The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

often. (He will cleverly foil our expectations of this pattern in later stories.) This plot repetition, which might seem a weakness, turns out to be a strength. It contributes to that sense of solidness we get from this world in which logic triumphs over superstition, and where justice in one form or another is meted out to violators of the social order. The sense of order that runs through this world is one of the great satisfactions of these stories. No matter how bizarre the circumstances, Holmes will tender a rational explanation for everything. Criminals are caught not because they make a fatal error, but because all human actions, good and bad, leave traces behind. If you pay close enough attention to the causative chain of events in everyday life, and you’ve trained yourself to think logically, you’ll be able to follow that chain when someone has committed a crime.
    The first story attends to some matters that by their nature appear only once. It must introduce both Holmes and Watson, which of course can happen only once. After that, it also contains a feature that appears only in the longer stories. It divides the action into two parts, introducing a flashback having nothing to do with Holmes and Watson to describe the genesis of the crime. Conan Doyle repeated this structure with modifications in The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear . In A Study in Scarlet the flashback comes as a sudden jolt, a third-person narrative far away in time and place from the story’s beginning. Despite the interest of the plot of the flashback, today we tend to mark time until we get back to Holmes and Watson. At the time the story was published, the American interlude was the most interesting part for British readers.
    Conan Doyle had read a treatment of the Mormons in a chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter entitled “The Story of the Destroying Angel.” He took its most sensationalized elements, then fashioned a brave, fearless hero along with a pitiful orphan who grows up to be a brave, fearless woman who is loved by another brave, fearless man, and sets them at the mercy of intolerant zealots. The story emphasizes the most pathetic aspects of the lives of John and Lucy Ferrier and lacks any psychological subtlety. Lucy and Jefferson Hope are always courageous and noble, while the Mormons who haggle over her are petty and dishonorable.
    This is soap-opera fiction. But it bears noting that Conan Doyle handles the action and the development of dramatic tension quite skillfully. The story is never dull. It moves without any padding to a dramatically exciting conclusion. It also establishes some sympathy for a man who, we discover, has committed the two murders at the beginning of the story. This kind of sympathy recurs in The Sign of Four , but rarely in the short stories. In most of them the perpetrators of the crimes, if there are crimes, act from base motives that are only briefly sketched, and they get what’s coming to them.
    Note here the use of names for the bad guys: Drebber and especially Stangerson are names with a slightly nasty ring to them. On the other hand, the man who kills them is given a name that in itself goes some way toward redeeming him. Jefferson, of course, is a name that was golden in America. Thomas Jefferson, well known in France and England during his life, had died but sixty years before this story. And the last name Hope speaks for itself. This rather obvious allegorical use of names is repeated in The Sign of Four , with Jonathan Small, an insignificant cog in the British imperial machine in India, but not afterward. Like Dickens, Conan Doyle learned how to use less obvious names to suggest personal qualities.
    It’s worth noting the ironic wrinkle in the beginning of the story—Holmes calls Dupin “a very inferior fellow” and Lecoq “a miserable bungler.” He means of course inferior and miserable when compared to him. This judgment could be taken as a boast on Conan