His Last Bow
Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of His Last Bow, published in 1917. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.
We come to Doyle’s second attempt to put Holmes behind him – “His Last Bow.” This story is one of the most unusual in the canon – it doesn’t feature Holmes or Watson all that much (although, based on two of the novels, that’s not all that unusual), it’s the first story written entirely in the third person (leading many Sherlockians to theorize on which character actually wrote it – I lean towards Mycroft), it’s the last recorded case in the official canon (taking place eleven years after “The Creeping Man,” even though that story hasn’t been written yet), and overall it’s really more of a short pulp adventure than a mystery.
Some publications listed the subtitle of “His Last Bow” as “An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes,” but the version I read listed it as “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes,” which is more appropriate to me – this story is utterly and completely about World War I. Much of the exposition of the story centers around the politics of the war at the time. Doyle mentions that August 4, 1914 is “the most terrible August in the history of the world” because this is when England declared war on Germany, followed shortly by other declarations of war between various countries – in other words, the defacto start to WWI.
There’s also some unexpected insight into the thoughts of the Irish-Americans towards England. It turns out that Germany was sympathetic to the anti-British sentiment after the question of Home Rule failed to pass with the declaration of war, and they supplied arms to two of the insurgent militia forces, one of which was the precursor to the IRA. Therefore, and Irish-American working for a German spy isn’t that implausible. Doyle had been heavily involved in “the Irish question” all of his life (he was staunchly anti-Home Rule, a point on which he constantly disagreed with his mother), and his interests shine through clearly here.
Due to the time frame, this is the only Holmes story that is explicitly post-Edwardian, and as such there are a lot of fascinating little details. Holmes is retired, but the Prime Minister was able to convince him to leave retirement, and impressively – Holmes spends two years finding this German spy ring, and uses tactics very similar to those used by Birdy Edwards in The Valley of Fear. There’s a reference to Holmes’ retirement occupation of bee-keeping in the package that Holmes gives to the German spy (a book that Holmes wrote on the topic). Holmes mentions working with Irene Adler, and that he is known in Germany. But the characters are still very much their Victorian selves – even though the fashion had changed to where friends referred to each other by first name, Holmes and Watson still refer to each other by their surnames. Holmes still values skill over morality in comments like “it is better than to fall before some more ignoble foe.” And Watson is very much his old self, as Holmes himself notes: “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.”
There are lots of historical details as well, including a reference to the “Marconi wireless” which would eventually become the radio. More interesting to modern readers and pulp fans, perhaps, is a reference to Zeppelin – not only the airship, but the inventor. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a retired German military office who invented a motor-driven airship called LZ-1 in 1900. By the end of WWI, the German military used over a hundred Zeppelins, and that proliferation of airships is mentioned in this story.
As a spy story it’s not great, with a spymaster who is singularly incompetent and with Holmes acting more out of panache than secrecy. As a detective story, it’s also lacking, since we’re already well aware of the core mystery before Holmes even arrives. It is clearly a propaganda piece from Doyle, but more interestingly there are echoes of the later pulp adventure tradition hidden in this story, including airships and German villains and convoluted conspiracies. If you replace “German” with “Nazi” or replace Holmes with a character like Doc Savage, it’s striking how prescient this story is in tone and content.