Sherlock Holmes Read online

  SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE NOVELS

  A Study in Scarlet · The Sign of Four · The Hound of the Baskervilles · The Valley of Fear

  In 1886 a doctor living on the southern coast of England decided to try his hand at writing a mystery story. In his notes for A Study in Scarlet, he called his chief characters, if only provisionally, J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker. Wisely, though, Arthur Conan Doyle eventually settled on much better names—indeed just the right names—and so created two of the most beloved figures in all of fiction, the world’s first and only consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and his friend and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson.

  Collected here are all four Holmes novels—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear—with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic and Baker Street Irregular Michael Dirda. These often eerie tales of seemingly impossible crimes, of hidden treasure and supernatural terror and inescapable revenge, have been thrilling readers, young and old, for generation after generation. They move swiftly from cozy 221B Baker Street to the outskirts of gaslit London, or to spooky Dartmoor and its deadly Grimpen Mire, or to distant India and even to the United States. In them Holmes matches wits with some of his most formidable adversaries, including his implacable nemesis Professor James Moriarty. There is ultimately one simple but compelling reason why these four novels have been read and reread, as well as broadcast, filmed, and reinterpreted again and again: they are among the most exciting, atmospheric, and unforgettable stories in all of world literature.

  “What you are looking at is a kind of narrative perfection: a perfect interplay between dialogue and description, perfect characterization and perfect timing.”

  —John le Carré

  “Every writer owes something to Holmes.”

  —T.S. Eliot

  PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

  SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE NOVELS

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was born in Edinburgh in 1859. Of Irish background, he was first educated at Jesuit schools and then at the University of Edinburgh, from which he received a degree in medicine in 1881. After opening a practice in Southsea, Conan Doyle—already an occasional writer of short stories—produced the detective novel A Study in Scarlet. The hero, Sherlock Holmes, was modeled in part after his teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, a diagnostician with spectacular powers of observation and analysis, and in part after Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional mastermind C. Auguste Dupin. Following several rejections, the short novel was finally sold to a British publisher for just £25 and published in the 1887 edition of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Thus was born the world’s best-known and most-loved fictional detective. Fifty-nine more Sherlock Holmes adventures followed, nearly all of them first serialized in The Strand magazine. At one point, Conan Doyle—complaining that writing about Holmes kept him from working on better, more important books—killed off his great detective, but popular demand and financial incentives eventually led to the sleuth of Baker Street’s resurrection. Apart from his Holmes stories, Conan Doyle published historical fiction, notably The White Company and The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, the science-fictional adventures of Professor George Edward Challenger (chiefly The Lost World and The Poison Belt), and several autobiographical works, including a charming tour of his library, Through the Magic Door. He became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when Edward VII knighted him in 1902 for his defense of the British cause in the Boer War. During the last fifteen years of his life, and to the dismay of many, the world-famous writer devoted much of his energy to promoting belief in Spiritualism. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in Sussex in 1930 at the age of seventy-one.

  MICHAEL DIRDA, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, is the author of the 2012 Edgar Award–winning On Conan Doyle. His other publications include the memoir An Open Book and five collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, Classics for Pleasure, and Browsings. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism and in recent years has become a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and several other literary periodicals. His current project is a study of popular fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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  This edition with an introduction by Michael Dirda published in Penguin Books 2015

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Michael Dirda

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  This book is not authorized by Conan Doyle Estate Limited or any other party.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930.

  [Novels. Selections]

  Sherlock Holmes: the novels / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ; introduction by Michael Dirda.

  pages cm.—(Penguin Classics Deluxe)

  ISBN 978-1-101-59505-3

  1. Holmes, Sherlock—Fiction. 2. Watson, John H. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—England—Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories, English. I. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930. Study in scarlet. II. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930. Sign of four. III. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930. Hound of the Baskervilles. IV. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930. Valley of fear. V. Title.

  PR4621 2015b

  823'.8—dc23

  2015011964

  Cover art and design by Adam Simpson

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Sherlock Holmes

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by MICHAEL DIRDA

  A Note on the Text

  SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE NOVELS

  A Study in Scarlet

  The Sign of Four

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  The Valley of Fear

  Introduction

  I like books in which things happen, and then keep on happening.

  —VINCENT STARRETT, AUTHOR OF The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

  If you’ve never read any Sherlock Holmes mystery stories, this omnibus of the four longer adventures will introduce you to the world’s one and only “consulting detective.” If you already know of Sherlock Holmes from the recent (and very entertaining) movies and television series, you will discover that there is no substitute for the original and best. In either case, you needn’t avert your eyes from this opening essay, for it avoids “spoilers” or revealing anything likely to mar the first-time reader’s enjoyment.

  Not that knowing “who done it” or how matters all that much. People who treasure these stories return to them because of the charm of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing and for the pleasure of being, once more, in the company of the great detective and his great-hearted friend and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson. Gaslight and hansom cabs, foggy nights in Victorian London, the snug bachelor quarters at 221B Baker Street—these are what rereaders come back for. The canonical adventures, consisting of four novels and fifty-six short stories, make up the best comfort literature in the world.

  I myself first discovered Sherlock Holmes as a boy of ten, on a dark and stormy night in November
, when I huddled under blankets with a paperback of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Two days later I rode my bicycle to the public library and signed out a worn one-volume edition of the master detective’s complete adventures. Tremulous with excitement, I immediately sat down at a secluded desk near an old-fashioned radiator and turned to A Study in Scarlet, described on its title page as “a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department.” Ever since, I—and many others all around the world—have never stopped reading and rereading those reminiscences.

  Even now, just murmuring the titles in this Penguin omnibus delivers a little jolt of anticipatory excitement: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), The Valley of Fear (1915). Not only do these four longer adventures offer mystery, they are also richly abundant in humor, romance, social realism, Gothic horror, and even frontier myth. In them Conan Doyle, borrowing elements from nineteenth-century “sensation” fiction, incorporates ancient curses, dark doings at the outposts of empire, criminal masterminds, blackmail, and revenge. The novels are, in short, wonderfully extravagant in plot, setting, and atmosphere, as well as absolutely essential to a full understanding of Holmes and Watson. I love them and you will too.

  Nonetheless, compared with the tightly composed short stories, these book-length cases are structurally awkward. Three contain protracted “flashbacks” that are effectively separate stories in themselves. Conan Doyle resorts to these historical narratives—which can be quite gripping all on their own—to explain the reasons behind the murders that Holmes has just solved. While The Hound of the Baskervilles doesn’t feature one of these extensive tailpieces, its central chapters nonetheless focus on Watson without Holmes. This is a little like Hamlet without the prince.

  There are several possible reasons why Conan Doyle adopted such a cumbersome framework. During the 1880s the French detective story writer Émile Gaboriau enjoyed immense popularity in England, and he employed just this odd structure for his books. Monsieur Lecoq, for instance, includes such a long explanatory flashback that one modern edition simply drops the second half of the novel entirely. An additional reason may be, quite simply, Conan Doyle’s own passion for history. Even though Sherlock Holmes’s exploits made him rich and famous, he much preferred to write historical fiction. He relished re-creating an era in detail and would happily immerse himself in background research for months, piling up facts and data with which to give his narratives authenticity.

  So even though A Study in Scarlet turned out to be the young writer’s first published novel, it was soon succeeded by far more ambitious, and much bulkier works, such as Micah Clarke (1889), set in the seventeenth century, and The White Company (1891), set in the fourteenth. The latter, a chivalric romance, was Conan Doyle’s own favorite among his novels, especially when read in tandem with its prequel Sir Nigel (1906). To modern eyes, these books’ battle sequences still shine, but far too many pages linger over the minutiae of period manners, costume, and weaponry. As Hesketh Pearson observed in a biography of Conan Doyle: “To the end of his life it never occurred to him that the accumulation of detail, however accurate or picturesque, does not vivify an age but nullifies it.”

  That lifelong love for history, coupled to an uneasy fascination with American life, reemerges in A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, where the second halves are, respectively, a western set in Utah with a titillating sexual theme (Mormon polygamy) and a laconic, hard-boiled account of violence and class warfare in the mining community of “Vermissa Valley, USA.” Some readers may recognize Conan Doyle’s principal literary sources for these dime-novel episodes: “The Story of the Destroying Angel,” part of New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Stevenson, and The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1887) by Allan Pinkerton.

  Matters are slightly different in the other two novels. In The Sign of Four a similar flashback—in this case to India and the Andaman Islands—is better integrated into the plot, being a criminal’s confession made in the presence of Holmes, Watson, and the police. Conan Doyle presumably drew inspiration for this book’s treasure story plot from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), which centers on the theft of an Indian jewel and the sinister events that later ensue in peaceful England. This leaves The Hound of the Baskervilles, generally regarded as the most aesthetically pleasing of the longer stories because it preserves the unities of time, place, and action, and doesn’t get bogged down in ex post facto accounts of earlier events. Instead, Conan Doyle briskly relates the legend of a Dartmoor hell-hound in just a single chapter at the beginning of the novel, then immediately connects that eighteenth-century backstory to the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the discovery of footprints near his body. When Holmes asks his informant, Dr. Mortimer, whether these last were from a man or a woman, he receives the most thrilling reply in modern literature: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” As a ten-year-old I knew that writing, or reading, couldn’t get any better than that.

  Nonetheless, this spooky novel—even though a popular candidate for the “best mystery ever” trophy—suffers from that bothersome interval in the middle, when Holmes is absent and one must make do with Watson’s discoveries both at Baskerville Hall and on the nearby moor. Almost every reader surrenders to the brooding power of the ominous landscape—those ancient stone huts, the deadly Grimpen Mire, the eerie sounds and lights in the darkness—while also wishing that the great detective would reappear. Holmes is where our heart is.

  And yet. While Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional character of modern times, and the most filmed as well, he truly would be nothing without Watson, his chronicler, his Boswell, his friend. Christopher Morley—founder of that quintessential Sherlockian society, the Baker Street Irregulars—once called their collected adventures “a textbook of friendship.” The stories record how Holmes saved Watson from going to seed and how the good doctor gradually humanized a great thinking machine. Moreover, as their exploits together continued, this dynamic duo gradually stepped off the page into real life. As Vincent Starrett said of them in his poem “221B”: “Here dwell together still two men of note/ Who never lived and so can never die.” So real do Holmes and Watson seem even now that people still write to Baker Street pleading for their advice and help.

  I myself would never trouble those busy men with my problems unless, of course, I were in really serious trouble. But I would certainly argue that these accounts of their adventures are, as much as any Keatsian urn, a joy forever. Nevertheless, it was a very near thing that they were ever recorded at all.

  A STUDY IN SCARLET AND THE SIGN OF FOUR

  Before he created the most illustrious residents of Baker Street—whom he nearly called J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker— Arthur Conan Doyle had already written a novel that was lost in the mail and contributed excellent short fiction to various magazines. “The Captain of the Pole-Star” (1883), set in the Arctic, is one of the most haunting Victorian tales of the supernatural. But the young writer could hardly think of quitting his day job as a doctor in Southsea. A Study in Scarlet was turned down by one publisher after another, until it was finally accepted by Ward, Lock, and Co., who offered to buy the British copyright for a derisory twenty-five pounds. Out of desperation, Conan Doyle took the paltry sum, then still had to wait a year before his short novel came out in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Today, that annual may be the most valuable magazine in the world. Only thirty-three copies are known to exist and many are tattered or incomplete. If a truly fine copy were to appear on the market today, it might bring a quarter of a million dollars. Or more.

  The 1887 Beeton’s containing A Study in Scarlet sold moderately well, and the novel was later republished as a book, with rather crude illustrations by Conan Doyle’s artist father. And that was all. There was no great hoopla, no recognition of a new star in the nascent detec
tive story firmament.

  Yet from the very first page, Conan Doyle’s storytelling mastery—the genial narrative voice, the fast-moving action—sweeps the reader along. In short order we learn that John H. Watson has been an army doctor, was grievously wounded at the battle of Maiwand in the Second Afghan War, and now, broken in health, has wearily returned to England. In London—“that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”—he falls into “a comfortless, meaningless existence,” spending his money profligately until he finally recognizes the need to economize. One day he encounters an old acquaintance who tells him about a chap looking for someone to share digs with in Baker Street.

  Watson and Holmes meet at St. Bart’s hospital, where Holmes’s first recorded words are “I’ve found it!,” that is, the English for “Eureka,” exclaimed by Archimedes when he suddenly grasped the displacement of liquids as he sat down in his bath. This is significant because the Holmes stories are leavened throughout with classical tags, biblical references, and literary allusions, as well as perplexing inconsistencies—Was Watson wounded in the leg or the arm?—and myriad tantalizing lacunae. Did Holmes attend Oxford, Cambridge, or some other university? Arguing about such questions and other points of dialectical hullaballoo provide never-ending joy to the members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the many other literary sodalities devoted to the study of the “canon.”

  The lanky young chemist’s reaction to his discovery of a test for bloodstains is also a hint of things to come. “His eyes fairly glittered as he spoke, and he put his hand over his heart and bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination.” Sherlock Holmes is nothing if not theatrical; he loves to dazzle and amaze. Some scholars, who play the game that the stories are factual if incomplete biography, speculate that young Holmes was once an actor, perhaps appearing in Hamlet—a play he often quotes from—and that he might possibly have gone on tour in the United States, which would account for his knowledge of that country. Who can say?