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

Doyle’s part that his detective is superior to those of the men who created the genre and, by further implication, that his stories are superior to theirs. Everything we know about Conan Doyle refutes such an interpretation. When this story was written, he was only twenty-seven, had published next to nothing, and was much in awe of both men, Poe especially. If confronted directly with this passage in his work, he would surely have denied any such claim to preeminence. He was merely expressing his character’s supreme self-confidence, perhaps even characterizing Holmes as a bit too conceited. Yet whatever the explanation, Holmes’s claim has indisputably come true.
    A Study in Scarlet was modestly successful. Conan Doyle did not consider writing a sequel until the American agent for Lippincott’s Magazine invited him and Oscar Wilde to a dinner in London. That proved to be an auspicious night for British letters. The agent proposed that both men write books for Lippincott’s . As a result of this proposal, Conan Doyle wrote the second Holmes story, The Sign of Four , in 1889, while Wilde’s contribution to the magazine turned out to be The Picture of Dorian Gray .
    The story was first published in February 1890 as The Sign of the Four , but the title was later shortened to the one Conan Doyle preferred, The Sign of Four . Conan Doyle once again split the story into two parts, but the structure of this division is more subtle than the one used in A Study in Scarlet . First, the history that led up to this crime is broken into two shorter parts instead of one long one, but more important, Conan Doyle allows Thaddeus Sholto and Jonathan Small, rather than a third-person omniscient narrator, to relate these flashbacks. This not only keeps a tighter focus on the action of the story, but also avoids the clearly artificial quality a third-person narrator introduces. After all, these stories are said to be the reminiscences of John H. Watson. In order to seem real, they can’t start recounting things that Watson couldn’t possibly have heard. In this respect, The Sign of Four is an improvement on A Study in Scarlet .
    The way this story treats its murderer is also more subtle. In A Study in Scarlet Jefferson Hope had been driven to his acts of vengeance by what amounted to the rape and murder of his sweetheart and the murder of her guardian. Because we get to witness the coldheartedness of the men who commit these crimes, their deaths are not near our consciences. As famed Texas trial lawyer Richard “Racehorse” Haines once said in a television interview, he was able to win acquittals for clients who had committed murder by convincing juries that “some folks just need killin’.” Hope is not made to suffer any punishment for his crimes; he dies “with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done” (p. 93). This is clearly an authorial reward for following the dictates of his heart.
    Jonathan Small is more problematic. Although his story makes us feel more sympathy for him than for his victims, the circumstances of the killings in which he was involved don’t grant him the same kind of easy absolution Conan Doyle gives to Jefferson Hope. Our response to Small is more complex, because his case has more of the tangled web of good and evil that characterizes most human enterprises than does the revenge of Jefferson Hope.
    While each of the murders Small commits contains some mitigating factor, each also contains a damning one as well. His first killing is forced upon him when his Indian companions make him an offer he can’t refuse. He must either kill or be killed. Yet when the time comes to fulfill this devil’s bargain, he takes some relish in it. When he sees the merchant Achmet escaping from his three cohorts, Small says, “My heart softened to him, but again the thought of his treasure turned me hard and bitter” (p. 175).