His Last Bow was once again intended to be the last Sherlock Holmes Collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Although he did get Holmes retired, there’d be many more adventures written of previously unchronicled cases.

This book has the fewest stories in it it of all the Holmes collections: seven in British version and eight  if you read the U.S. version. Mostly, it’s a strong collection: “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” “The Red Circle,” “The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans,” and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” are as good as any Holmes story out there. The best of these is Wisteria Lodge, there are so many great features in there: a great mystery, international intrigue  and perhaps the most clever official detective introduced in the Holmes Canon.

“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Fairfax,” and “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” are good not great stories and “His Last Bow” is one that’s enjoyable for its sentiment and patriotism far more than its cleverness or any sort of suspense.

The somewhat controversial story “Adventure of the Cardboard Box” was left out of American editions of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes because it dealt with marital infidelities. It’s not for this reason that I didn’t enjoy the story . Holmes himself asked not to have his name mentioned in association with it because it was so simple. And perhaps, Watson (or Doyle) would have done better heed it. The problem with the story is that Holmes doesn’t do much and the focus instead becomes on a sensation and sordid crime rather than a mind of great detectives. The results are mediocre at best.

Overall, the book holds up pretty well and shows that Doyle was just as adept at writing great mysteries in the early 1910s as he had been in the 1880s and 1890s which is why he’d find himself writing several more Holmes adventures in the 1920s.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.0

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The Valley of Fear is the last Sherlock Holmes novel. It was originally published in 1915 but is set prior to the events of “The Final Problem.” Doyle ignores at least one fact stated by Watson in, “The Final Problem” where Watson claims not to have heard of Moriarity. Here, Holmes introduces Watson far before that as the two go to a castle to investigate the murder of a mysterious American.

The mystery at the castle is well-laid out with a lot of intriguing clues and some nifty deduction. However, the Holmes portion of this story is fairly light. It reads like a slightly longer Short Story rather than a novel. The rest of the novel, much like in A Study in Scarlet is consumed by a look at the back story of the crime which began in America.

The idea of solving a mystery and then telling us the story behind the crime is rarely a good writing method. I had to really slog through Doyle’s use of in A Study in Scarlet. I put the book aside when I came on it when a child and didn’t pick it up for 20 years. However, this story is more interesting with its focus on the Scowrers, an American secret society that terrorized Pennsylvania and a mysterious stranger that joined them. It was quite riveting reading, so I didn’t mind the digression much.

However after that great story, the ending of the book left a bad taste. The 1935 movie, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes was based on this story but gave a radically different end and with good reason. Without spoiling the end I will say, that  for the first time that for all concerned, everyone would have been better off had Holmes not investigated the case.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0

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