In his memoirs, Conan Doyle describes how he was commissioned to write this story over a dinner at the Langham hotel with Joseph M Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott's on 30 August 1889. They became friends and Wodehuse eventually paid homage to his mentor when he created English literature's supreme double act in his Jeeves and Wooster stories. It also marks the reappearance of the 'Baker Street Irregulars' and an important step in the evolution of Holmes and Watson, the most successful and popular literary duo in Victorian magazine fiction.ĭoyle was a keen cricketer who used to play with other writers, including the young PG Wodehouse.

They will eventually get married.Īs a novel about a crime, The Sign of Four is inferior to The Moonstone, though superbly constructed and compelling, complete with poison darts, a disputed legacy, and an exciting chase down the Thames. In The Sign of Four he deepens the Holmes-Watson relationship and has the good doctor (also the narrator) fall in love with Mary Morstan ('A wondrous subtle thing is love,' declares Watson). On only his second outing in a full-length novel, Holmes is on top form throughout, stimulated by injections of cocaine and his celebrated deductive method ('How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?') Here, unmistakably, is the voice of the master.Ĭonan Doyle had stumbled on the idea of the brilliant detective and his stolid sidekick (a variation on a theme best known to literature in a double act like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) in A Study in Scarlet (1888). The story that Holmes swiftly unravels will involve some potent aspects of India in all its mystery and romance: the 'mutiny' of 1857 stolen jewels from Agra and a Sikh plot.

Sherlock holmes the sign of four book