Summary
Chapter 1
Watson narrates the tale. He begins with Sherlock Holmes lost in thought, looking at a letter from 'Porlock'. Watson asks who Porlock is, and Holmes explains it is a nom-de-plume; Porlock is important in that he is connected to an influential man: Professor Moriarty. Moriarty is unknown as a criminal to the public, but Holmes knows better; however, anyone who tries to cast aspersions at the great man would be laughed at.
Watson nods in agreement and Holmes continues, saying Porlock has been a secret help to him once or twice. He has now sent a series of numbers and letters with two words: 'Douglas' and 'Birlstone', the latter repeated twice. It is a cipher with no code.
Watson asks why there would be no code; Holmes believes it will arrive soon. Indeed, the page soon arrives, but when Holmes opens the letter they see that the frightened Porlock has written that he will not provide the code because he is under suspicion.
Watson rues that there is a secret in the cipher that they will never know. Holmes is quiet, and then says that it relates to a book; he infers that Porlock assumed he’d have it. They deduce it must be the most commonly possessed book—an almanac (there are too many editions of the Bible, Watson’s first guess).
They locate the right almanac and the correct pages and words in order to discern that someone named Douglas is in danger, and a house of Birlstone is somehow involved. Before they can parse these words much further than acknowledging the danger for this gentleman named Douglas, Alec MacDonald of Scotland Yard enters; he is a friend of Holmes’s whom the detective had helped a few times in the past, thereby earning the young, intelligent Scotsman’s respect.
MacDonald greets Holmes and Watson and says there is new mischief afoot, but before he can get further he sees the cipher on the table. His entire countenance fills with amazement and he sputters out his question of how Holmes got the cipher. After Holmes asks what is amiss; MacDonald says, dazed, Mr. Douglas of Birlstone was murdered last night.
Chapter 2
This is the sort of moment Holmes lives for. He looks composed and interested, more intellectually excited than shocked or horrified. He explains the background of the cipher to MacDonald, and when MacDonald says they must find Porlock Holmes states that this is impossible. Porlock is connected to Moriarty, he explains.
MacDonald smiles a bit and says the Yard thinks Holmes has a bee in his bonnet over the Professor. MacDonald had gone to see the Professor himself and was struck by his solemn mien and erudition. Holmes laughs and asks if MacDonald happened to notice the painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze behind Moriarty’s desk. The inspector is confused and says no. Holmes explains who Greuze is and how valuable his paintings are; MacDonald wonders aloud how the Professor could afford it. That is the point, Holmes tells him, and they speculate about the man’s illegal activities that procured his great wealth. Holmes knows a lot about Moriarty: he has many bank accounts, and must have extravagant wealth to be able to pay, for example, his chief of staff six thousand a year.
The talk turns back to the murdered man, and the men speculate that Douglas came afoul of Moriarty, who ruled over his people with an iron fist. They all agree to go to Birlstone. MacDonald reads a note from Birlstone’s local officer, White Mason, who had first taken up the case. Mason asked MacDonald to bring Holmes.
Holmes muses aloud that there is a great brain in London and a dead man in Birlstone, and it is their job to trace the connection between them.
Chapter 3
Watson narrates the background of the mystery as it stood before they arrived.
The village of Birlstone is small and old, but attracted some well-to-do residents who built stately villas in and on the outskirts of the woods. One of these is the Manor House, part of it as old as the First Crusade and other parts added in the 1500s and 1600s. This unique home was effectively an island, as it had a drawbridge that went over a moat and was kept raised every night.
Only John Douglas and his wife lived there. Douglas was fifty, imposing but genial. He was said to have earned money in the gold fields in California. He had a good reputation and was seemingly indifferent to danger. His younger wife was also popular, but was very absorbed in her husband and duties of the home. Some people noted that she seemed anxious, and that there may have been issues between the two of them.
Another man lodged with them as well: Cecil James Barker of Hales Lodge, Hampstead. A wealthy young bachelor, he had apparently known Douglas in America. He was very friendly with both Douglasses, but there were rumors about his closeness to the wife.
Ames the butler and Mrs. Allen the housekeeper were the only other two people whose presence in the house mattered that night.
The events of the night are thus: Cecil Barker rushed to the small police station near midnight and said Douglas was murdered. Sergeant Wilson accompanied him to Manor House, where the drawbridge was down and the windows lit up. Dr. Wood, a local physician, joined them.
The dead man was on his back in the study. A sawed-off shotgun fired at close range had killed him. He wore only a pink dressing gown. There was one dumbbell in the room.
Barker explained that he had just gone to bed when he heard the noise of the shot and came down and saw Douglas lying there. He blew out the candle and lit the lamp. When Mrs. Douglas started to come down, he held her off. He lowered the drawbridge at that point.
Wilson asked if perhaps Douglas shot himself, but Barker said that, while he thought that too at first, he had discovered a smudge of blood on the windowsill. It appeared someone shot Douglas and then left through the window. The man may have waded across the moat to escape. In terms of when he got there, he must have arrived earlier that day and hid.
Wilson noticed something on the floor and picked up a card labeled 'V.V.—341'. Barker had not yet seen that, and was surprised.
There were muddy boot prints near one of the other curtains, which Ames told them had been drawn around four.
Barker asked if they ought to try to find the man because he probably did not get too far. Wilson replied that there were no trains before six, so he could not have left by rail. Perhaps someone else would see him when the search began.
The doctor bent down and pointed out a mark that had been branded on Douglas’s arm. It was a brown design with a triangle inside a circle; Barker said he had seen it on Douglas many times these past ten years, but didn't know what it meant.
The butler burst out suddenly that Douglas’s wedding ring was taken. Since it was the middle ring between two others, the killer must have taken them off and put them back on in order to take the ring. Wilson shook his head in amazement and said it was time to get White Mason here on the case.
Chapter 4
Watson picks up the narrative of the present day. White Mason is a friendly, quiet, but capable man. He meets Holmes, Watson, and MacDonald at Birlstone and helps everyone get settled, all the while talking about the case. He explains to Holmes how he checked the hammer that was found near the body (there was no evidence of it being involved in the crime) and the gun, which had the initials P, E, and N on it.
Holmes informs them it is an American gun put out by the Pennsylvania Small Arms Company; this knowledge surprises and pleases Mason.
The group discuss the possibility of whether an outsider was in the house, or if the murder was staged. MacDonald proffers his interpretation. He assumes the murder was premeditated, but wonders why the killer would choose such a loud weapon. Holmes asks about signs of someone climbing out of the moat, but there were none.
The men walk toward Manor House and Watson contemplates that the scene seems fit for a tragedy. As they near the house Mason points out the window and informs Holmes of how shallow the moat is: three feet at the deepest.
Ames admits the group to the house. The conversation returns to the murder. Suicide is ruled out, but the issue of the loud weapon remains. It seems unlikely that the person made the muddy footprint, opened the window, marked the sill, took the ring off, and left before Cecil found Douglas. Surely someone came in earlier that day, hid, and then killed Douglas, using the sawed-off shotgun because the murder was personal. Douglas probably came in, put down the candle, struggled, grabbed the hammer, and was then shot. The man left the card and escaped across the moat.
Holmes listens; even though the men ask for his opinion, he demurs until he has more facts. He asks for Ames, and questions him. He inquires about the mark, and Ames said he had seen it before. Ames also says Douglas was a bit more nervous the last day he saw him than usual.
After this line of questioning Holmes turns to the card, which MacDonald says seems like it belongs to a secret society; he also considers the strangeness of the wedding ring and the fact that there has been no arrest yet.
A knock sounds, and Cecil Barker interrupts to say they’ve found the killer’s bicycle hidden in a clump of evergreens not far off.
Analysis
The novel begins like many of the stories of Sherlock Holmes: a case is presented, Holmes gets involved, and the particulars of the crime are laid out before the reader. However, midway through the novel a major shift takes place in that the backstory of one of the characters takes over; now we are twenty years prior, in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, and dealing with a band of rapacious and murderous Irish union men. It is an abrupt shift and one that disconcerted readers looking for more of the perspicacious British detective, but Doyle was working through his own issues with his Irish identity.
In these first few chapters, though, we see the classic duo of Holmes and Watson. Watson narrates the tale (though Doyle considered not making him the narrator) and, as per usual for the Holmes canon, readers fashion of a portrait of the famous detective through the eyes of his friend. Holmes comes across as relaxed, confident, ever sagacious, and sharp; he welcomes the new mystery and seems energized and vitalized by it. Critic Anthony Boucher (quoted in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes) says “this is a ripe, mature Holmes, free from external eccentricities…Here is Holmes in the perfect thinking mind, in crypt-analysis, in observation, in deduction…Holmes [is] at his most completely charming…There is more overt humor here than is usual…there is a certain fey quality.”
The first mystery (or, the mystery-within-the-mystery) is the identity of Porlock and what Moriarty might be up to. It has been suggested Porlock was actually Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother, but Doyle never stated this definitively. Porlock is shadowed in mystery and fear, and his connection to that most cunning of Holmes’s enemies, Moriarty, is also ambiguous. Moriarty never makes an actual appearance in the novel; instead, he is fashioned through the comments of Holmes and MacDonald; this adds to the character’s mystique, especially as it becomes clear that, without nearly any evidence, he is indelibly connected to this case.
The second mystery is the actual case itself. What arguably makes the Sherlock Holmes collection so appealing is that readers have the opportunity to play detectives as well, using Watson as their stand-in to survey the evidence and then see if they can figure the case out. Here the evidence can be easily summed up: the dead body, shot close-range by a sawed-off American shotgun; a stain of blood on the windowsill; muddy shoeprints near the windowsill; one dumbbell; a mysterious card near the body; a missing wedding ring; reports of the timing of the shot; a bicycle in the hedges. Keen readers then pick up on the bluster of Barker and the strangely emotionless behavior of Mrs. Douglas. Watson’s encounter with the two in the garden only adds to the rumors of Douglas’s jealousy regarding their friendship.
Still more clues begin to present themselves in terms of Douglas’s past and the sense that he was under some sort of dark cloud. It is clear he came to England to escape some sort of persecution in America, and it is connected with the shadowy “Valley of Fear.” This ominous appellation is a physical place as well as a symbolic one in the sense that Douglas is psychologically stuck in that infernal valley.
