Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Valley of Fear, published in 1915. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

As a personal note, with this book I did all my reading and initial note-taking on the iPad, which is positive – it made the process of writing these essays a lot smoother. On the other hand, the transcription errors in this particular ebook version were infuriating. It almost made me want to go through and re-edit the entire series. Almost.

My frustration could be in part due to the fact that The Valley of Fear is set up in a nearly identical way to A Study In Scarlet. From half of the book being set in a different time and written by a different narrator down to the use of another American secret society and even a key clue revolving around a wedding ring, this book feels like a rewrite of Scarlet.¹

Okay, irritating similarities aside, Doyle has some interesting bits in this novel. There’s a classic locked-room mystery that’s probably one of the best in the canon, and most of the investigation feels more like modern mystery writing – revolving around a number of testimonies, and trying to sort out which are the lies and how to deduce the truth from the falsehoods. It’s actually got a very hard-boiled feel.  The second half of the novel is a fun pulp-style story of an undercover Pinkerton that would be great to read in another book. Doyle takes a stab at writing some accents (although he only seems to focus on both the Scottish and German accents). And at one point, Doyle actually takes a poke at himself and the growing detective fiction field through MacDonald:

“I don’t take much stock of detectives in novels—chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That’s just inspiration: not business.”

Finally, there are some interesting Victorian details in this story. During the cipher deduction, we learn that almanacs are quite common books to have in most Victorian homes. We see more bicycles, and MacDonald mentions the idea of giving them license plates. The American secret society this time is a thinly-veiled combination of the Molly Maguires and the Ancient Order of Hibernians (a fraternal organization of Irish Catholics). Also, Watson mentions “peine forte et dure,” which was a method of torture used by the French legal system. In peine forte et dure, a defendant who refuses to plead had subsequently larger and heavier stones put on his chest until he stopped breathing or entered a plea. The longer stories are great for this kind of Victorian detail, which I love.

So, this book sits in the same place as A Study in Scarlet for me. What it lacks in the canon-establishing detail, it makes up in a few bright spots of writing and some great Victorian flavor. The second half of the book is still easily skipped from the perspective of the canon, and Doyle seems to get fed up with his own writing at points, but it’s not the worst novel you could read.