The Sign of the Four, Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of the Four (1890) is the second book of the famous Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (It can be found for free at gutenberg.org. It is a relatively short read and easy enough to read.

The story is split into two basic parts. There's the murder, which Holmes is to solve, and the back story, which is a story of revenge. A woman asks for Holmes to help her solve the mystery of her father's disappearance. She has a letter and an invitation which leads Holmes, Watson, and herself to the scene of a freshly committed crime.

Some interesting facts about Sherlock Holmes' weakness comes to light in this case. He is addicted to cocaine, and injects himself in times of boredom. He is easily bored, and as he says, "...'there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow.'"

With some clues and gross generalizations, Holmes is able to stitch together enough of the puzzle to get onto the trail of the murderer. After some frustration, they succeed in catching the criminal and getting a full confession.

There is the problem of racism in this story. The Indians from Andaman Islands are described in quite a nasty fashion:

'They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they that all the efforts of the British official have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs, or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.'

To be fair, however, this is from a book describing these people rather than a verifiable opinion of Doyle's on the aboriginals of this island.

I have recently read some excellent books. It wasn't really painful to read, but it wasn't particularly stimulating, either.

A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle isn't exactly the first to develop the mystery (all hail Edgar Allan Poe), I do believe he was the first to create a kind of serial detective. Although, interestingly, Doyle mentions two other detective near contemporaries: Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the genre, and Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq.  Certainly, he is the most famous detective: more so than even Agatha Christie's formidable Poirot. A Study in Scarlet can be found at Gutenberg.org.

Some interesting facets of Holmes is that he has no interest at all for any studies (aside from the violin) outside of those who help him to solve murder mysteries:

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order."

A mystery comes and is solved by Holmes easily enough. The murderer was the taxi driver.

The second part of the novel is a novel in itself, correlated to the motivation, I suspect. At first I actually wondered if somehow this story had crept accidentally into the wrong book. After checking it out on Wikipedia, however, it is indeed a part of the story.

The story is about the founding of the Mormon Zion. A man is in the desert, his companions dead from dehydration, when the migrating Mormons, looking for a place to settle, discover them. They are then told that they can go with the Mormons as Mormons, or be left behind to die. So, of course he agrees.

There aren't enough women for the polygamous men in the cult. Thus, they go about raiding immigrants who are passing through, kidnapping the women and making them their own wives.

The narrative is quite fast paced and with almost no illumination into the minds of any character, including that of Dr. Watson, the narrator.

Wikipedia notes that Doyle regretted painting the Mormons in such a negative light, having relied on the common rumours of the day.

Years after Conan Doyle's death, Levi Edgar Young, a descendant of Brigham Young and a Mormon general authority, claimed that Conan Doyle had privately apologised, saying that "He [Conan Doyle] said he had been misled by writings of the time about the Church."

I cannot say of course whether these stories had any relation to truth. There are a lot of myths around the Mormons, both for and against.

In any case, it was an interesting short read. I recommend reading it.