The Valley of Fear, & A Case of Identity

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear turns out to have exactly the same structure as A Study in Scarlet: part one involves Holmes’s investigation into a mystery, which turns out to have an extensive backstory in the American West, so at the beginning of part two we jump across an ocean and about twenty years back to spend many chapters learning all the necessary backstory, before letting Holmes wrap it up in a chapter or two.

However, Doyle must have gotten some complaints about the abrupt shift between Parts One and Two in Scarlet, because in Fear Watson carefully informs us that he is now going to spend many chapters unfolding the events many years ago that led to the current investigation. This is quite helpful, actually! I did spend a few chapters in Scarlet going “...is this still the same book actually?”

I’ve also been reading along with Letters from Watson, which sends you all the Sherlock Holmes stories in reasonably sized emails). Originally I intended to post about these stories as they came in - in fact, I was hoping that a year devoted to Sherlock Holmes might at last make me a Sherlock Holmes fan - but in actual fact I haven’t had much to say about them. They’re well-paced and fun and they feel rather slight. Maybe I just don’t have the Sherlock Holmes port in my brain that makes other people go gaga over him and all his successors.

However, I simply must complain about “A Case of Identity,” in which ( Spoilers )