The Valley of Fear - Definition and Overview

Sherlock Holmes novels

A Study in Scarlet The Sign of Four The Hound of the Baskervilles The Valley of Fear

The Valley of Fear is a Sherlock Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story was first published in the Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. The first book edition was published in New York on February 27, 1915.

The structure of the novel falls more or less into two halves. In the first half, Sherlock Holmes, employing his usual techniques, discovers the identity and location of a killer; when the killer is apprehended, the main plot makes way for a verbose third-person account of the history between the killer and his victim, before returning at the end to tie up a few loose ends. In this way The Valley of Fear, the last Sherlock Holmes novel, echoes - perhaps deliberately - the structure of A Study in Scarlet, the first.

The Valley of Fear is also notable for the involvement of Professor Moriarty, making Arthur Conan Doyle himself the first of many writers to ignore the fact, established in "The Final Problem", that Dr. Watson first heard of Moriarty shortly before Moriarty's death, with no unrecorded adventures in between.

External links

• Free eBook of The Valley of Fear (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3289) at Project Gutenberg