“The Valley Of Fear” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

If you’d like to see the happiest woman in the world, you should have seen me on the day when I emerged from the library carrying under my arm an enormous volume. “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” published in the USA in 1988 is one of the greatest treasures the library has, and since the day I discovered its existence I wanted nothing else. Alas, another reader took it from under my nose, so I had to wait two more months before it was finally in my hands.

I’ve read a lot about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson – a lot, but not everything. This book contains every word ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the genius detective, so now I can acquaint myself with every story or novel previously missed. “The Valley of Fear” is one of those.

The novel starts as Mr Holmes receives a ciphered letter from his informant, one of the trusted people of the sinister Professor Moriarty. The key to the cipher never arrives – apparently the Professor is starting to suspect his underling – so Holmes has to use deduction to read the letter. But he succeeds. A certain Mr Douglas of Birlstone is in danger. And just as he and Dr Watson finish deciphering the mysterious document, Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard enters to announce “that Mr Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night”.

Needless to say, Sherlock Holmes undertakes to solve the mystery of his death, so the whole company departs to Birlstone as soon as they finish discussing Professor Moriarty.

Sherlock Holmes succeeds – and not quite in the way we’d expect. Still, when he unravels the mystery, we find out that it has been only the first half of the novel. In the second half the author takes us to the USA of twenty years before, the days of Mr Douglas’s youth, when he was called McMurdo and joined a sinister gang named “The Scowrers”. The gang kept a whole town of Vermissa in terror ruthlessly murdering everyone who stood in their way and always getting acquitted in court. The gang was closely connected with the Eminent Order of Freemen, and McMurdo soon became the Bodymaster’s most trusted man and possible successor. But long before it could happen, a craching blow was delievered to the Scowrers from where they didn’t expect it.

These days we would have called them “the Mafia”, but back then this word meant one particular society in Italy rather than all crimilal societies organised in the same way. But they are no less scary – and the way Conan Doyle describes their organisation, discipline and cynical disregard for the lives of people who were not members of the same gang almost froze my blood. But I wanted to finish the novel if only to find out what would happen to McMurdo and the girl he loved.

The final chapter binds everything together, just as the formidable Professor Moriarty reminds us once again of his presence from behind the scenes. This novel, sadly, has no happy end, but such is life… I’m still glad I’ve read it. Once again, as I always do with detective stories, I’m carefully avoiding spoilers, so those of you, my readers, who haven’t read “The Valley of Fear” yet could do it with all the interest and excitement it deserves.