Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free Page B

criminal genius Professor James Moriarty. When, despite the entreaties of friends, family, and editors, Conan Doyle irrevocably determined to kill off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” ( 1893 ), he arranged for the detective to confront the Napoleon of Crime on the treacherous paths high above Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. The two enemies grappled and, to all appearances, tumbled into the gulf below. Having elected to sacrifice his life to preserve the world from evil, Holmes—once merely an inhuman calculating machine and bohemian aesthete—had now become, in Watson’s words, “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”
    Thereafter, among other projects, Conan Doyle took to chronicling the glorious and comic exploits of the Napoleonic soldier Etienne Gerard (in their way, they are as good as the Holmes stories), while
The Strand
ran a series of mysteries solved by Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, the first of the so-called rivals of Sherlock Holmes. But the world wanted the one, the only. While on a golfing holiday Conan Doyle learned from a younger friend named Bertram Fletcher Robinson about the supernatural folklore of Dartmoor, including occasional sightings of a spectral dog of death. Together the two writers began to sketch out “a real creeper.” Before long, Conan Doyle concluded that this was a case for Sherlock Holmes.
    The Hound of the Baskervilles
( 1902 ) deals with ancient terrors in a desolate landscape of moor and bog, where—to borrow some phrases from that devoted Sherlockian T. S. Eliot—the Grimpen Mire affords no secure foothold and the visitor is menaced by monsters and deadly enchantment. It is a tale, above all, about an aristocratic family haunted by a monstrous beast that brings terror and violent death. Conan Doyle dedicated the book to Robinson, who claimed he’d written parts of it and who sometimes called himself its joint author. No one will ever know for sure the extent of his probably minimal involvement. Still, only one thing really mattered: Holmes was back! Unfortunately, his creator hadn’t actually resurrected the great detective. Instead Conan Doyle subtitled his book “Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” and set this chilling case sometime before the fatal encounter with Moriarty. Then Watson had memorialized his friend in words originally applied to Socrates in Plato’s
Phaedo
. As
The Hound
opens, one can again hear echoes of Platonic dialogue in some of the detective’s exchanges with his old friend:
    â€œIs it then stretching our inference too far to say the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”
    â€œIt certainly seems probable.”
    Humankind, as the philosophers tell us, swings between the bestial and the angelic, partaking of both flesh and spirit. Throughout
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Conan Doyle plays up the metaphysical, and practical, issues surrounding the relationship of the body and the soul. Holmes’s informant Dr. Mortimer analyzes human skulls for “supra-orbital development” and indications of atavism. When the great detective meditates over a map of Devonshire, he claims to travel there “in spirit.” An escaped convict presents “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face . . . it might have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.” Another villainous character turns out to be “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” When an ominous-seeming figure is dimly glimpsed standing on the summit of a rocky tor, we are left wondering if it is just a passing hiker or the devil surveying this fallen world.
    Despite Holmes’s warning in
The Sign of Four
, Watson continues to judge people by their physiognomies and the good doctor is wrong in almost every instance. For example, he concludes, quite mistakenly, that