dear reader,
welcome back to the strand. Last month’s edition featured the front half of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which we’re finishing up in this newsletter. Enclosed please find: false identities, the past coming back to bite, Holmes family lore, and the shocking conclusion of our detective’s story…
The mystery!
The Adventure of the Crooked Man
A man is mysteriously killed in a locked room after an argument with his wife. Investigation leads Holmes to a man from the victim’s past, who tells a tale of a love triangle, betrayal, his plight after being captured in India, and revenge. But, it turns out, he didn’t actually kill the victim, but caused him to faint and hit his head, then fled the scene and accidentally created the lock room mystery. And he has a pet mongoose who was also there, I guess.
We’re starting out poorly here with a story that I did not like! I think this is the first time so far that I’ve just flat out disliked a story, but here we are. It’s boring, the colonialist and ableist attitude of the characters is exhausting, and the mechanisms of the mystery irritated me. The reveal that a mysterious animal that was present at the scene was actually a mongoose the suspect brought back from India is uninteresting, having already seen nearly this exact twist in a previous story! The ending in particular made me roll my eyes, where Holmes tells us that one of the strange occurences in the case, the wife being overheard referring to her husband as “David”(his name is James1) isn’t actually a mystery but was just a Biblical reference… genuinely a ridiculous deduction, especially when the clue is introduced to readers as being “of the utmost importance”.
The Adventure of the Resident Patient
A doctor starts his own medical practice with the suspiciously generous support of a man who becomes his resident patient. Unbeknownst to him, this patient is also secretly a former member of a criminal gang, wanted for a well known bank robbery years prior. The doctor sees a new patient, a Russian aristocrat and his son, and their suspicious behaviour convinces him to seek advice from Holmes. When the resident patient refuses to share the truth with Holmes to aid the investigation, Holmes leaves, but the next morning they discover that the patient has been murdered by the fake aristocrat and his son, who were actually members of the gang that had been betrayed.
The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter
A man who works as an interpreter is hired by a suspicious and threatening individual who takes him to a house in the country and forces him to translate messages and threats in Greek to a man being held hostage. The interpreter is able to gather clues which he shares with Mycroft Holmes, the elder brother of our great detective, who then relays the story to Sherlock and asks for his assistance. The Holmeses investigate, but gain the attention of the kidnappers, who take the interpreter again and try to kill him. Holmes arrives just in time to rescue him, and concludes that the kidnappers had been trying to force their hostage to sign papers handing over his family fortune and allowing the kidnapper to marry his sister. The kidnappers get away along with the girl, but there are later reports that they have both been killed in a stabbing, and Holmes suspects that the young woman has gotten her revenge.
I like this story for a few reasons - the mystery itself is engaging and the peril that the characters are put in gives the story real stakes and suspense. And, of course, this story is unique as the introduction of Mycroft Holmes, a character who only briefly appears in the Canon but has become an essential figure in adaptations and in how we remember the world of Sherlock Holmes. This is also definitely my favourite of the five I read for this installment.
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
An old school friend of Watson’s, a Foreign Office nepo baby, is given access to important top secret documents (which would be worth a fortune to foreign spies) by his uncle(nepo boss) and asked to copy them that night while he is alone in the office. Obviously this leads to the documents being stolen while he is out of the room, and the mystery around the theft goes unsolved, leading him to be ill for months with brain fever2. One night, a mysterious figure tries to break into his room while he’s sleeping, so Watson and Holmes investigate and realise that the thief was a friend who has been staying in the house out of fake concern for the brain fever, but actually had hidden the stolen documents in his room and was forced to wait for an opportunity to recover them.
*The Final Problem*
Holmes comes to Watson for help and tells him that he is facing a dangerous adversary called Professor Moriarty. Moriarty is responsible for a massive criminal network that has been behind many of Holmes’ cases; he recounts that Moriarty visited him at Baker Street and that Holmes will do anything to take Moriarty down, even at the cost of his career. Holmes believes Moriarty and his gang will soon be arrested, but asks Watson to travel with him to escape any danger, and the two follow a complicated plan to avoid being followed as they travel. Meanwhile, Moriarty’s gang have attacked the apartments at Baker Street, and Scotland Yard arrests everyone except for their leader. In Switzerland, Holmes and Watson visit the Reichenbach waterfall on their way to the next village where they will be staying, but Dr. Watson is suddenly called back to assist a patient on holiday from England. When he arrives it turns out to have been a trick, and he has left Holmes alone with Moriarty. He returns to the waterfall but both men are gone, with footprints leading towards the cliff’s edge, and he finds Holmes’ hiking bag and his silver cigarette case, containing a letter explaining his final confrontation with Moriarty and saying goodbye.
Can I be honest? Reading this here, in the context of this project and having read all of the stories before it in order, I found this one super weird. It’s one of the best known and most retold of Holmes’ adventures, and I’d read it before purely because of that status, but rereading it really puzzled me. It doesn’t fit in. The story is barely a mystery, and the figure of Moriarty appears seemingly out of nowhere. The professor has never been mentioned or even hinted at previously, but suddenly he’s the greatest criminal ever and involved in everything? If this information came from any character other than Holmes it would seem suspect.
The framing of it is curious as well. Dr. Watson tells us that he is only writing because of allegations made by a Colonel James Moriarty3 to discredit Holmes, although we do not learn precisely what these are(a typical Watson move is to mention some sort of famous ‘in the news’ item that he assumes readers should already know about, and thus does not detail), and the mystery of this, which to me is one of the most intriguing in the whole story, is never given closure.
The story is exciting, certainly, and makes for a fun adventure as Holmes and Watson embark on their travels and have to do all kinds of convoluted things to avoid being followed(which, by the way, does not work at all?). One of the great things about reading Watson’s narratives is his unique perspective, and how we nearly always learn about the stories and Holmes purely through his eyes, which often means that we miss certain clues or important details, or indeed parts of an investigation altogether when he is not with Holmes. His knowledge intentionally limits our own as readers, so that by the end we get to experience the reveal of a truth or the solving of a puzzle alongside him. In this story, though, those limitations feel particularly limiting. Watson never meets Moriarty, so neither do we, and because he is called away(as if watching a horror film, we can’t help but say no! don’t go back! it’s a trick!, but he goes back anyway) we miss the crucial confrontation between Moriarty and Holmes. When he finally returns to the scene, he bases his description of what happened on what he sees there and the letter left by Holmes, but I find it hard to accept any of his conclusions because, after having read the last 22 stories and two novels before that, I know that Dr. Watson is not very good at making observations and deductions! Holmes has pointed this out many times, Watson himself has told us as much, and yet here, in perhaps the most important and devastating mystery we have read so far, we are expected to follow his logic and take it at face value? His depiction of the two adversaries plummeting over a waterfall together(“reeling over, locked in each other’s arms”) is supposed to be accepted as reasoned fact and not romantic melodrama? It’s not impossible, but it’s certainly improbable, and I have a hard time accepting it as truth.
The Science of Deduction!
In “Crooked Man”, Holmes is presented with mysterious animal footprints which even using his vast knowledge and archives, he is unable to identify - they turn out to be the prints of a mongoose.
Holmes is, as we have seen before, very good at demonstrating his skills when doing a little mind reading trick on Watson where he figures out based on their surroundings what Watson is thinking about, which always amazes Watson.
We see Holmes using his chemistry equipment to solve a murder in “Naval Treaty”.
When Holmes makes a Biblical deduction(as mentioned above in “Crooked Man”), he says “My biblical knowledge is a trifle rusty, I fear, but you will find the story in the first or second of Samuel.” - demonstrating a knowledge of the Bible that was in fact better than I would have expected from him(this story is from 2 Samuel)
Also: “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion” - Holmes seems to be taking a theological turn these days
The Great Detective!
Watson’s description of Holmes(and his dislike of travel/holidays) in “Resident Patient”:
“neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. 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.”
Interestingly, later on in “The Final Problem,” Holmes describes Moriarty like this:
“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.”
Here, he seems to adopt a very similar metaphor to the one Watson had used previously; their characters as singular thinkers and essential figures in the world of crime in this world are closely paralleled, and this imagery accentuates their similarities.
This is the first time that we learn about the Holmes family! Watson himself notes that Holmes “never [refers] to his relations,” and that “he had come to believe that he was an orphan” until Holmes mentions Mycroft. We learn that he has a brother “seven years [his] senior” who he considers to be smarter and more capable in Holmes’ own art of logic and deduction. He also shares that his family were country squires, and that his grandmother was French and related to the Vernet family, which includes several generations of artists(this is a real family, and there is some speculation as to which of the three artists called Vernet Holmes is referring to).
In the conclusion to “Naval Treaty”, Holmes invites his client to a meal, then opens a covered dish to reveal that he has recovered the missing treaty, much to everyone’s surprise, then explaining “it was too bad to spring it on you like this, but Watson here will tell you that I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.” Very silly!
Another great Holmes quirk: he likes to wrap up sandwiches and put them in his pockets when on a case.
Holmes is referred to as “an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.” This is an interesting way of describing him, and certainly one that feels very prevalent in the way the character is thought of popularly and depicted in adaptations, but I also question how accurate it is to the character we have seen in the stories so far, who is so often shown to be a humorous and friendly person who becomes very invested in the lives of others not only because of the interesting puzzles they bring to him but also with his own deep sense of justice and empathy for people who have been wronged.
Another interesting contradiction in the whole “Holmes is an unfeeling unsentimental robot” thing is a scene in “Naval Treaty” where he rather suddenly waxes poetic over flowers:
He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
Regulars & Irregulars!
“Crooked Man” provides a little peak into Watson’s married life when Holmes comes to visit him at home for the first time and observes various details, and he also stays over in their guest room.
In “The Final Problem”, Watson explains that following his marriage, “the very intimate relations which had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent modified.” …. no comment.
Inspector Gregson reappears at long last in “Greek Interpreter”.
This collection introduces two of the most well known characters of the series, Professor Moriarty and Mycroft Holmes. In both cases, we learn that they are figures of immense import in Sherlock Holmes’ life, and that Watson(just like us, his readers) had never heard of them prior to their introduction.
Professor Moriarty is given the infamous monicker “the Napoleon of crime,” by Holmes. We learn that he is a professor of mathematics who was at one time highly revered, that he’s into phrenology(gross), and that he has at least one brother named James.
Catchphrase Corner:
In “Crooked Man”, we get a pretty famous Holmes catchphrase: “Elementary”
This is one of the things that has become most associated with the character in pop culture, but surprisingly very rarely comes up in the original text, or at least not as an exclamation in the way it is often repeated, much less in the longer form of “Elementary, my dear Watson,” a phrase which never appears in the text, although both the word elementary and the separate “my dear Watson” do appear a few times throughout.
Special Edition:
The Diogenes Club is one of the best remembered locations to appear in these stories, and it is the social club where Holmes and Watson meet Mycroft. It is a highly exclusive institution, of which Mycroft was a founding member, and those who are a part of it must abide by very specific rules. The club has a beautiful reading room with comfortable chairs. Everyone who spends time there must maintain silence and “no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one.” There is a strict visitor’s policy, and outside of that, any talking or disruption can lead members to be expelled. The people who are part of the club are described as “the most unsociable and unclubable men in town.” Sherlock Holmes himself says that the club has “a very soothing atmosphere”.
“The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men.”4
A Case of Adaptation:
BBC Sherlock makes reference to several of these stories
In one episode, Watson writes about a case entitled “The Geek Interpreter”.
After solving a case, Holmes jokingly asks what title it will be given and suggests “Bellybutton Murders,” but Watson says that it will be called “Naval Treatment”. We don’t see what this case was about, but the title is a humorous reinterpretation of “the Naval Treaty”.
“the Crooked Man” provides the basis for characters(particularly the murder victim, Colonel Barclay and the locked room murder mystery which appear in the episode “The Sign of Three”
Perhaps most notably, “The Final Problem” is extremely influential on the television programme, starting with its first season when a criminal mastermind, James Moriarty is introduced as the series’ main villain. The second season’s finale, “The Reichenbach Fall”, takes its title from the location where this story ends, and depicts the conflict between Holmes and Moriarty, the attack on Baker Street, and the presumed deaths of both characters. One of the best moments of this episode is Moriarty’s visit to Baker Street, which is the only direct conflict described by Holmes in the story, and it directly adapts certain dialogue, such as this memorable exchange:
“‘All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,’ said he.
‘Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,’ I replied.”
The ultimate showdown between the two recurs in the Victorian era dream world of “The Abominable Bride,” this time more closely following the finale of the original story than the contemporary reimaginings of the other episodes.
Finally, the show’s finale episode is entitled “The Final Problem”(although its story is unrelated).
The character of Moriarty provides loose inspiration for a primary villain in The Great Ace Attorney, a serial killer known as “The Professor”.
The film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows also adapts “The Final Problem”, with Moriarty appearing as its antagonist, and which reimagines the fall of Holmes and Moriarty at Reichenbach at the eve of World War I.
“The Final Problem” is also adapted in some way in numerous other Holmes related television shows, including Elementary(Holmes faces a serial killer called Reichenbach and must fake his own death), House(as the series finale), and Miss Sherlock(Sherlock and a criminal adversary fall from the roof of the Reichenbach Building), and in fact appears in some form in nearly every adaptation of the Holmes canon.
sadly, now that we’ve finished reading this collection, that seems to be the end of our great detective :( rip. however, this is not the end of the newsletter!
In the opening of “The Final Problem”, Dr. Watson writes: “It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.” Whether that turns out to be true remains to be seen… more on that in future.
Coming soon, we’ll be discussing the prequel novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I’ll also be sharing a reading guide of sorts that will compile all of the previous monthly Sherlock Holmes updates. Until then, please feel free to get in touch, share with a friend, beloved flatmate, or arch nemesis, and subscribe for free to read future editions of cloudtopia and “the strand”.
believe me to be, my dear fellow, very sincerely yours,5
isobel
Oh sure so now ACD wants us to think it’s suspicious and mysterious when a wife refers to her husband by a different name…
If you’ll recall, in the “Man With the Twisted Lip” John Watson’s wife Mary calls him “James”, a mistake which sparked a number of theories and debate among readers. The “James” issue just keeps coming up!
I’ve been noticing this happening to people a LOT recently in these stories, so I decided to do some research because I wasn’t even sure what brain fever was let alone why it was afflicting so many characters.
I can’t even get into it now but why is ACD so obsessed with the name James?? Please stop! Unfortunately this is not the last we will hear of this.
this club has EVERYTHING
I’m stealing the sign off that Holmes uses in his letter to Watson in “The Final Problem” :)