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

the outside without more of a test than we hear McMurdo has undergone. Because the seed of doubt about him was sown in the first part, we can’t read this account without wondering what it omits. We begin to mistrust the narrator. Although McMurdo’s ultimate goal was to put an end to the criminal enterprise that locks the valley in a grip of fear, to do so he must surely have been forced to commit some crimes to gain the trust of a show-me cadre of leaders. The entire flashback seems to avoid the question at its center: Just how much evil can one commit in the name of good and not become evil oneself? McMurdo/Edwards is surrounded by moral ambiguity. Some of this ambiguity is transferred to the narration itself, something new in the Holmes Canon.
    Then there is the question of Moriarty. Right away we hear of the archvillain whom readers of the series would instantly remember as the man they thought had plunged their detective hero to his watery death twenty years before. But in that story, “The Final Problem,” Watson responds to Holmes’s question about the Professor by saying he had never heard of him. Here, in “the early days at the end of the ‘eighties,”’ well before the unpleasant incident at Reichenbach Falls, Watson knows all about him. This contradiction could be the result of negligence, but that seems unlikely. If we assume that Conan Doyle hadn’t forgotten what he had written earlier, he must have thought he had more to gain from the inclusion of Moriarty’s name than he would lose by the glaring inconsistency of Watson’s knowledge of him. What The Valley of Fear gained was a sense of menace supplied by the mere mention of the Napoleon of crime. If Holmes had never managed to connect Moriarty with a crime several years after the date of this story, the implication that Holmes won’t connect him this time must hang over this scene like a dark cloud. If Moriarty is out to get Douglas, we must fear that he will succeed, as in fact he does. Moriarty’s name is a guarantee of ultimate doom. It’s the beginning of fear, and a guarantee that its span stretches far past the valley in Pennsylvania.
    After The Valley of Fear was published, Conan Doyle contributed one more story, “His Last Bow,” in ,1917 before collecting the series of tales written since The Return into a new volume entitled His Last Bow. When it was published in late 1917, its title implied once again that readers had seen the last of the remarkable consulting detective. But again, Conan Doyle, for whatever reason, had a change of heart. Over the next ten years he wrote a series of stories at odd intervals that was published in 1927 as The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. This group presents a unique problem in Conan Doyle scholarship: The poor quality of many of them, the details that differ significantly from the earlier stories, and the erratic characterization of Holmes himself, all lead us to ask if all of these stories were actually written by Conan Doyle himself? A number of devoted Holmes critics have concluded that several stories are spurious. The evidence for such conclusions rests primarily on an examination of the texts themselves. What biographical support there is for this contention is very slender. What we know is that Conan Doyle was so hard up for plots for his detective stories that he suggested a public contest for ideas to turn into Holmes adventures. He wrote in his autobiography that “the difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story really needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do. One cannot without effort spin plots at such a rate. They are apt to become thin and break” (Memories and Adventures, pp. 91-92). The editor of the Oxford editions of all the stories, Owen Dudley Edwards, states that he hardly ever questioned changes editors suggested to him (A Study in Scarlet, p. viii), but that is disputed by Cameron Hollyer’s study of the letters between Conan Doyle and his