Thoughts on The Sign of the Four

 

Looking at Sign of the Four, we can see some of the conventions of future mystery novels taking shape.  There is a murder.  (Not all Sherlock Holmes stories include a murder, or even a crime).  It is an early locked room mystery -- a body is found in a room with the door and windows locked.  Holmes introduces one of his best-known precepts -- eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however, improbable, is the truth.  There is an obvious suspect who is innocent, and it is up to the detective to clear his name and identify the real killer.  Holmes is able to identify the villain (not actually the killer in this case, but the prime mover) using the clues available to the reader -- in particular, Jonathan Small must be the villain because Major Sholto shot at a random wooden-legged man who turned out to be a harmless tradesman.  Presumably this mean a white tradesman, or Thaddeus would have said otherwise.  Since Small was the only English name among the four, he must be the wooden-legged man.

There are some other things that do not work so well in modern mystery conventions.  The Andaman Islander appears to exist solely as a plot device, to allow the wooden-legged man to climb a wall, and to commit the murder.  Otherwise Doyle has no interest in him.  As with the last novel, there is also an unidentified accomplice, in this case the insider who let Small know what was taking place in the Sholto household.  Holmes is reasonably sure it is the butler, Lal Rao.  I also find Small's purported fidelity to his accomplices to be implausible.  They forced him, on threat to his life, to join their conspiracy.  Why should he need their consent to cut a deal, or insist that they receive their share?  He might say that he took an oath and his oath bound him, but how binding is an oath made under duress?  Of course, one can also ask whether Small is a reliable narrator and whether his account -- either of acting under duress, or of his fidelity to his accomplices, none of whom are in sight -- is altogether truthful.

I am told by TV Tropes that in Sherlock Holmes the woman is always innocent.  That seems like a sort of sentimentality decidedly out of character for Holmes.  And, in fact, it is not universally held by his contemporaries.  Often the obvious suspect that Holmes works to clear is a woman (although, of course, in this case it was a man).  But in this novel, at least, we see an indication that the sentiment belongs to Doyle, not to Holmes.  When Watson comments on how attractive Miss Morstan is, Holmes answers: 

I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

So apparently Holmes recognizes at least the hypothetic possibility of a woman being the villain, even if it never comes up in any of his stories.  And when Watson announces his intention to marry her, Holmes calls her "one of the most charming young ladies I ever met" and praises her intuition in spotting the important item in her father's papers.  But he disapproves of love as biasing the judgment.

And so we see Doyle's first attempt to end the series, by marrying Watson off.  Needless to say, he failed.