Just Finished re-Reading: The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (FP: 1914) [192pp] 

Holmes was already too late. The heinous deed he suspected was about the happen had already done so. Inspector Alec MacDonald of Scotland Yard had brought the news and requested Holme’s help in unravelling the mystery. In his country estate a man lay dead in his drawing room. There is no sign of a forced entry, the house is locked up and is even protected by a drawbridge. How then did the murderer gain access and, more importantly, how did he escape? It wasn’t just a locked room mystery; it was a locked house mystery. The police are at a loss and at first Holmes is equally bemused. Something is missing, something in plain sight. Is everything as it appears? Little things, the bloodstain, the cut bell-rope, the abandoned bicycle, just don’t fit the narrative the police have created for themselves. But if Holmes can make them fit maybe he can point to the real reason a man is dead and exactly who he was... 

This is ACD’s last Holmes novel (with the next, and last, book in the series being the usual collection of short stories) and is, I think, the worst of the bunch – although I might be being a little harsh here due to an understandable disappointment. I did actually enjoy the mystery and the very clever way it was solved. I was especially intrigued by the mention of Professor Moriarty on the SECOND page and thought/hoped that we would learn more about Holmes’ mortal enemy/alter-ego. But nothing further was revealed over and above what we already knew about him being ‘the Napoleon of Crime’. Colour me disappointed! But what I found that disappointed me even more was the diversion away from Holmes, crime and the English countryside for a lengthy backstory/flashback to the gold fields and mining towns of the USA. This wasn’t just a few pages, or even a few chapters but 94 pages – practically half the book – then rounded out with 3 pages of epilogue! Now I freely admit that this diversion wasn’t badly told and was even quite dramatic at times BUT I couldn’t help but feel that I was a little mislead in assuming that this was a Sherlock Holmes novel and not a Holmes novella plus a western one. It did feel at times that ACD had simply lost interest in Holmes and wanted to write about something else. Weirdly, although ACD has done this kind of thing before – though usually on a MUCH smaller scale – I have zero memory of any of these side-stories. I’m guessing that either I blanked them out as being ‘not my thing’ or that they were completely overshadowed by the Holmes narrative that I was expecting and looking forward to. 

Despite the fact that neither novella (I can’t honestly call this a single book) was poor in itself – indeed the Holmes mystery part was very good – I can’t say that I greatly enjoyed this outing. The side-story was WAY too big and didn’t add much to the ‘main’ narrative and could have easily been compressed into 10 pages or less. I am, however, still looking forward to the last book in the set which will be reviewed at the end of October. After that I’ll be moving onto Holmes adjacent literature. There’s LOTS of it out there – and some of it is VERY out there! Reasonable.