The second Sherlock Holmes novel opens with a cocaine injection and ends with a marriage proposal — and between those two acts of self-destruction, as Holmes himself might observe, lies one of the most structurally ambitious detective stories of the nineteenth century. This Erato Press critical edition reads The Sign of the Four as the darker, stranger, and more interesting novel it actually is.
Commissioned at a London dinner in 1889 — the same dinner at which Oscar Wilde was commissioned to write The Picture of Dorian Gray — The Sign of the Four begins with the most famous opening in detective fiction: Holmes, bored and restless between cases, reaching for the cocaine syringe that Watson watches with professional horror and personal helplessness. It is the novel in which Doyle discovered that Holmes was not merely a detective but a problem: a man whose genius required stimulation that only crime or chemistry could provide, and whose mind, in the absence of a case, turned against itself.
The mystery at the novel’s centre reaches back thirty years and halfway across the world. A stolen treasure, hidden during the chaos of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A pact between four convicts — the Sign of the Four. A betrayal. A death. And now, in the fog of Victorian London, the consequences arriving at the door of Mary Morstan, the young woman whose father vanished ten years ago and who has been receiving, once a year, a single lustrous pearl from an unknown sender.
Sherlock Holmes — at his most brilliant and most self-destructive, the mind that can solve anything except the problem of its own existence Dr. Watson — who falls in love during a case and discovers, in the process, the limits of his loyalty to Holmes Mary Morstan — calm, intelligent, brave, the woman who arrives with a puzzle and leaves with a proposal Jonathan Small — the one-legged convict whose confession fills the novel’s second half with the violence of colonial India and the patient fury of a man who has waited thirty years for justice Tonga — the Andaman Islander whose presence in the novel raises questions about empire, race, and representation that the text does not entirely answer The Thames — the great dark artery of the chase, rendered with the most sustained action-writing Doyle ever produced
✦ The complete, unabridged text of The Sign of the Four (1890)
This edition also includes: ✦ The Empire Returns: Colonial Violence, Domestic Detection, and the Second Novel of Sherlock Holmes — a critical essay in thirteen sections examining the novel’s genesis at the Lippincott’s dinner, the cocaine as structural device, the colonial frame of the Agra treasure and the Indian Mutiny, Jonathan Small’s confession as counter-narrative to imperial history, the problem of Tonga, the Thames chase as the finest action sequence in the Holmes canon, and Watson’s marriage as the novel’s quiet upheaval ✦ Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) — a full author biography in seven sections, from Edinburgh and the influence of Dr. Joseph Bell through the creation of Holmes, the spiritualist period, and the legacy
For readers who enjoy: ✦ The Sherlock Holmes canon and the darker reaches of Victorian detection ✦ Colonial fiction and the British Empire as narrative engine ✦ Mystery fiction that embeds historical violence inside domestic suspense ✦ Literary criticism that reveals the strangeness inside the familiar
“The treasure is gone. The empire has taken its cut. Watson has found love. Holmes has found the syringe. The novel ends exactly where it began — with a man who can solve everything except the problem of what to do when there is nothing to solve.”
