The Valley of Fear

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Otto Penzler

In the last of the Sherlock Holmes novels, the origins of his rivalry with Moriarty are revealed

In London, there is a professor whose income runs to a modest £700 a year, yet in his office hangs a painting worth no less than £40,000. The author of a rarefied mathematical treatise on the dynamics of asteroids, he has twenty different bank accounts and a priestly manner that belies his vicious nature. His name is Moriarty, and he sits at the center of a vast and invisible web of crime. Years before their fateful meeting on the cliffs of the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes vows to put an end to the professor’s secret reign of terror.
 
A coded message from an informant on the inside of Moriarty’s organization arrives at 221B Baker Street. No sooner than Holmes and Watson have deciphered the message—a warning that a man named Douglas of Birlstone Manor House is in grave danger—do they learn that Douglas is dead, his head blown off with an American shotgun. At a moated manor in the South of England, the dead man’s widow and best friend hold the keys to a mystery that reaches all the way across the Atlantic and proves just how powerful Moriarty’s fiendish influence has grown.
 
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480489905

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish author best known for his classic detective fiction, although he wrote in many other genres including dramatic work, plays, and poetry. He began writing stories while studying medicine and published his first story in 1887. His Sherlock Holmes character is one of the most popular inventions of English literature, and has inspired films, stage adaptions, and literary adaptations for over 100 years.

Book preview

The Valley of Fear

Arthur Conan Doyle

Contents

Introduction

PART 1—The Tragedy of Birlstone

Chapter 1—The Warning

Chapter 2—Sherlock Holmes Discourses

Chapter 3—The Tragedy of Birlstone

Chapter 4—Darkness

Chapter 5—The People of the Drama

Chapter 6—A Dawning Light

Chapter 7—The Solution

PART 2—The Scowrers

Chapter 1—The Man

Chapter 2—The Bodymaster

Chapter 3—Lodge 341, Vermissa

Chapter 4—The Valley of Fear

Chapter 5—The Darkest Hour

Chapter 6—Danger

Chapter 7—The Trapping of Birdy Edwards

Epilogue

Introduction

by Otto Penzler

About one hundred years ago, Sherlock Holmes was described as one of the three most famous people who ever lived, the other two being Jesus Christ and Houdini. There are some who claim that he is a fictional character, but this notion is, of course, absurd. Every schoolchild knows what he looks like and what he does for a living, and most know many of his peculiar characteristics.

The tall, slender, hawk-nosed figure, with his deerstalker hat and Inverness cape, is instantly recognizable in every corner of the world. In addition to the superb stories describing his adventures written by his friend, roommate, and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson (with the assistance of his literary agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), Holmes has been impersonated on the stage, television, and radio, and in countless motion pictures. More than twenty-five thousand books, stories, and articles have been written about him by famous authors, amateur writers, and scholars.

Sherlock (he was nearly named Sherrinford) was born on January 6, 1845, on the farmstead of Mycroft (the name of his older brother) in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He solved his first case (eventually titled The Gloria Scott) while a twenty-year-old student at Oxford. Following graduation, he became the world’s first consulting detective—a vocation he followed for twenty-three years.

In January 1881 he was looking for someone to share his new quarters at 221B Baker Street and a friend introduced him to Dr. John H. Watson. Before agreeing to share the apartment, the two men aired their respective shortcomings. Holmes confessed, I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. He also smokes a vile shag tobacco and conducts experiments with loathsome-smelling chemicals. And he failed to mention an affection for cocaine. Although he ruefully noted his fondness for scratching away at the violin while in contemplation, he proved to be a virtuoso who could calm his roommate’s raw nerves with a melodious air.

Watson’s admitted faults include the keeping of a bull pup, a strong objection to arguments because his nerves cannot stand them, a penchant for arising from bed at all sorts of ungodly hours, and an immense capacity for laziness.

I have another set of vices when I’m well, he said, but those are the principal ones at present.

They became friends, and Watson chronicled the deeds of his illustrious roommate, often to the displeasure of Holmes, who resented the melodramatic and sensational tales. He believed that the affairs, if told at all, should be put to the public as straightforward exercises in cold logic and deductive reasoning.

Holmes possesses not only excellent deductive powers but also a giant intellect. Anatomy, chemistry, mathematics, British law, and sensational literature are but a few areas of his vast sphere of knowledge, although he is admittedly not well versed in such subjects as astronomy, philosophy, and politics. He has published several distinguished works on erudite subjects: Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos; A Study of the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of the Hand; Upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus; A Study of the Chaldean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language; and, his magnum opus, The Practical Handbook in Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. His four-volume The Whole Art of Detection has not yet been published. When he needs information that his brain has not retained, he refers to a small, carefully selected library of reference works and a series of commonplace books. Since Holmes cares only about facts that aid his work, he ignores whatever he considers superfluous. He explains his theory of education thus: I consider that a man’s brain originally is like an empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.… It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.

An athletic body complements Holmes’s outstanding intelligence. He seems even taller than his six feet because he is extremely thin. His narrow, hooked nose and sharp, piercing eyes give him a hawklike appearance. He often astonished Watson with displays of strength and agility; he is a superb boxer, fencer, and singlestick player. He needed all his strength when he met his nemesis, the ultimate arch-criminal Professor James Moriarty, in a struggle at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The evenly matched adversaries, locked in battle, fell over the cliff; both were reported to be dead. All England mourned the passing of its great keeper of the law, but in 1894, after being missing for three years, Holmes returned. He had not been killed in the fall, after all, but had seized a good opportunity to fool his many enemies in the underworld. He had taken over the identity of a Danish explorer, Sigerson, and traveled to many parts of the world, including New Jersey, where he is believed to have had an affair with Irene Adler (who will always be the woman to Holmes), and to Tibet, where he learned the secret of long life from the Dalai Lama.

When Miss Adler (the famous and beautiful opera singer Holmes first meets in A Scandal in Bohemia) died in 1903, he retired to keep bees on the southern slopes of the Sussex Downs with his old housekeeper, Mrs. Martha Hudson. He came out of retirement briefly before World War I, but his life since then has been quiet.

Holmes has outlived the people who have participated at various times in his adventures. In addition to Mycroft, Watson, Moriarty, Irene Adler, and Mrs. Hudson, the best-known auxiliary personalities in the stories include Billy the page boy, who occasionally announces visitors to 221B; Mary Morstan, who becomes Mrs. Watson; the Baker Street Irregulars, street urchins led by Wiggins, who scramble after information for Holmes’s coins; Lestrade, an inept Scotland Yard inspector; Stanley Hopkins, a Scotland Yard man of greater ability; Gregson, the smartest of the Scotland Yarders according to Holmes; and Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London.

The first story written about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, originally appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and subsequently was published in book form in London by Ward, Lock & Company in 1888; the first American edition was published by J. B. Lippincott & Company in 1890. Holmes is called to assist Scotland Yard on what Inspector Tobias Gregson calls a bad business during the night at 3, Lauriston Gardens. An American, Enoch J. Drebber, has been murdered, and Yard men can point to only a single clue, the word Rache scrawled on the wall in blood. They believe it to be the first letters of a woman’s name, Rachel, but Holmes suggests that it is the German word for revenge. Soon, the dead man’s private secretary, Stangerson, is also found murdered; the same word is written in blood nearby. A long middle section of this novel, dealing with Mormons, is an unusual flashback.

The Sign of the Four first appeared simultaneously in the English and American editions of Lippincott’s Magazine for February 1890. Spencer Blacket published the first English book edition in the same year; P. F. Collier published the first American book edition in 1891. Calling at 221B Baker Street for help is Mary Morstan, a fetching young lady by whom Watson is totally charmed; ultimately, he marries her. She is the daughter of a captain in the Indian Army who mysteriously disappeared ten years earlier and has never been heard from again. Four years after the disappearance, Miss Morstan received an anonymous gift, a huge, lustrous pearl, and got another like it each year thereafter. Holmes and Watson accompany her to a tryst with the eccentric Thaddeus Sholto, twin brother of Bartholomew Sholto and the son of a major who was Captain Morstan’s only friend in London. Holmes sets out to find a fabulous treasure and is soon involved with the strange Jonathan Small and Tonga.

A Scandal in Bohemia first appeared in the Strand Magazine in July 1891; its first book appearance was in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). The first published short story in which Holmes appears features the detective in an uncharacteristic battle of wits with a lady, and with no real crime to solve. The king of Bohemia has had a rather indiscreet affair with Irene Adler, who threatens to create an international scandal when he attempts to discard her and marry a noblewoman. Holmes is hired to obtain possession of a certain unfortunate photograph before it can be sent to the would-be bride’s royal family. Holmes is outwitted, and he never stops loving Irene for fooling him.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Sir Charles Baskerville, of Baskerville Hall, Dartmoor, Devon, has been found dead. There are no signs of violence at the scene, but his face is incredibly distorted with terror. Dr. James Mortimer enlists the aid of Holmes to protect the young heir to the estate, Sir Henry Baskerville. Watson goes to the grim moor to keep an eye on Sir Henry but is warned to return to London by a neighbor, Beryl Stapleton, the lovely sister of a local naturalist, who hears a blood-chilling moan at the edge of the great Grimpen Mire and identifies it as the legendary Hound of the Baskervilles, calling for its prey.

The original stories about Holmes number sixty; more than that number have been written by other authors, however. Even Conan Doyle wrote a parody of the characters, How Watson Learned the Trick, first published in The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House in 1924. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) by Nicholas Meyer was a longtime bestseller. Among the most famous pastiches are those by H. F. Heard, whose Mr. Mycroft is a pseudonymous Holmes; the tales of August Derleth, whose Solar Pons is the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street; and The Unique Hamlet (1920) by Vincent Starrett, in which the great detective appears under his true name.

Other names (and guises) under which Holmes has appeared are Herlock Sholmes and Holmlock Shears (in Maurice LeBlanc’s The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, 1907, and The Fair-haired Lady, 1909); Picklock Holes (in R. C. Lehmann’s The Adventures of Picklock Holes, 1901); Shylock Homes (in John Kendrick Bangs’s series of short stories in American newspapers in 1903, reprinted as Shylock Homes: His Posthumous Memoirs, 1973; Bangs also wrote many parodies of Holmes using the detective’s real name, as in The Pursuit of the House-Boat, 1897; The Enchanted Type-Writer, 1899; and R. Holmes & Co., 1906, in which the hero is the son of Sherlock Holmes and the grandson of A. J. Raffles); Shamrock Jolnes (by O. Henry in two stories in Sixes and Sevens, 1911); Hemlock Jones (by Bret Harte in The Stolen Cigar-Case in Condensed Novels: Second Series, 1902); and Schlock Homes in many stories by Robert L. Fish.

Today, of course, Holmes continues to be a multimedia superstar, appearing in two internationally successful films starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes; the BBC television series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch; and Elementary, the wildly popular CBS series starring Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson.

PART 1—The Tragedy of Birlstone

Chapter 1—The Warning

I AM INCLINED TO think— said I.

I should do so, Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.

I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I’ll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption. Really, Holmes, said I severely, you are a little trying at times.

He was too much absorbed with his own thoughts to give any immediate answer to my remonstrance. He leaned upon his hand, with his untasted breakfast before him, and he stared at the slip of paper which he had just drawn from its envelope. Then he took the envelope itself, held it up to the light, and very carefully studied both the exterior and the flap.

It is Porlock’s writing, said he thoughtfully. I can hardly doubt that it is Porlock’s writing, though I have seen it only twice before. The Greek e with the peculiar top flourish is distinctive. But if it is Porlock, then it must be something of the very first importance.

He was speaking to himself rather than to me; but my vexation disappeared in the interest which the words awakened.

Who then is Porlock? I asked.

Porlock, Watson, is a nom-de-plume, a mere identification mark; but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city. Porlock is important, not for himself, but for the great man with whom he is in touch. Picture to yourself the pilot fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion—anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable: not only formidable, Watson, but sinister—in the highest degree sinister. That is where he comes within my purview. You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?

The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—

My blushes, Watson! Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.

I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.

A touch! A distinct touch! cried Holmes. You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law—and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that’s the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year’s pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That’s genius, Watson. But if I am spared by lesser men, our day will surely come.

May I be there to see! I exclaimed devoutly. But you were speaking of this man Porlock.

Ah, yes—the so-called Porlock is a link in the chain some little way from its great attachment. Porlock is not quite a sound link—between ourselves. He is the only flaw in that chain so far as I have been able to test it.

But no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

Exactly, my dear Watson! Hence the extreme importance of Porlock. Led on by some rudimentary aspirations towards right, and encouraged by the judicious stimulation of an occasional ten-pound note sent to him by devious methods, he has once or twice given me advance information which has been of value—that highest value which anticipates and prevents rather than avenges crime. I cannot doubt that, if we had the cipher, we should find that this communication is of the nature that I indicate.

Again Holmes flattened out the paper upon his unused plate. I rose and, leaning over him, stared down at the curious inscription, which ran as follows:

534 C2 13 127 36 31 4 17 21 41 DOUGLAS 109 293 5 37 BIRLSTONE 26 BIRLSTONE 9 47 171

What do you make of it, Holmes?

It is obviously an attempt to convey secret information.

But what is the use of a cipher message without the cipher?

In this instance, none at all.

Why do you say ‘in this instance’?

Because there are many ciphers which I would read as easily as I do the apocrypha of the agony column: such crude devices amuse the intelligence without fatiguing it. But this is different. It is clearly a reference to the words in a page of some book. Until I am told which page and which book I am powerless.

But why ‘Douglas’ and ‘Birlstone’?

Clearly because those are words which were not contained in the page in question.

Then why has he not indicated the book?

"Your native shrewdness, my dear Watson, that innate cunning which is the delight of your friends, would surely prevent you from inclosing cipher and message in the same envelope. Should it miscarry, you are undone. As it is, both have to go wrong before any harm comes from it. Our