Arthur Conan Doyle. His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. 1917; Project Gutenberg, 2024.

I confess that I thought I had read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. After all, I had read and reviewed a collection that claimed to be the complete works. It turns out that the collection had a few stories missing. The recently reviewed O Jerusalem mentioned “The Devil’s Foot,” a story I could not remember at all. It turns out that the collection I reviewed omitted all but one story in this collection, which was the last collection of “new” Holmes stories that Doyle published.

The single story that was in the collection perhaps explains why the compiler missed the other stories. “His Last Bow” was also the name of the last story in this book. Apparently, the editor of the “complete” stories thought that that story was the only story in the collection. Anyway, now, I believe, my own reading of the Doyle Holmes stories is complete.

From his personal correspondence, Doyle indicated that he was not happy with many of the Holmes stories he wrote after Holmes returned from being presumed dead. Most of these stories are interesting and even clever, but for the most part they are not as entrancing as many of the earlier stores. Still, they would likely be published even today in a magazine that specialized in detective stories.

“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” has echoes of “The Red-Headed League” and may be the most interesting of these tales. A Mr. Eccles tells how a country neighbor named Garcia who recently moved to Wisteria Lodge has befriended him and turned up murdered the day after he spent the evening with him. There is a mysterious letter that makes it sound like Garcia was on his way to rendezvous with a woman, yet the only woman with any connection to the tale is a housemaid considerably older than Garcia.

“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” tells how Holmes managed to root out a spy from the Continent. This case is somewhat interesting because Sherlock gets hired by his brother Mycroft Holmes who, as readers may know, has some kind of high-level unspecified government job. This tale progresses well via a combination of dialogue and classified advertisements.

This story is also alluded to in O Jerusalem, though not mentioned by name. Set in 1895 it is supposedly about secret naval engineering plans for a submarines. In O Jerusalem, Holmes says that the British never acted on the submarine plans, and the Germans had underwater superiority throughout the World War in spite of the vessel the British had designed—they never put it into production.

We could call “The Devil’s Foot” a medical mystery. Holmes and Watson are vacationing in Cornwall when two brothers and a sister, all single adults, expire mysteriously while playing cards one evening. They are found sitting at the table with their card hands still ready to be played. This story involves some subterfuge on Holmes’ part. (For what it is worth, this story was mentioned in O Jerusalem—for a plot-related reason—and I could not find the story in that “complete” Holmes collection I owned. That led me to discover this book I am now reviewing.)

“The Adventure of the Red Circle” also has echoes of the “Red-Headed League” as well as The Valley of Fear. A Mrs. Warren engages Holmes because she has a mysterious lodger. He has rented a room in her lodging house, but he never seems to come out of his room. She takes his meals to his room on a tray and leaves the tray by the door. Someone is murdered in her neighborhood, and she thinks there is a connection.

This tale is probably the most mysterious of the ones in this collection. Its only weakness is that the conclusion is a long narrative explaining the mystery. If there had been an effective way to illustrate the same through the action rather than a multi-page explanation, the story could have been a lot stronger.

“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” takes Watson through Europe trying to track down Lady Carfax who seems to have disappeared (in case you could not tell from the title). This is interesting because Holmes dispatches Watson to collect clues on his own by tracking down her last known addresses. Holmes disappears from much of this story, too. Watson is even more than usually self-effacing in this story. Still, together the two men do solve the mystery.

In “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” Holmes uses disguises effectively as he does in a couple of the other whodunits in this collection. Some stories depend not only on disguise but on Holmes’ acting ability. This is one of those. We admire Sherlock even if the plot is somewhat predictable.

“His Last Bow” was and is meant to be the last of the Holmes stories. Here we learn that Holmes indeed has retired to the countryside. He is in the process of having his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture published. He seems content but finds himself caught up in a German spy ring. Yes, this begins with “the most terrible August in the history of the world,” i.e. August 1914 when World War I begins. This is likely the most complicated of the plots in this collection. Readers will still find it intriguing, though Holmes seems a little too pat in this one.

All of these stories have an interesting feature. They all involve one way or another and international cast—whether it is foreign criminals, foreign spies, or foreign settings. I believe the earliest of these stories came out in 1909, and some clearly were written with the Great War in mind. We know that Doyle was interested in international affairs: The Crime of the Congo, his critique of the Belgian administration of the Congo, also came out in 1909. Holmes fans should not miss this, including those of us who thought we had read them all.