction, this tale (first published in the Strand for April 1893 and Harper’s Weekly for April 15, 1893) is told entirely in the voice of Holmes, reminiscing before the fire. It is as though the author, two years into his writings about Holmes, felt the need for some novelty. What he introduces is a flashback to the detective’s youth, specifically to the incident that led him to make detective work his career. Like so many of the stories, the matter turns out to have its origin in distant regions and long-gone years — in a mutiny aboard a ship en route to Australia’s penal colonies. The detection is of little interest, though there are some fine minor deductions about the person of old Trevor, and the most memorable aspect of the case in fact is the amusing if improbable cipher in which an important message is conveyed.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL. A month after “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” in May 1893, the Strand presented a second story about Holmes’s college years, one with many strong features. It also appeared in Harper’s Weekly for May 13. This tale offers royalty, sexual intrigue, a first-rate antagonist for Holmes in the person of butler Brunton, and the “ritual” itself, a series of solemn questions and answers, so easily memorized, so hard to forget. Although the solution to the puzzle is somewhat artificial, involving trigonometry and arbitrary pacing of distances, the climactic scene in which a corpse is found under the flagstones of Hurlstone Manor is a fine one.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE REIGATE SQUIRES. This tale, set among the gentry of Surrey, appeared first in the Strand for June 1893, titled “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire,” singular. Harper’s Weekly published it June 17, 1893, as “The Reigate Puzzle,” perhaps because Americans could not be expected to know exactly what a squire was (although there is evidence that “Puzzle” was the author’s original intention). In British book editions, the title became “The Reigate Squires,” plural, but the “Puzzle” version has remained standard in the United States. By any title, the story is undistinguished, though it presents some memorable glimpses: of Holmes prostrate with depression even while Europe rang with his praises, of Holmes feigning illness to create a diversion, of Holmes knocking over a table and blaming Watson, of Holmes showing off his abilities at the analysis of handwriting. It takes no graphologist, however, to see that the fragments of a note that are reproduced with the tale, being the essential clue, are in the handwriting of Arthur Conan Doyle.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CROOKED MAN. Published in the Strand for July 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for July 8 of that year, this story returns to the Indian Mutiny as background, and gives full scope for Doyle’s fascination with physical distortion: the “crooked man” is an ex-soldier who is hideously crippled as the result of torture by the rebels outside Bhurtee. The tale is notable for the presence of Teddy the mongoose, for the Canon’s only reference to regular church going (in the Roman Catholic tradition, not that of the established church), and for the motive that lies behind the evil deeds it presents: a love triangle, the rivalry of two men for the love of the beautiful Nancy Devoy.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RESIDENT PATIENT. When this story first appeared in the Strand in August 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for August 12, it began with a brief episode now unfamiliar to most Sherlockians. Holmes is at work on an “abstruse” chemical investigation, but “towards evening” he breaks a test tube, gives “an exclamation of impatience,” and suggests to Watson that they go for “a ramble through London.” In modern British editions of the story, that incident has disappeared, and the “ramble” is suggested in the same brief paragraph in which Watson speaks of “a close, rainy day in October.” In American editions, it is also missing, but in favour of a three-page digression known as “the thought-reading episode,” a passage that had previously been published in “The Cardboard Box.” That episode was transplanted into “The Resident Patient,” at the expense of the broken test tube, when “The Cardboard Box” was suppressed, as it effectively was from 1894 to 1917. Such editions as the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes continue to print it in full in both stories. In other respects “The Resident Patient” is less remarkable, though the opportunity it gave Doyle to use his knowledge of medical practice gives verisimilitude. The story deals with the mysterious behaviour of Dr. Trevelyan’s resident patient, who proves to be in hiding from his former companions in crime; at last his sins find him out.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GREEK INTERPRETER. This tale dates from the Strand of September 1893, and Harper’s Weekly for September 16.
It is of interest chiefly because it introduces Mycroft Holmes, the detective’s brother, offering a long scene at the Diogenes Club in which he displays his eccentric brilliance. The case itself is set among foreigners rather than among Englishmen, and involves kidnapping and extortion of a most melodramatic kind. Little detection is involved, but there is a satisfactory rescue scene in which Watson has the opportunity to administer first aid in the form of brandy.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NAVAL TREATY. So long is this story — some 12,700 words, compared with an average of 8,100 for the fifty-six short stories — that it was originally published in two installments, in the Strand issues for October and November 1893. Harper’s Weekly also published it in two installments, October 14 and 21 of that year. (The first installment ended with Holmes’s announcement that “We are now going to interview Lord Holdhurst, the Cabinet Minister and future Premier of England.”) For the first time in the Canon, Holmes is involved with government secrets and affairs of state: a treaty has been stolen, and war threatens if it is not recovered. The story has elements of the locked-room mystery, with a rather improbable floor plan of the Foreign Office, and of the purloined-letter tradition, as the treaty is found very close at hand. Its most memorable moment is, however, a digression, in which Holmes admires a moss rose and reflects that “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE FINAL PROBLEM. The title of this tale seems a redundancy — the more so as Holmes faces no “problem” in it, in the sense of a mystery to be solved. Rather, he has traced to his lair the mastermind of London criminality, Professor Moriarty, and must now conquer him or be conquered by him. To Watson’s horror, detective and arch-criminal die together, falling over the falls of the Reichenbach, in Switzerland, to which the two men have journeyed in anticipation of a showdown. Doyle wrote this story and offered it for publication in the Strand (and also McClure’s) for December 1893, simply as a way of killing off Holmes so that he might turn his authorial attention to other works. When it appeared, he told audiences later, “if I had killed a real man I could not have received more vindictive letters than those which poured in upon me.” There is, however, no first-hand evidence that young men about town wore black mourning-bands on their arms that winter. Their grief, real or assumed, is a tribute to the effect of the earlier Holmes stories and the pathos with which Doyle, in Watson’s voice, writes a final tribute to “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.”
Determined for some years to write nothing more of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle weakened in 1901 when he realized that Holmes was the perfect protagonist for a novel he wanted to write about a demon hound on Dartmoor in Devon, in southwestern England. He did not, however, bring Holmes back to life, instead presenting his story as an
