16. Doyle’s final Holmes novel
Between September, 1914, and May of the following year the fourth and final novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, appeared in serialization in The Strand Magazine. The time setting for the novel is not clearly established, though the events it relates to preceded the fatal encounter with Professor Moriarty. Moriarty is established as the antagonist in the book’s opening pages. Holmes also informs Watson in the opening pages that he was capable of reading ciphered messages, “as easily as I do the Apocrypha of the agony column”, referring to a daily column in The Times. The novel appeared as the opening months of the First World War generated most of the news of the day.
Despite the war, Doyle took as his theme the terrorist activities associated with labor unions in the United States and the political situation in Ireland. The Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, provide much of the novel’s background story. Doyle’s final Holmes novel took his hero outside of his usual role of providing entertainment, and placed him solidly in the activities of domestic terrorism and anarchism. The novel was published as a book in the United States in February, 1915, before the serialized version in Britain ended. The following year it appeared as a full-length silent film in Britain, the second of the Holmes stories to be so treated.