The Sign of the Four

Very much so.

He has just published A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes, and during a dinner the previous night with the publisher of Lippincott's Monthly magazine, he agreed to write the sequel, The Sign of Four.

And Wilde is just utterly captivated by Doyle.

He senses this quiet, anchored gravitas in the Scottish doctor.

Dvorak, Sibelius, Toscanini stayed.

In August of 1889, an American magazine publisher named J.M. Stoddart hosted a dinner in the hotel for two young writers he wanted to commission, and walked out of it with The Picture of, of Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde, and The Sign of the Four from Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle, excuse me.

Both published the next year.

That's crazy.

Not to mention a life-changing romance for Dr. Watson.

Over the next seven episodes, I'll be reading The Sign of Four, starting next time.

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CHAPTER I.

OF THE SIGN OF THE FOUR Sherlock Holmes.

Mrs. Hudson.

Mary Morstan, read by Charlotte Duckett.

is a paper of native Indian manufacture,' he remarked.

it has at some time been pinned to a board the diagram upon it appears to be a plan of part of a large building with numerous halls corridors and passages at one point is a small cross done in red ink and above it is three thirty seven from left in faded pencil writing "'In the left-hand corner is a curious hieroglyphic-like four crosses "'in a line with their arms touching.

"'Beside it is written, in very rough and coarse characters, "'The Sign of the Four, Jonathan Small, Muhammad Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar.

"'No, I confess that I do not see how this bears upon the matter, "'yet it is evidently a document of importance.

And of course, Watson writes this up as a study in Scarlet.

And in the very next novel, The Sign of Four, it opens with Holmes admitting that he read Watson's publicity piece for him in helping make his name great.

but tells Watson he can't congratulate Watson on it, criticizing him of his storytelling rather than keeping to the facts and discussing Holmes' abilities as a treatise rather than as a story.

And Watson tells us, I was annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him.

What else do we have?

Well, and then, you

know, we're in a study, The Sign of Four, the next novel.

And, of course, there's a lot going on in Sign of Four, but one of the things that's going on is you meet the Sholto brothers, first Thaddeus and then, of course, Bartholomew, with whom we're not going to have much of dialogue because, sadly, Bartholomew has shuffled off.

It is hidden in...

No, no! Keep him out! There, at the window! What is it? That face! That face! That face! The sign of the four.

I can still hear those words echoing in my memory, for in a sense they changed my life.

My name is Watson, Dr. Watson, and I was privileged to share the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I will tell you how we first came across the sign of the four.

I can see it still.

Our rooms in Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes, and in such detail you will be there yourself.

Here, do you see? There's a small cross down in red ink.

well it's all true at once right that's what's right super interesting as in the world today things don't happen one at a time and even in the original Sherlock stories, yes, he's charging about as this great agent of justice, but who's justice? And there are multiple cases, the Bruce Parrington papers being one of the most obvious, his final bow, where he is explicitly charged by the British government.

uh by the crown directly in a few cases and of course his brother mycroft famously sherlock says it may be more accurate to say that he is at this point the british government right and if you're an agent of the crown in the 1890s and 1910s it means you're an agent of empire right and that's interesting to think about with this perspective and In the cases where Empire does pop up, as it does in The Sign of the Four, where the whole mystery is around, you know, the theft of a great Indian treasure, the great treasure of Agra,

then

suddenly the Empire pokes its nose in and you have Indian characters and colonial characters and Pacific Islander characters.

One is not anxious to have one's personal dates handled so unkindly.

As a matter of cold fact, Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet and in The Sign of Four, two small booklets which appeared between 1887 and 1889.

It was in 1891 that A Scandal in Bohemia, the first of the long series of short stories, appeared in the Strand Magazine.

The public seemed appreciative and desirous of more, so that from that date 36 years ago, they have been produced in a broken series which now contains no fewer than 56 stories, republished in The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Return, and His Last Bow.

So why did he do it? The Holmes stories had been a means of keeping body and soul together whilst he struggled to be a doctor.

But as he said himself of Holmes, "He takes my mind from better things." The better things were what he termed his serious literary efforts, his carefully researched historical novels, such as The White Company, a tale of medieval chivalry, and Rodney Stone, set in the Regency period.

He complained that Holmes was killing him as a serious writer, and no one, publishers or friends, could persuade him to relent.

A trip to Switzerland in 1893 for his wife Louise's health had given him a suitably impressive scene for Holmes' demise, the Reichenbach Falls.

Posterity is grateful for his artistic sacrifice.

The Sherlock Holmes canon is read again and again worldwide.

The historical novels are read today by only the most loyal of aficionados.

To all entreaties and sometimes threats, Conan Doyle was impervious.

One is not anxious to have one's personal dates handled so unkindly.

As a matter of cold fact, Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet and in The Sign of Four, two small booklets which appeared between 1887 and 1889.

It was in 1891 that A Scandal in Bohemia, the first of the long series of short stories, appeared in the Strand Magazine.

The public seemed appreciative and desirous of more, so that from that date 39 years ago, they have been produced in a broken series which now contains no fewer than 56 stories, republished in The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Return, and His Last Bow.