This is a late Holmes story (thirty-six years after the first magazine appearances), so it’s a bit self-aware. It starts with Watson warning off any miscreants who fancy they can interfere with the great detective’s records: “The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.”
But it has the classic ingredients: a noble and trusting heroine, a lion, a fake lion, love affairs, cads, boardinghouse landladies, London, etc. What I also like about all the Holmeses is their model of story-creation as a way of solving a crime. A person comes into the study and tells them a story. Then through reading – reading the clues on the person, or in Holmes’ comprehensive archive, or in the evening papers, or by reading letters and telegrams that network across the country all through the day – through reading they create the resolution. By the end of each of Watson’s case notes, the crime is solved, society is re-levelled, and the case, like a disease or pathology, is cured.
First published in The Strand Magazine, February 1927. Collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, John Murray, 1927, and World’s Classics, 1999. Also online at Project Gutenberg here
A Personal Anthology 