The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is most notable for the stories which open and close the collection. The opener is one of the most beloved Holmes adventures that Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote, containing arguably the single most famous accurately quoted line in the canon “Silver Blaze” is a tale of racing horses that famously turns on “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” in which what it curious is what the dog did not do rather than what he did. The closing story, by contrast, is even more famous what does not happen although it would take many years for readers to learn that this was the case. For the next ten years after “The Final Problem” was originally published, readers assumed that what did happen was that Holmes fell to his death at the bottom of Reichenbach Falls and its appearance as the final story in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes seemed to indicate that this collection of short stories would be the final chapter for the great detective.
Which makes it quite natural for the reader closing the back cover on this volume to ponder why Arthur Conan Doyle would allow that to seem to be the case for ten years. What took place between “Silver Blaze” and “The Final Problem” which might have urged Conan Doyle to kill off not just the most popular figure in British literature at the time, but a veritable money-making machine? This question makes reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes particularly attractive to those drawn to Holmes and his calculating brain. Are the clues contained right there in the other stories and do those clues point to a logical solution?
If the order of the stories between the first and last were reversed, the solution might seem immediately obvious to contemporary readers. The book ends much more strongly than it begins by going on out five of the most famous stories in the canon. By contrast, five of the first six stories following “Silver Blaze” are among the least well known and the group is also notable for the fact that only two were adapted for the ambitious and popular BBC series starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. The lack of familiarity with much of the first half of the collection could certainly account for Doyle deciding he’d had enough were it not for the one thing. Perhaps the reason they are not as popular may have to do with being examples of Doyle experimenting with formula and taking risks with his creation.
For instance, “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” not only takes the risk of committing strongly to what would have been a rather unpopular anti-racism message, but it is also one of the very few occasions where Sherlock Holmes is actually proven wrong in his deduction. “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” also tinkers with the template by having Holmes serve as the narrator rather than Watson in a recollection of one of his first cases. Meanwhile, “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire” may not tumble off the lips of many contemporary readers listing their favorite Holmes mysteries, but Conan Doyle himself listed it among his dozen personal favorites. And so it would seem that the writing of these stories which may not have connected as strongly with readers as previous stories did was not the stimulus behind the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes which follows.
By the four stories which precede “The Final Problem” Doyle was back to form with stories that meet all the conventional expectations of a Holmes adventure. “The Crooked Man,” “The Resident Patient,” “The Greek Interpreter” and “The Naval Treaty” combined to present memorably twisted villains, high level British intelligence concerns and even another clever female for Holmes to match wits against in a high stakes battle of nerves. Combined with “The Final Problem” these five stories actually allow The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes to go out on a higher creative note than any of the other collections. In fact, a collection comprising the final five stories of this collection with the first five stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes which follows could quite accurately be titled “Sherlock’s Greatest Adventures.”
In other words, just as Doyle was getting ready to kill off Holmes and just when he finally decided to bring him back from the dead, the author was quite literally working at the top of his game. Which just might well be the smoking gun inside The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had given himself the leeway to experiment with the formula and the determination seems to be that it was not a direction he wanted to continue. The last half of the stories reveal a writer committing to the formula with what would seem to be the goal of seeing how much creativity was still left there. The result may have been all the evidence he needed to convince himself that now was the time to pull the plug. He’d gotten the tinkering out of the way and then proceeded to prove that he could use the formula to produce just as good a Holmes adventure as ever and one after another at that. It is easy to see Arthur Conan Doyle wanting to write about other things and realizing that if he went out when he did, he would be going out with Holmes still very much on top. He had given him great cases to solve and written them with great style and inventiveness.
What more was there to prove after such a display?
