Fiction · 1914
The Valley of Fear
A coded warning arrives from one of Professor Moriarty's own lieutenants — and hours later, a country squire is found shot dead in his own moated manor house, his face blown away, a strange brand burned into his forearm. It should be simple: a Scotland Yard inspector, a local constable, Holmes, and a body. It is not. Everything about the murder scene is staged for someone's benefit, and the man Holmes wants to interview never actually died.
Doyle wrote The Valley of Fear as two books stitched into one: a Birlstone country-house mystery in Holmes's own time, and — once the case is solved — an entirely separate American backstory, twenty years earlier, following an undercover Pinkerton man into the coal country of Pennsylvania and a secret society that runs it by murder. Serialized in the US from September 1914 and in Britain's Strand Magazine into 1915, it was Doyle's fourth and final Holmes novel, and the last time he'd let the detective anchor something this long. The society at its center, the Scowrers, is drawn directly from the real Molly Maguires and the Pinkerton agent who infiltrated them.
Bibliomancer publishes the complete novel — both Parts and the Epilogue, exactly as Doyle divided them.
Contents
- Part I — The Tragedy of Birlstone
- Chapter I — The Warning
- Chapter II — Sherlock Holmes Discourses
- Chapter III — The Tragedy of Birlstone
- Chapter IV — Darkness
- Chapter V — The People of the Drama
- Chapter VI — A Dawning Light
- Chapter VII — The Solution
- Part II — The Scowrers
- Chapter I — The Man
- Chapter II — The Bodymaster
- Chapter III — Lodge 341, Vermissa
- Chapter IV — The Valley of Fear
- Chapter V — The Darkest Hour
- Chapter VI — Danger
- Chapter VII — The Trapping of Birdy Edwards
- Epilogue
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1859–1930 · Victorian
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born in Edinburgh and trained as a physician there before practising in Southsea, where he wrote A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine from 1891 made him famous; he killed the detective in 1893 and revived him in 1901–03. He also wrote historical novels, the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World, 1912), military histories, and, in his later years, extensively on spiritualism. He was knighted in 1902.
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