The Sign of Four / Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Lucky Sherlock Holmes, with Watson as a roommate he has his own supervised consumption site! And how much more I appreciated the story this time around.

I just finished reading The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, from which I learned so much about the lives of the working class and the poor in Victorian society. It gave me a new perspective on the Holmes & Watson relationship. Watson is just home from Afghanistan, wounded, probably watching his money carefully and being able to share lodging with Holmes is keeping him from far worse situations. When Mary Marston comes to them, she is also living in a rooming house and she is fortunate enough to afford a decent one with a landlady who is a friend as well. When Holmes disguises himself as an old sailor, Jones compliments him on his “workhouse cough.” Illness was almost ubiquitous among the folk who had to accept a place in the workhouses, where people had a roof over their heads but were fed barely edible food, had to deal with verminous beds, had no privacy to speak of, and then had to perform hard labour for the privilege. I was blind to all these details when I first read this tale.

The bargain between Small and the three Sikhs reminded me in some ways of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, despite the fact that it is Indians who come to England in that book in order to recover the moonstone of the title. Doyle strangely gives his characters Muslim first names and generally seems to muddle Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu details (and Holmes recognizes an Andaman Islander but doesn't blink at these inconsistencies, so they must have been common at the time).

It also made me smile that many of us gripe about “instalove" in modern books, but here we have John Watson professing his undying love to Mary Marston within a few days of meeting her, having held her hand briefly. I guess Doyle had no idea how many adventures that he would write for these two men, so why delay in marrying Watson off. Mind you, as a Victorian man, being married wouldn't have curtailed his freedom in any way, so the marriage wouldn't interfere with plot tension.

At least Mary got a few pearls out of the deal before the vindictive Small cast the remaining treasure into the Thames! The iron box remained as the representative of the sought after relic.



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