15th July 2026
The Valley of Fear was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fourth and final “long” Sherlock Holmes novel, appearing roughly two-thirds of the way through the canon of 56 short stories that ran from A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891 to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place in 1927.
The book is in two parts. In the first, we are fully immersed in Holmes’s world from the opening pages: his successful solving of a complex cipher code sent to him through the post; a link from that to the “formidable and scientifically sinister” Professor Moriarty; the introduction of a Scotland Yard contact, Inspector MacDonald; and the reporting of a ghastly murder. And, of course, his intellectual teasing of his companion in 221b Baker Street: Dr John Watson.
Holmes’s assistance is requested to solve a murder at a remote Sussex mansion. He – and we – are presented with a range of clues: the sawn-off shotgun with a part-inscription of the maker’s name; muddy footprints behind a lounge curtain; an open window with a different – and bloody – footprint on a window ledge; the raised drawbridge; a mysterious card containing a strange inscription; a removed wedding ring… There is something satisfying in the way that, after Inspector MacDonald has asked a number of questions of the mansion’s other inhabitants, Holmes tends to follow up with a single question of his own – apparently innocuous and irrelevant – which we know will turn out to be of some significance.
In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, it is revealed some of the key characters have links to the rest of the world – Australia, South Africa, South America – in which both fortunes and enemies have been made. In this case, it is the United States: Chicago, California and, in particular, the tough coal-field communities in the snow-covered gorges of the fictional Gilmerton Mountains.
The last of these provide the background context of Holmes’s case – some twenty years later – in the Sussex mansion. The “valley of fear” is the Vermissa Valley of 1875, when Lodge 341 of the Ancient Order of Freemen conducts an unremitting campaign of tyranny against the area’s businesses and their senior employees. The Master of the Lodge is Boss Jack McGinty, who oversees the blackmail, extortion and murder undertaken by his so-called “Scowrers”, knowing that the local police and politicians are firmly under his control. When McGinty is reluctantly impressed by the attitude and actions of a newcomer to the valley – John McMurdo, a fellow Lodge member with a criminal past in Chicago – he brings him into the small group at the centre of the Lodge’s operations.
In constructing this setting for the novel, Conan Doyle was clearly drawing on the real-life events (and stories) surrounding the “Molly Maguires” – a secret society of Irish immigrant coal miners in the eastern United States – which had been reported extensively in the British newspapers in the 1870s. After the penetration of the society by an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, twenty suspected members of the society were convicted of murder and other crimes and executed in Pennsylvania in 1877 and 1878.
The reader is satisfactorily drawn along – in their turns – by the two parts of the narrative. The twist in the solution of Holmes’s case is now perhaps a familiar one in much detective fiction, but nonetheless arrives as something of a surprise. Likewise, in the epilogue that Conan Doyle presents as a coda to the overall story, there is another development, which Holmes had anticipated – as the work of Professor Moriarty – but we probably didn’t.
JR Alexander 