which evidently obsessed him during the early years of the century, while his own emotions were painfully divided. The “child’s scrawl” that proves to be an underworld cipher, and the clue in a gory murder, makes this story one of the most memorable in the Canon, and one of the most frequently dramatized (although solving such a cipher is ordinarily a far simpler matter than Holmes, or the author, makes out). Much attention has been given to Doyle’s possible sources for the dancing men, and to the genuine existence of an ancient Cubitt family in Norfolk. For the first time since “The Five Orange Pips,” Doyle uses an American background in this story, reasonably enough since he now had a major American audience. It appeared in Collier’s Weekly for December 5, 1903, and in the Strand for December 1903.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY CYCLIST. Violet Smith (who is not herself the solitary cyclist of Charlington; that was her pursuer) is the distressed damsel in this dramatic story, and the second of the four Canonical Violets. Like Violet Hunter in “The Copper Beeches,” she is a career woman making her way in the world, and finding the atmosphere at a remote country house threatening. In short, the tale is as much a Gothic work as it is a detective story. The dramatic wedding scene at the end is among the most exciting passages in the Canon. This story was first published in Collier’s for December 26, 1903, and the Strand for January 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL. A lonely little boy from a broken home runs away from school: the plot of this story must reflect Doyle’s childhood fears. Its concluding scene, in which Holmes patronizes and swindles the rich and powerful Duke of Holdernesse, gives a convincing picture of the detective as iconoclast; the scene in which he arranges crumbs on the tablecloth to show Watson how the cow-tracks on the moor were arranged is a classic of detection, explication, and dramatic sense. The story was first published in Collier’s for January 30, 1904, and the Strand for February 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETER. Not, please, “the” Black Peter: the title indicates a person’s name. The story appeared first in Collier’s for February 27, 1904, and in the Strand for March 1904, and deals with a particularly violent murder — Holmes is first seen returning from an attempt to drive a spear through a pig’s carcass, to estimate the force involved in the harpooning of Peter Carey. The whaling background doubtless owes something to Doyle’s youthful experience in that industry.
THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON. Holmes has not much to detect in this case; he is employed instead as an agent to recover papers from Milverton the society blackmailer. To do so, he resorts to wooing Milverton’s housemaid (a sordid episode which has led to much Sherlockian speculation and sniggering) and, in Watson’s company, to burglary; in his presence, Milverton is shot dead by an unidentified woman who has been dubbed “Lady X.” The case thus has much colour and action, as well as moral satisfaction, the noble Holmes vanquishing the snakelike Milverton. The tale was first published in Collier’s for March 26, 1904, and the Strand for April 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS. The British fear of Napoleon, emperor of France, even eight decades after his death, figures large in this story, though ultimately only as a red herring: the gem might have been hidden in busts of anyone, but Napoleon is a plausible subject for monomania, on which everyone except Holmes blames the curious incidents of vandalism. The tale gives an opportunity for Holmes to display his clear reasoning and, in the scene at the end where he triumphantly produces the pearl, his flair for drama as well. “The Six Napoleons” was first published in Collier’s Weekly for April 30, 1904, and the Strand for May 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTS. Improbable details abound in this story of a student who cheats on a university exam; the very procedure used to unmask the cheater, in which the don responsible calls in Holmes privately, is alien from the way a university would deal with such an incident. But as a logic puzzle the tale is splendid, giving Holmes the opportunity to choose from among three young men, the only possible suspects. At last he confronts the culprit, who confesses in a burst of emotion. The story first appeared in the Strand for June 1904 and Collier’s for September 24, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ. Holmes is made to appear politically somewhat retrograde in this tale of Russian nihilists, exiled revolutionaries of the kind much feared in the England of that generation. The story is not of the first rank, despite Holmes’s perception in understanding the dying words of the murdered secretary — “The professor, it was she” — and his ingenuity in scattering cigarette ashes so that the concealed murderess would leave footprints when she emerged. It was first published in the Strand for July 1904 and Collier’s Weekly for October 29, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE-QUARTER. Doyle’s beloved world of amateur sport (with which Holmes ostentatiously denies any familiarity) provides the background for this pathetic tale, in which mystery proves to be domestic tragedy. The comic portrait of the miser, Lord Mount-James, is hardly enough to make the tale a success. It appeared first in the Strand for August 1904 and Collier’s for November 26, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE. By 1904, Doyle had spent almost a decade tending to a dying wife, while he was in love with another woman. Two years later he would become president of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Thoughts on such matters clearly lay behind the writing of this story, about a brave woman who helps her lover kill her aristocratic but drunken husband. The story is also notable for its picture of Holmes seeing more than the official police can see as he inspects the bloody room at the Abbey Grange, and for its juxtaposition of free-minded Australians with decadent English. “The Abbey Grange” was first published in the Strand for September 1904 and Collier’s for December 31, 1904.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN. The title of this story is as intriguing as the story itself; its resonance can be seen in its mention in “The Naval Treaty,” along with the untold “Adventure of the Tired Captain.” The second stain is a clue that helps Holmes solve his case, which involves not the usual murder but a matter of espionage and statecraft, again recalling “The Naval Treaty.” By far the most interesting feature of the case is the beautiful Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope, who is faithful to her high-placed husband after her fashion. The story was first published in the Strand for December 1904 and Collier’s for January 28, 1905.
This novel may just be Doyle’s masterpiece; it may even be two masterpieces, for it consists of two almost entirely separate mystery novels, and the second of them, “The Scowrers,” is if anything more successful than the first, “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” which involves Sherlock Holmes in a way the second does not. J. Bliss Austin, prominent collector and scholar in Pittsburgh, felt such an affinity for the second book that he managed to become owner of the entire manuscript of The Valley of Fear — but then he was a vice-president of United States Steel, a company whose shadow can easily be felt in “The Scowrers,” a tale of the Pennsylvania coal and iron fields.
“The Scowrers” is set in the 1870s, in a time of technological and social change, and hence of conflict between the mostly Irish miners and labourers and their American-English bosses. One flower in the carbonized soil of the Shenandoah Valley (a metaphor repeatedly used in The Valley of Fear) was a fraternal and, eventually, terrorist group called the Mollie Maguires, largely a perversion of the otherwise legitimate Ancient Order of Hibernians. It has been the subject of several books, variously historical and fanciful, and of a 1969 film (The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery). The Mollies were eventually infiltrated by the new Pinkerton detective agency, in the person of agent James McParlan, and a number of them hanged for murder, including Jack Kehoe, the most prominent leader or “bodymaster.” Doyle learned the story of the Mollies from a somewhat
