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but psychologically suspicious, loathing for a disabled military man whose early history closely mirrors his own. As for the villains: they emerge from the shadows as grotesque figures out of medieval allegory or Freudian nightmare.
    While
The Sign of Four
is intimately connected to the turmoil and bloodshed of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 , its main action takes place in 1888 . The 1880 s were themselves a particularly violent decade in English history, one that included a series of Fenian dynamite bombings, an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria (by a man who hated the number four), and, most infamously, the 1888 Whitechapel “Jack the Ripper” murders: at one point Holmes analyzes a letter just as the police analyzed those of the vicious serial killer. This was also the period when scientists began to chart and tabulate human behavior, when Alphonse Bertillon measured skulls (anthropometry) for indications of latent criminality, and Cesare Lombroso argued that crime was an atavistic throwback to the primitive savage. Such classification and typology are regularly alluded to throughout the story. Watson clearly believes in these phrenological pseudo-sciences: Mary Morstan’s face, he writes, indicated “a refined and sensitive nature.” But Holmes will have none of it: “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
    Not least, Holmes’s second published case proffers the first iteration of what would become his best-known, and most repeated, aphorism: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth.” From this viewpoint, much of
The Sign of Four
certainly does seem improbable or even impossible, like the Muslim-Sikh name Mahomet Singh. But these cavils will occur to the reader only later. Once begun, there’s no resisting the sheer rush, the nonstop narrative excitement of this dark and wondrous tale.
    THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
AND
THE VALLEY OF FEAR
    You might have thought that the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would have been greeted with huzzahs from a grateful public. No such luck.
The Sign of Four
proved only modestly successful. Conan Doyle was still pinning his publishing hopes on
The White Company
and other “serious” books. But having few patients for his new London medical practice and needing money, in 1891 he decided to submit some short stories to a recently established magazine called
The Strand
. The first was titled “A Scandal in Bohemia” and opened with the tantalizing sentence: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman.” In the resourceful and daring Irene Adler, the sleuth of Baker Street truly meets his match: she turns out to be far more than just “the daintiest thing under a bonnet.” In the following months, “The Red-Headed League,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Speckled Band” would finally make Conan Doyle famous and Sherlock Holmes immortal. As the grateful editor of
The
Strand
proclaimed, he had found “the greatest natural-born storyteller of the age.”
    But fairly soon Conan Doyle began to tire of these trivial entertainments; they kept him from “better things.” Only the writer’s formidable mother persuaded him to continue writing about Holmes and Watson for a while longer. In “The Greek Interpreter” he even doubled the narrative’s star power by introducing Sherlock’s lazy, corpulent, and smarter older brother Mycroft, whose specialty is “omniscience” and who sometimes “
is
the British government.” And then finally, inevitably, he introduced Holmes’s most dangerous and implacable foe, the