Complete Sherlock Holmes

From Kyle Freeman's Introduction toThe Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II When in 1891 Sherlock Holmes tumbled to his apparent death over the falls at Reichenbach in Switzerland, locked in the embrace of the sinister Professor Moriarty, readers all over the world were stunned and saddened. Letters poured in to Arthur Conan Doyle and to his publisher, theStrand Magazine, urging the revival of the beloved detective. Conan Doyle was adamant that he wouldn't do it. "I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for years," he wrote to a friend, "for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towardspate-de-foie-gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day" (Baring-Gould,The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, p. 16; see "For Further Reading"). Then seven years later, after a young friend told him a legend from Dartmoor about a supernatural hound, Conan Doyle relented by writingThe Hound of the Baskervilles. He was careful, however, to make it a reminiscence, not a resurrection, of his famous consulting detective. The story was set in 1889, two years before the Swiss misadventure. The resumption of writing about his most famous creation must have set into motion something in Conan Doyle's soul, for in an interview quoted in theHarper's Weeklyissue of August 31, 1901, the monthThe Houndwas first serialized, one can see his resolve starting to weaken. "I know that my friend Dr. Watson is a most trustworthy man, and I gave the utmost credit to his story of the dreadful affair in Switzerland. He may have been mistaken, of course. It may not have been Mr. Holmes who fell from the ledge at all, or the whole affair might be the result of hallucination." It wasn't long before Conan Doyle decidedperhaps after a wistful look at his bank balancethat the enforced absence of his sleuth had gone on for too long. In 1903 he called on his friend Dr. Watson once more for another series of stories about his colleague, and in October 1903 theStrandpublished "The Adventure of the Empty House." There it was revealed, almost plausibly, that only Moriarty had gone over the falls at Reichenbach. Thus readers learned to their delight that they would be treated to many more adventures of the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. A series of twelve more stories followed, ending with "The Adventure of the Second Stain," the last published in the December 1904 issue of theStrand Magazine. In quick order the series was published as a book by George Newnes of London in 1905, under the titleThe Return of Sherlock Holmes,with sixteen illustrations by Sidney Paget, the great illustrator whose drawings for the firstStrandstories had done so much to establish the popular image of Holmes. The new stories appeared to take up just where the old ones left off. Holmes and Watson resumed their cozy relationship; Holmes continued to solve mysteries that baffled Watson, Scotland Yard, and the reader; and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed as solid and unchanging as ever. It seems that way only until one examines the stories more carefully. A closer reading reveals subtle but significant changes in Holmes. The first one we might notice is Holmes's willingness to take the law into his own hands. In one of the early Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," we recall that Holmes did not divulgDoyle, Arthur Conan is the author of 'Complete Sherlock Holmes', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593082048 and ISBN 1593082045.