The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PENGUIN COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded that prodigious variety of activity and creative work that made him so great an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet of ‘the good giant’. He was the nephew of ‘Dickie’ Doyle the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors are said to have provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes.

  He first set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he first began to write. His success as a writer was only one of the facets of a versatile man. He was a champion of those convicted of crimes they had not committed, as witness his efforts in proving the innocence of Oscar Slater; a sportsman, a flesh and blood detective himself, for whose help there were frequent demands; a physician in the Boer War; a preacher and a missionary.

  His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained an international status and constantly decoyed his creator from work that he preferred. At one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life. Holmes was a rival who had so many of the characteristics and experiences of Conan Doyle that he even adopted one of his creator’s friends, Dr Watson, and turned him also into one of the famous characters of fiction. Penguin also publishes, in individual volumes, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This collection first published by Doubleday & Company Inc. 1930

  Published in Penguin Books 1981

  Reissued with a new Foreword 2009

  1

  Foreword copyright © Ruth Rendell, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193181-4

  FOREWORD

  THE ULTIMATE IN fame reaches an author and his creation when a character in his fiction is seen by readers as a real person. More than that – when this assumption is made without thought or reasoning but taken for granted. The creation is so convincing, his or her character so thoroughly and deeply drawn, their ways and habits, propensities and virtues so established, their appearance so confidently described, that the reader has little doubt that this is a living human being.

  Dickens’s Mr Pickwick is or has been such a one and so, I think, has Shakespeare’s (and Verdi’s) Falstaff. But neither of them has come near to meriting that absolute confidence in a character’s true existence as Sherlock Holmes. When I lived very near to Baker Street and the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b, visitors used to stop me to ask where Sherlock Holmes ‘lived’ or even ‘lives’. They believed in him as a real detective. They took Dr Watson’s chronicles of his adventures as true records of a dauntless investigator’s exploits.

  As early as his first novella, The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had begun receiving post directed to Sherlock Holmes. One fan asked to be sent a copy of his monograph on tobacco ash, others asked for Holmes’s autograph; some enclosed gifts for Holmes, including violin strings and shag tobacco. Another wrote applying for a job as his housekeeper. The detective had become a rave and a celebrity, part of the national consciousness. He was as famous as Queen Victoria.

  But for Doyle the success of Sherlock Holmes obscured his more serious work and he called his stories a ‘lower stratum of literary achievement.’ It was the old story of the popular entertainer who dreams of playing Hamlet. For Doyle’s literary historical novels were never very readable and are now largely forgotten, while the Holmes stories, which their author categorized as pot-boilers, are recognised as original works of genius.

  Thanks to the portraits by Sidney Paget, Holmes’s appearance is better known than that of most fictional characters. And this long, lean figure and face, dark, saturnine and with a kind of burning intelligence, has suffered from no competition. If other artists have attempted a likeness, their efforts have had no success. This is what Holmes looks like and what his readers accept. This, moreover, is what the actors who have portrayed him on film and television look like. Everyone who has ever seen an episode in the series is familiar with the late Jeremy Brett whose resemblance to the Paget portrait was almost uncanny. How old is Holmes? His estimated age in His Last Bow places his year of birth as around 1854, his birthday given as January 6th – because this date is Epiphany, a manifestation of some divine or superhuman being? Or is it the merest chance?

  He is therefore no more than thirty-three when the stories begin. A magical age? The age when, according to a mediaeval tradition, we shall all meet in heaven? In films he looks older. He feels older. To viewers he is middle-aged but these adaptations are none the worse for that. Excellent as are the performances of those playing Holmes, Dr Watson and Holmes’s loyal housekeeper Mrs Hudson, they are often good, occasionally brilliant, but they cannot compete with ‘the real thing’. The stories when translated to film have the advantage of sets and costuming appropriate to their period, of action and of dramatic acting, but they leave little to the viewers’ imagination and deny him or her the pleasure of a close study on the printed page of Holmes’s deductive methods. To derive the maximum satisfaction from his writing, Doyle’s fiction needs to be read.

  He began the Holmes stories in 1887 and in the ensuing decades – his detective was said to have been in active practice for twenty-three years – wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories. His was not the first detective fiction. It was preceded long before by William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Williams, by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and by Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, but his protagonist was the first detective to be presented as personality, hero and star. While his other work is entertaining and, in the case of The Lost World, original, the Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a landmark in English literature. Holmes was not only a celebrity in his author’s lif
etime and far beyond but the forerunner of a thousand fictional detectives investigating crime and pursuing criminals all over the world.

  I have described Holmes as protagonist and hero, yet he is the narrator of his own exploits in only two stories, The Musgrave Ritual and The ‘Gloria Scott’, while two others are told in the third person. It is the job of Dr Watson, his colleague and himself the precursor of many a detective’s sidekick, to chronicle his investigations and successes. Somewhat sycophantic but often also acerbic in a practical way, Watson has recorded the adventures too dramatically for Holmes’s taste. He complains that his biographer has placed too much emphasis on the sensational aspects of the cases and neglected to describe the detective’s deductive methods. Readers do not agree. For their success the stories rely on the creation of atmosphere – terrifying, sinister or mystifying – and on the eccentricities and curious charm of Holmes, while the methods can be amusing but look a little amateurish in the light of modern forensics.

  Doyle’s own favourites among them included The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Red-headed League, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Musgrave Ritual but not my own favourite, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. My preference, I think, is due to its quasi-political content, to the horror engendered in anyone who has mislaid valuable and irreplaceable documents and the vital part played in the story by the London Underground. The arrangement with the train would have worked in the 1890s and possibly could be made to work now, a hundred years later. The Musgrave Ritual concerns what its title suggests and has about it an air of mystery and suggestion of the occult as well as introducing the reader to Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, an intellectual giant superior in brain power (according to Holmes himself) to his own.

  We are told that the snake and bell-pull contrivance in The Adventure of the Speckled Band will not stand up to testing but does anyone now really care? It is a marvellous story and even today takes one aback that any would-be killer could think up so diabolical a murder method. But ‘it’s a wicked world,’ as Holmes remarks, ‘and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all.’

  The fiction concerning royal or aristocratic personages holds less appeal for me than does that which explores the lives of working people or the middle classes. A Scandal in Bohemia is the exception, largely due to the presence of Irene Adler. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, Irene is a name which first appeared in England in about 1880 and would therefore have been fashionable and perhaps glamorous when Doyle began writing about Holmes in 1887. The story is not one of his best but Irene Adler, opera singer, beauty, adventuress, blackmailer, has the distinction of being the only woman – perhaps the only person – to outwit him. To him, as Watson says, ‘she is always the woman.’ But he hastens to add that, ‘It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love.’ He never does. While Watson marries and appears to have married twice – though this may be a mistake on Doyle’s part – Holmes remains single and celibate.

  A Scandal in Bohemia is also the story in which Holmes manages, in his subtle and ironic way, to be rude to a king. He is no respecter of persons. In The Adventure of the Priory School he tells a duke – and these are the days when a duke could be a cabinet minister – that he has condoned a felony and aided the escape of a murderer. And when a ‘noble bachelor’ in a story with that title tells him condescendingly that he presumes the detective’s usual clients are not from his level of society, Holmes replies that this is so, his last client was the King of Scandinavia.

  Doyle understood that his readers would wish to identify with his characters, as all readers do, in any age. The Victorians also had that passion for celebrity which is so common today but instead of pop singers and models, their celebrities belonged in a wealthy and landowning upper class. So while he could people many of his stories with characters like the unfortunate engineer who loses his thumb and that master of disguise, the man with the twisted lip – two of the best stories, these – he understood that to attract readers he must also write about a jewelled coronet which is ‘one of the most precious public possessions of the empire’ and the fabulous blue carbuncle, abstracted from the jewel case of a countess. Twice he is mentioned as having a king for a client, while titled men and women abound in his fiction. Not only is he paid for his services but is awarded the Legion of Honour in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez. The Dutch royal family presents him with a fabulous ring and he receives an emerald tie-pin from Queen Victoria herself.

  Probably the best-known of all the collection is the long short story The Hound of the Baskervilles. Much of its popularity it owes to its bleak and sinister setting and to the supernatural element, so effectively dismissed by Holmes when he solves the mystery. It is a story of wonderful originality and when it first appeared must have had a spine-chilling effect on readers. It still startles today. But A Study in Scarlet, the novella in which Dr John Watson introduces himself and in which he introduces Sherlock Holmes, is just as good and has the merit of taking us to late nineteenth-century America, a land of pioneers and outlaws. This carefully crafted piece of fiction showed readers what they had seldom, if ever, seen before; his characters’ trek across the American continent and through the Rockies into Utah, shows them the Mormons, polygamy and the great temple in Salt Lake City. It also afforded Watson the opportunity to say that Holmes has ‘brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.’

  There is a good deal of passion in the stories and quite a lot of love. After all, Dr Watson falls in love and marries during the course of The Sign of Four. Several stories are concerned with the fate of young women fearful that they may be prevented from marrying the man of their choice or expected to marry a man they have not chosen. But there is no sex. Illicit sexual behaviour is heavily frowned upon and made the province of the villains of the stories and of women lost to all virtue and morality, for this is the 1880s and 90s. Only Irene Adler is permitted to get away with having been a man’s mistress, in her case no less a man than the King of Bohemia, and not only get away with it but, having made a happy marriage with someone else, be placed on a pedestal by Holmes. But she is the woman and in a category of her own.

  Celibate Holmes may be but he has his vices. Much to Watson’s dismay, he is addicted to cocaine and is an occasional user of morphine. His disapproval of the opium den he visits in the course of investigating a case is, the reader feels, less due to revulsion at the drug itself than to the degradation it brings to the men who indulge in it. Modesty is not usually his strong suit. When told he should never neglect a chance, however small it may seem, he remarks that ‘To a great mind, nothing is little,’ yet on another occasion, when he has made an incorrect diagnosis of a crime, he bids Watson remind him of the case if ever he should seem to be ‘a little over-confident in my powers.’ Seldom showing much emotion, he nevertheless has tears in his eyes when Watson, his friend and faithful chronicler, lies wounded.

  Holmes himself appears to die as a result of his celebrated encounter with Moriarty in The Final Problem and there is little doubt that Doyle intended his death to be the outcome of their duel at the Reichenbach Falls. Still, Holmes’s farewell letter is somewhat ambiguous and his body is never found. However much Doyle wanted to terminate his creation, he was finding that this was no easy task. Holmes was too popular to be easily got rid of and his author, while saying that he had had ‘an overdose of him,’ restored his detective to life, though backdating him in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and more positively and contemporaneously in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

  Some readers unkindly – and I think unjustly – said that though he returned he was never the same again. I am among those who cannot agree. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder and The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez are among the best in the collection and in His Last Bow he is still going strong. Watson tells us that he is alive and well. It is 1914, the First World War approaches and Holmes, laden with honours and univer
sally acclaimed, places his ‘remarkable combination of intellectual and practical activity at the disposal of the government.’

  We are delighted that he did so, for we welcome any excuse Doyle, in the guise of Watson, may make to present us with the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

  Ruth Rendell

  CONTENTS

  A STUDY IN SCARLET

  Part 1 Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department.

  1 Mr. Sherlock Holmes

  2 The Science of Deduction

  3 The Lauriston Garden Mystery

  4 What John Rance Had to Tell

  5 Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor

  6 Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do

  7 Light in the Darkness

  Part 2 The Country of the Saints

  1 On the Great Alkali Plain

  2 The Flower of Utah

  3 John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet

  4 A Flight for Life

  5 The Avenging Angels

  6 A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.

  7 The Conclusion

  THE SIGN OF FOUR

  1 The Science of Deduction

  2 The Statement of the Case

  3 In Quest of a Solution

  4 The Story of the Bald-headed Man

  5 The Tragedy of Pondicherry Lodge

  6 Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration

  7 The Episode of the Barrel

  8 The Baker Street Irregulars

  9 A Break in the Chain

  10 The End of the Islander

  11 The Great Agra Treasure

  12 The Strange Story of Jonathan Small

  ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  A Scandal in Bohemia

  The Red-headed League

  A Case of Identity

  The Boscombe Valley Mystery

  The Five Orange Pips

  The Man with the Twisted Lip

  The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle