Valley of Fear

Only Holmes and Watson can get to the bottom of this baffling murder mystery. John Douglas is found in his study blasted faceless with a sawn-off shotgun. There is no obvious motive or suspect. Douglas and his wife, Ivy, a rich and locally popular couple, have lived for years in the ancient, moated Birlstone Manor House. Despite Douglas' nightly ritual of raising the drawbridge, a perpetrator had concealed himself, shot Douglas, and made a clean getaway.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. After nine years in Jesuit schools, he went to Edinburgh University, receiving a degree in medicine in 1881. He then became an eye specialist in Southsea, with a distressing lack of success. Hoping to augment his income, he wrote his first story, A Study in Scarlet. His detective, Sherlock Holmes, was modeled in part after Dr. Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary, a man with spectacular powers of observation, analysis, and inference. Conan Doyle may have been influenced also by his admiration for the neat plots of Gaboriau and for Poe’s detective, M. Dupin. After several rejections, the story was sold to a British publisher for £25, and thus was born the world’s best-known and most-loved fictional detective. Fifty-nine more Sherlock Holmes adventures followed. Once, wearying of Holmes, his creator killed him off, but was forced by popular demand to resurrect him. Sir Arthur—he had been knighted for this defense of the British cause in his The Great Boer War—became an ardent Spiritualist after the death of his son Kingsley, who had been wounded at the Somme in World War I. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in Sussex in 1930.