Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free

nineteenth-century standards, Conan Doyle could be an astonishingly facile writer. In this instance he signed the contract for
The Sign of Four
on August 30 , 1889 and delivered the manuscript just a month later;
A Study in Scarlet
was written almost as fast. To complete a short story would seldom require more than a couple of days. Once a plot had been worked out, the actual writing could be done in a single draft, with perhaps a few light corrections afterward. Second, let me draw your attention—as Holmes might say—to the phrase “flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.” This is another of those many covert allusions that thicken the texture of Conan Doyle’s writing. In this instance, the image is drawn from the Venerable Bede, who in a famous passage of his
Ecclesiastical History of England
(circa AD 731 ) compares the meaningless life of a pagan to a sparrow that flies from a stormy winter’s night into a warm mead hall and then, all too quickly, passes back into the surrounding darkness.
    In
The Sign of Four
Mary Morstan brings Holmes several mysteries: What happened to her father after Captain Morstan arrived in London from military service in the East and suddenly vanished? Why has she received a lustrous pearl of great price on each of her birthdays over the past six years? Could there be any importance to a scrap of Indian paper inscribed with four interlinked crosses and the words “the sign of the four”? (To this last, the contemporary response would be “Duh.”) And, most immediately pressing, who is the mysterious correspondent asking to meet her at seven that evening “at the third pillar from the left” of the Lyceum Theater? She may bring two friends, if she feels insecure, but no police. Of course, Watson and Holmes agree to accompany their new client.
    Much will happen that night, but eventually the nervous Thaddeus Sholto will guide the little company to Pondicherry Lodge, once the home of his late father Major Sholto and currently that of his twin brother Bartholomew. At the gates they are stopped by a former prizefighter named McMurdo, now working as a bodyguard. Here Holmes discloses an unexpected detail from his past: As an amateur he once boxed against McMurdo, who remembers his “cross-hit . . . under the jaw.” The pugilist then tells the detective, “You’re one who has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.” (The “fancy” is a slang term for the fight game.) Are there, then, no limits to Holmes’s abilities? His subsequent acrobatics on the roof of Pondicherry Lodge will actually be compared to those of Blondin, the aerialist who walked across a wire suspended over Niagara Falls. Detective, aesthete, human calculating machine, actor, music and art lover, bibliophile, boxer, acrobat—Holmes is obviously far more than “a theorist,” as the obnoxious Inspector Athelney Jones here calls him. A few chapters further on Holmes even scrapes together a meal of oysters and grouse, telling Watson, “you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper!”
    Just as
A Study in Scarlet
is thematically a study of obsession in various forms—passionate love, religious fanaticism, long-planned revenge, detectival relentlessness—so
The Sign of
Four
puts forth a series of ethical stress tests, as Conan Doyle probes the complexities of the riven human heart and conscience. One character is faced with a life-or-death moral dilemma. Another sacrifices his honor for a treasure he never uses. Watson falls in love but tortuously hesitates to declare himself. Holmes himself assumes so many radically different personae that they begin to imply multiple personalities. Thaddeus Sholto is effeminate and generous, while his twin is brutally masculine and miserly. Even the instinctively kind Watson experiences a visceral,