The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Kyle Freeman Page 0,17

fair Susan.” He also twice insults a black man, whom he also calls by his first name, by claiming he has a peculiar smell. Most repugnant of all, a character in this story refers to the black man as “the big nigger”; it’s true that the term is spoken by a pompous and dim-witted policeman, but it seems inconceivable for the man who wrote the appeal for racial harmony in “The Yellow Face” and the indictment of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Five Orange Pips” to have penned this. In addition to obvious affronts like these, the prose style itself furnishes more subtle clues that an unseen hand may have been at work. After you’ve read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Conan Doyle’s prose, you become so accustomed to its rhythms, its diction, its tone, that sudden departures from his style jump out at you. Almost nothing about either of “The Mazarin Stone” or “The Three Gables” has the true ring of Conan Doyle’s style about them.

One could suggest that, after all, these stories were written at the end of Conan Doyle’s life, by which time his creative powers had begun to flag. He was also in ill health during these years. This might be a reasonable explanation, were it not that some of these last stories still show remarkable power. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” for example, are superior to some of the stories in the first two volumes of Holmes’s exploits. Some of the other less successful stories also have passages of considerable power, making a judgment that parts were written by someone other than Conan Doyle extremely difficult to sustain.

Not everything in The Case Book is cartoon fiction, however. In “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” Holmes solves no crime, nor does he even clear up any sort of mystery. The lodger, a woman who had been horribly disfigured by a lion while trying to kill her husband, simply wants to confess her crime of years ago before taking her own life. Holmes, after listening to the confession, dissuades the lady from ending it all by telling her “your life is not your own.” Days later she sends him the bottle of poison she was planning to swallow to show him he has saved her from despair. We see in this story that Conan Doyle chose to make Holmes fulfill functions other than just avenging crimes. Here he takes on the role of priest, hearing a last confession before giving a secular absolution. By the time of this story, Conan Doyle was nearly seventy. Like most people, he grew sadder as he grew older. In addition to the usual woes that afflict us all, he suffered a few not everyone experiences. He lost his first wife in 1906 after a long illness, his son and his brother to World War I, and he saw the devastation that war wrought on a whole generation of young English men. He may well have come to think that gallivanting around the countryside peering at footprints and carriage tracks was ultimately a trivial pursuit for his fictional creature. If he were to continue to write stories about Holmes, Conan Doyle wanted him to serve some higher purpose than just putting away the odd criminal or two. Unfortunately, paragons of virtue rarely make good reading. While Holmes is out saving souls, he is not performing the feats most readers have come to expect of him, and many are left cold by this change of mission.

The Case Book brings to an end the development of a forty-year relationship between two of the most oddly paired characters in fiction. Most of that time the personal relationship between Holmes and Watson was unstated. Victorian men weren’t accustomed to express emotion, especially about their male friends. Before his resurrection, Holmes scarcely noticed Watson, save to chide him for placing the wrong emphasis on his accounts, or for bungling a reconnaissance on which Holmes has sent him, or for completely misdeducing some obvious string of inferences. We’ve seen a couple of scenes where that pattern was broken by a show of feeling by Holmes, but the ultimate epiphany of Holmes’s emotion for Watson occurs in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after Watson has been shot by Killer Evans. The passage bears repeating in full.

Then my friend’s wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.

“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that