The Valley of Fear is the fourth and last of the Sherlock Holmes novels — a two-part drama that opens with a cipher and a murder at Birlstone Manor and unfolds, in its second half, into a Pinkerton agent's infiltration of a murderous secret society in the Pennsylvania coal-fields, drawn from the real history of the Molly Maguires. Professor Moriarty presides, unseen, over the whole. The New York Doran edition of 1914 precedes the London first of 1915.

It is joined here by Memories and Adventures — the book in which Conan Doyle tells where Sherlock Holmes came from. The detective, he explains, was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary, whose uncanny readings of a stranger from a single glance Doyle used and amplified when, in later life, he tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal. Here too he recalls naming his cast and writing A Study in Scarlet [Green & Gibson; Memories and Adventures, ch. 3].

Two works in publisher's cloth stamped in gilt. The Valley of Fear, New York: George H. Doran, 1914; Memories and Adventures, Boston: Little, Brown, 1924.

Very good: minor wear and scuffing to the cloth; hinges tender or cracked; a bookseller's sticker; faint stains to the edges of the text-blocks.

PROVENANCE

Bookseller's sticker.

REFERENCES

Green & Gibson, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle