But in Vermissa Valley, it’s a tightly run gang of thieves, murderers, and extortioners called the Scowrers who have the area under their thumb so much that it is nicknamed the Valley of Fear. He’s part of an organization called The Eminent Order of Freemen, which primarily engages in charitable works in Chicago. In this story, a young John McMurdo is fleeing from the law in Chicago and comes to a Vermissa Valley to start anew. At first nothing seems related at all, but the reader assumes that some of the characters are going by different names than what they’re known as in the first part. The second part of the book is the back-story of what happened leading up to these events and is written in a completely different style, much like the story within a story in A Study in Scarlet. Holmes fixates on one that the others do not think is important, and, of course, solves the mystery. There are a number of odd incidents and clues that do not add up. The victim had been shot in the face with an American sawed-off shotgun. But as far as I know that’s the only major slip up in Doyle’s narratives, so we can forgive him: he may have even been aware of the problem and decided to write this story as is anyway.Īt any rate, Holmes and Watson are interrupted by the arrival of a Scotland Yard Inspector MacDonald asking Holmes to assist on a case and then being stunned to learn that the message Holmes had just deciphered concerned the very man who had been killed. So this story predates that one, but there is a bit of a disconnect in that Watson didn’t know who Moriarty was in Memoirs, and if the events in The Valley of Fear occurred in the timeline before that book, Watson would surely have known the name. The only other time Moriarty has been mentioned was in the last chapter of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, in which he died. The book opens with Holmes and Watson trying to decipher a message from an informant concerning Professor Moriarty.

Like most of his other stories, it first appeared serialized in a magazine, this time in The Strand. The Valley of Fear is the fourth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s full-length Sherlock Holmes novels.

Sherlock holmes the valley of fear