Created by Scottish author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant London-based consulting detective, famous for his intellectual prowess and powers of deductive reasoning.
According to Conan Doyle, the character of Sherlock Holmes was based on his friend and mentor, Doctor Joseph Bell. Bell was interested in crime and had assisted the police in solving a few cases and, like Sherlock Holmes, he was known for drawing large conclusions from the smallest of observations.
Although Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four is the second of only four full-length novels. All but four of the Sherlock Holmes stories are narrated by his close friend and biographer, Doctor John Watson; two are told by Sherlock Holmes himself while the remaining two are written in the third person.
Synopsis
As the dense yellow smog swirls around London, a despondent Sherlock Holmes sits in a drug-induced stupor lamenting his lack of intellectual challenges until a visit from Miss Mary Morstan shakes the melancholy from him.
Mary’s father, an officer in the British army who had served as a prison guard in India, disappeared the day he returned to England six years previously. A year to the day after Captain Morstan’s disappearance, Mary receives the gift through the post, a small box containing a beautiful pearl. There was no note of explanation and no return address, just the pearl.
On each successive anniversary Mary received a pearl but this year it was accompanied by an invitation for Mary and two companions to meet her mysterious benefactor. Mary asks that Holmes and Watson accompany her to the meeting and soon they are all caught up in a thrilling adventure involving exotic lands, stolen treasure, secret societies, murder and a one-legged nemesis.
Review
The Sign of Four is another excellent Sherlock Holmes story with enough mystery, intrigue, action and romance that even Holmes remarks of the adventure, ‘isn’t it gorgeous’. As well as featuring a complex plot, The Sign of Four goes beyond Conan Doyle’s previous novel, A Study in Scarlet, in that it succeeds in humanising both Holmes through his drug use and Watson through his meeting with his future wife.
The Sign of Four is fairly similar structurally to Conan Doyle’s previous Sherlock Holmes novel since it is also split into sections with the final section revealing the motivation behind the mystery and murder. One slight difference, which does rely on the rather convenient cooperation of the murderer, is that at the end of The Sign of Four Holmes and Watson are also being told just why the murderer did what he did and so empathy can be demonstrated towards him. In A Study in Scarlet the reader discovered the killer’s motivation at the end of the book but Holmes and Watson could only guess at it.
Conan Doyle has also adapted his style to be in keeping with detective fiction conventions so that, unlike A Study in Scarlet, there are clues dotted about the story of The Sign of Four which allow the reader to guess and solve the mystery before the answer is revealed by Sherlock Holmes.
The Sign of Four was followed by the first of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short story collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
ISBN 978-0755334490, Headline Review, 2006, £4.99, pp 146
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