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

as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes’s presence makes no difference to the outcome of the case. In comparison to the silly plot of “Silver Blaze,” which falls apart at even the merest scrutiny, “The Yellow Face” is one of the more moving tributes to racial tolerance in all British literature. But because it is part of the Holmes canon, readers bring expectations to it that it doesn’t meet.
    Conan Doyle came to his racial sensitivity as a result of his meeting with Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a black antislavery leader, then U.S. minister to Liberia, when Conan Doyle was ship’s surgeon on the Mayumba in 1882. Garnet was aboard for three days, during which time he impressed Conan Doyle with his intelligence and seriousness. Conan Doyle remained deeply committed to racial justice for the rest of his life.
    One last reflection about “The Yellow Face”: Conan Doyle chose the name Grant Munro for this most sympathetic character. Munro is also the name he chose for himself in his autobiographical fiction The Stark Munro Letters . It is tempting to see here an attempt to put himself in a situation that called for tolerance, understanding, and compassion, then imagining to himself how he would like to think he would react.
    When he began writing the stories for this second series, Conan Doyle made a fateful decision. He would exercise the ultimate godlike power in his created world. He had given life and now he would take it away: Sherlock Holmes would meet his end. So when he began writing the first of what he thought would be the final twelve adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he had the ending already in mind. Just before starting the series, during a trip to Switzerland with his wife, Conan Doyle visited Reichenbach Falls. Its grandeur impressed him so much that he concluded it was the perfect setting for the finale. He wrote that the Falls “would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him” ( Memories and Adventures , p. 92).
    That ending included one last character who has also achieved immortality: Dr. Moriarty. Conan Doyle waited until what he thought would be the final Holmes story to introduce him. It seems a natural idea that Holmes should meet his mirror opposite, his doppelgänger, somewhere in the stories. The trouble with this conception is that Moriarty’s presence can’t be sustained for very long: Either Holmes catches him, and he’s put away or killed, or he escapes by outwitting Holmes. Since the latter can’t be allowed, Moriarty is going to have to make a one-time appearance. So the final story is the right time to unveil the master criminal. Moriarty serves a further purpose by providing Holmes with a worthy adversary for his final bow. You don’t want just any old crook to do in the world’s greatest detective.
    So before introducing Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle did something curious in the stories leading up to it. Knowing that the Professor was due to appear at the end of the second series of twelve Holmes stories, Conan Doyle included the following passage in the second story, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”: a “He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime.” Then in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle describes Moriarty in this passage: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans” (p. 559). These passages are quite similar. It’s clear that the being at the source of the outstretched filaments, though undescribed, must be a spider; the second passage only makes more explicit what was already implied in the first one. The first passage, I neglected to state, describes Sherlock Holmes.
    Conan Doyle could hardly make an