Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

living at the time. The fact that the announcement came on April Fool’s Day gave rise to a rumor that the master spy’s demise was a ruse to throw killers off his trail, a feature Conan Doyle used in The Valley of Fear by having Douglas fake his own death for the same reason.
    So there was historical precedence for the novel’s story. The new novel was originally written with a third-person narrator telling the entire story. By the time it was finally published in September 1915, Conan Doyle either had had second thoughts about the wisdom of that decision, or he was urged by someone to revise the work so that once again we have Watson as our trusty guide. As in A Study in Scarlet, the long flashback to experiences in America is written from a third-person point of view. We are told that Douglas presents Holmes and Watson with a manuscript explaining the provenance of the current situation. That manuscript is clearly the basis for the long flashback, but it isn’t clear whose words we are reading.
    On first glance this would seem to be a step backward. After the awkward third-person flashback of A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle had gotten better and better about introducing the distant past into his novels. The Sign of Four lets two of the characters, Sholto and Small, each tell part of the previous story, so that no omniscient narrator obtrudes with testimony Watson couldn’t have heard. The Hound of the Baskervilles needs only a two-page letter about the history of the curse of the Baskervilles, read by Doctor Mortimer, to explain how the past is prologue to the present. Most readers don’t think of it as a flashback at all. At this point in his career, after reaching the peak of his ability to construct plots, why would Conan Doyle revert to a clumsy tactic of his youth?
    A second glance—indeed, a long, hard stare, perhaps—reveals that Conan Doyle was trying something here that he couldn’t have begun to bring off in his younger days. We’re being asked to judge Douglas in a way that would be impossible if Watson were our guide. Watson is an admirable example of the dependable narrator. We believe what he says. The success of this story depends on our doubts about McMurdo/Edwards /Douglas. That doubt is first sown when Douglas reveals that an intruder, armed with a shotgun, was “accidentally” shot square in the face during a struggle. In view of the plan to use this accident to his advantage, one can’t help but wonder if in fact Douglas managed to capture Ted Baldwin, the intruder, and then cold-bloodedly execute him as the realization sank in that he would never be free from the retributive arm of the Scowrers. It seems a little too convenient for Baldwin’s face to be obliterated; and how exactly would an intruder get into a castle like Birlstone Manor, with a moat and a drawbridge, and then be surprised so quickly that he couldn’t get off a shot with a shotgun? It seems more likely that someone else with a gun got the drop on him. Part II convinces us that Baldwin was a killer who got just what was coming to him. But his premeditated killing, even if it saves Douglas’s life, would put Douglas in a morally ambiguous state. Our doubts about Douglas only grow when we note that Holmes doesn’t congratulate him for his escape. Holmes is strangely quiet, perhaps pondering this very ambiguity.
    When we then read the story of Douglas’s career as secret agent, we have to wonder just how he managed to rise so high in an organization of killers, thieves, and scoundrels of all stripes without committing any crimes himself. The unknown narrator gives him plenty of attractive features, despite the reprehensible circumstances in which he finds himself, so that we like him, and we see that the best people in the town also like him. His ascendancy in the Scowrers occurs without any serious moral compromise on his part. It’s hard to believe that this group of hard-edged men would cede authority to someone from