The Sherlock Holmes Handbook by Riggs Ransom

Author:Riggs, Ransom [Riggs, Ransom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Try as he might to keep the detective locked in his watery grave, however, Holmes refused to stay there forever. Perhaps Doyle’s repulsion toward him had waned over time, or the financial promise of pulling the dust-covers from 221B Baker Street had proved irresistible; whatever Doyle’s reasoning, Holmes finally reappeared in 1901, eight years after “The Final Problem” had seemingly killed him, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle was showered with adulation for the now-classic tale, but the public still wasn’t satisfied; he had set Baskervilles before the events of “The Final Problem,” leaving the world’s favorite detective still theoretically posthumous.

Responding to pressure from friends and fans, Doyle finally brought Holmes back from the dead in 1903 with “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which finds Holmes back in London after three years of exile, explaining to an astonished Watson that he’d been forced to fake his death in order to elude Moriarty’s vengeful henchmen. Doyle would write three more collections of Holmes mysteries over the next twenty-four years, but fans and scholars continue to puzzle over the detective’s period of mysterious exile, known as “The Great Hiatus,” and what might’ve taken place during it. Of course, Holmes himself tells Watson where he’s been in “The Empty House”—for two years he explored such far-flung lands as Tibet and Persia under the guise of a “Norwegian named Sigerson” before moving to France, Holmes says, where he conducted laboratory research on “coal-tar derivatives.” Hearing that his enemies in London were in a weakened state (and intrigued by news of a new mystery he might help solve), Holmes finally returned to Baker Street.

But this wasn’t enough for many Holmes fans, who had their own ideas about the Great Hiatus. Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution supposes that Holmes spent his hiatus years recovering from cocaine addiction under the care of Sigmund Freud. Other drug-related hiatus theories range from Holmes traveling to Tibet to grow opium to spending his time there studying Buddhism in an effort to kick his habit. More skeptical readers wondered if Holmes had ever left London at all and whether the entire “hiatus” was a scheme cooked up by Watson to deceive Moriarty’s henchmen; others suggested that Holmes may actually have died at Reichenbach Falls and been replaced by a convincing imposter. A less outlandish school of thought holds that Holmes had married Irene Adler—the beautiful opera singer from “A Scandal in Bohemia” who was, famously, one of the few persons ever to outwit the detective—and that the “hiatus” was really their extended honeymoon.

The world may never know.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.