Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A coded warning reaches Baker Street from a frightened informer inside Professor Moriarty's organisation. Sherlock Holmes has barely deciphered the message — danger, a country house, the name Douglas — when Inspector MacDonald arrives with news from Birlstone Manor. Behind a raised drawbridge, in a room protected by a moat, an American-born gentleman has been found dead. A card marked “V.V. 341” lies beside him, and one of his wedding rings is gone.

Arthur Conan Doyle divides The Valley of Fear into two great movements. The first is a locked-country-house investigation, driven by Holmes's attention to what does not fit: a missing dumbbell, a bicycle without a rider, a strangely arranged window and witnesses whose stories agree a little too neatly. The second crosses the Atlantic and turns backward in time, carrying the reader into a Pennsylvania mining valley ruled by intimidation, oaths and a violent lodge.

First published in book form in 1915, this final Sherlock Holmes novel broadens the detective story into a study of long memory. The mystery at Birlstone is not isolated; it is the latest consequence of choices made years earlier and thousands of miles away. Doyle lets setting do much of the work: the quiet Sussex manor, the industrial American valley and Moriarty's unseen London network become three chambers of the same trap.

This illustrated edition introduces the cast, maps both sides of the Atlantic and traces objects and places without revealing how the two narratives join. Six visual movements unlock only after their corresponding chapters have been read. Begin with Porlock's cipher, and remember Holmes's rule: the unusual is often more useful than the obvious.