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

explicit link between Holmes and so repulsive a creature as a spider, but his language has made that link despite his reticence. This is the first in a series of parallels Conan Doyle set up between Holmes and his nemesis. It was necessary for Moriarty to have as exalted a stature in the criminal world as Holmes has in his. Holmes himself says, “I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal” (p. 560). When Holmes continues, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill” (p. 560), he expresses more than just respect for an adversary. His admiration is a kind of self-approval as well. When Holmes contemplates Moriarty, he sees an image of himself reflected in a perverse mirror. First, they look alike: Moriarty, like Holmes, is “extremely tall and thin” (p. 560). They share a taste for French painting. In a later novel, The Valley of Fear , we are told that Moriarty owns a work by Jean Greuze, paid for, it is implied, with ill-gotten wealth. Holmes expresses throughout the stories a decided preference for Gallic art, no doubt because his grandmother was the sister of French painter Emile Vernet (1789-1863). Holmes refers to the Professor as “the Napoleon of crime” (p. 559). Setting aside for the moment that such a phrase would be redundant for many an Englishman at the time, the only other reference Holmes makes to Napoleon is in the later story “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” where he compares himself to the Little Corsican. Except for the “criminal strain” that “ran in his blood” (p. 559), Moriarty might have become a highly esteemed colleague or even a soul mate.
    Although on the simplest plot level, Holmes and Moriarty exist as two separate figures, on another level we are invited to see them as two sides of a single coin, like Milton’s “knowledge of good and evil,” “two twins cleaving together, leap[ing] into the world” or, in this case, out of this world. Europe’s greatest detective and its greatest criminal locked arm in arm, tumbling together into eternity over a vast abyss, form as powerful an image of the mysterious duality of good and evil as the framework of these stories allows. It recalls the structure of Shakespearean tragedy, where the expulsion of evil always requires the sacrifice of some human good.
    It is probably impossible today to gauge the effect this final scene had on readers. Now every reader knows that Holmes did not meet his end at Reichenbach Falls, if only because of the huge number of pages still to read after “The Final Problem.” Even if we were momentarily deluded, we would soon find out that Mr. Sherlock Holmes returned from Switzerland, resumed his crime-fighting career, and finally retired to a country farm in Sussex, where he tended bees. This sheds a completely different light over our feelings for him. Instead of a tragic hero whose final sacrifice redeemed his society, he has faded into what Conan Doyle called in the Preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes that “fairy kingdom of romance,” existing forever in the secure confines of an impossibly safe world.
    At the time, Holmes’s death made an enormous impact on the reading public. Bank clerks and shopkeepers wore black armbands in mourning for the late consulting detective, and storms of letters poured into the Strand and to Conan Doyle himself, urging the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle writes of one woman who sent him a letter beginning “You brute!” But Conan Doyle was adamant in his refusal even to consider taking up his pen to revive his fallen hero.
    So from 1893 until 1901 the reading public had to accept the idea that they had read the last of the remarkable sleuth. But then a young friend of Conan Doyle named Fletcher Robinson told him about an old legend from Dartmoor in England’s West Country, near Robinson’s boyhood home. The tale involved a spectral hound that haunted one of the local