Around the World in Seven Cases
Not one, but two pre-World War One Germany spies. A member of a secret Italian organized crime society. A deposed Central American dictator living in hiding among the British gentry. A titled British “Lady” goes missing in Switzerland. Holmes near death after contracting a tropical disease whilst investigating a case involving Chinese sailors. Gruesome deaths resulting from “ordeal poison” created by African medicine men. More so than practically all the other volumes containing the collected short story adventures of Holmes combined, The Last Bow is distinguished by its unique air international intrigue.
Their Last Bow
Another persistent theme connecting these stories—and most of the figures mentioned above—is the rather elegiac tone that regardless of who you are and how high you rise, everybody’s story always ends in darkness. The very last case in the chronology of Holmes’ life ends this volume on the note of permanent retirement and this comes after another story in which Holmes genuinely instills fear in others that he is near death. (Turns out he was faking in order trap a clever killer). The twilight of highly regarded African explorer Dr. Leon Sterndale is particularly poignant as he heads back to the Dark Continent after having murdered the man who murdered the woman he loved. At the other end of the spectrum is the utter lack of poignancy in the twilight of Don Murillo who has gone from being despotic Central American dictator known as the Tiger of San Pedro to a comfortable but significantly stripped down existence as a wealthy immigrant among the British gentry to a life on the run that ends in assassination in Spain. Even that seems preferable to the very short-lived twilight of “Mafia” assassin Giuseppe Gorgiano’s life which ends with a knife stuck in his throat.
Secret Identities
Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro who enjoyed a brief but brutal run as a Latin American dictator, is known to the people of England only as Henderson, wealthy man that even Holmes is unsure about whether he is an immigrant or merely someone who has spent much time in the tropics. Henderson leads the ultimate secret identity that runs as a theme through this collection, but he is far from the only example. Holmes himself, for instance, notoriously takes on two different false personas in order to entrap his prey. He goes to great lengths to convince everyone he is dying of a tropical disease in “The Dying Detective” and masquerades as an American spy holding anti-British sympathies in order to catch the real German spy in his final case. Sherlock even comes to lean that his own brother Mycroft has been covering up his own secret identity as one of the most influential men in the British government by pretending to be a much lower-level career bureaucrat.
