‘The Adventure of the Abergavenny Murder’ 
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

NAME: Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective 
PLACE: London and Wales 
TIME: circa 1910

CASES: ‘A Study in Scarlet’ (1887), ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ (1891), ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902.), ‘The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes’ (1927) etc.

DOSSIER: The tall, lean, hook-nosed Sherlock Holmes with his deerstalker and Inverness cape was the world’s first consulting detective-a man so famous that readers all over the world believe he actually exists and have made his home at 221b Baker Street in London a place of pilgrimage. Admired for his intellect, powers of deduction and scientific knowledge, Holmes is a first-class athlete, enthusiastic violin player, and noted also for his moods and his not infrequent use of cocaine. A restless and excitable man, he owes much of his stability to his friend and companion, Dr John H. Watson, a practising GP of great loyalty and common sense. Although often teased by Holmes and left amazed at his deductions, the good doctor is not above questioning his methods. According to the canon of stories, Holmes was born in 1854, solved his first case while still a student at Oxford, and then set himself up as a consulting detective in Baker Street in 1881. Here for almost a quarter of a century-interrupted only by a hiatus of three years as a result of certain events at the Reichenbach Falls-he used his scientific equipment, library of reference works and commonplace books, in conjunction with his exceptional powers of reason to reassure potential clients before setting out on his cases. Ultimately, Holmes retired to Sussex to raise bees, and there, with a single brief foray just before the First World War, he has remained, his fame ensured by the constant reprinting of his exploits plus many film and television adaptations of the stories so faithfully recorded by Dr Watson.

CREATOR: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) changed detective story history with the creation of Sherlock Holmes, who was partly based on his Edinburgh tutor, Dr Joseph Bell, and a fair mixture of his own convictions and interests. His medical knowledge, love of unravelling mysteries and his brilliant idea of creating a central figure to run through all his stories, helped to establish a benchmark for all those who followed in the genre. Conan Doyle was a supreme storyteller and few other writers have so evocatively captured the language and times of Victorian London, with its gaslit streets and hansom cabs. He has also been credited with creating arguably the first hardboiled detective-the tough, wisecracking, resourceful Birdy Edwards, the American undercover Pinkerton operative who is involved in Holmes’s case of ‘The Valley of Fear’, published in 1915, almost a decade before the official ‘birth’ of the genre in America. (Curiously, Dashiell Hammett, one of the founding fathers of the hardboiled genre was, of course, a Pinkerton operative before he became a writer.) Mystery also surrounds this next item-the outline for a Sherlock Holmes story which Conan Doyle never completed. The text was found in manuscript after the author’s death by his biographer, Hesketh Pearson, and it is assumed that he either mislaid it or decided against using the plot. The title has been ascribed to it from a remark by Dr Watson and it is here appearing in print for the first time in almost half a century.

THE STORY:

A girl calls on Sherlock Holmes in great distress. A murder has been committed in her village-her uncle has been found shot in his bedroom, apparently through the open window. Her lover has been arrested. He is suspected on several grounds:
(1.) he has had a violent quarrel with the old man, who has threatened to alter his will, which is in the girl’s favour, if she ever speaks to her lover again.
(2.) a revolver has been found in his house, with his initials scratched on the butt, and one chamber discharged. The bullet found in the dead man’s body fits this revolver.
(3.) he possesses a light ladder, the only one in the village, and there are the marks of the foot of such a ladder on the soil below the bedroom window, while similar soil (fresh) has been found on the feet of the ladder.
Notwithstanding these damning proofs, however, the girl persists in believing her lover to be perfectly innocent, while she suspects another man, who has also been making love to her, though she has no evidence whatever against him, except that she feels by instinct that he is a villain who would stick at nothing.
Sherlock and Watson go down to the village and inspect the spot, together with the detective in charge of the case. The marks of the ladder attract Holmes’s special attention. He ponders-looks about him-inquires if there is any place where anything bulky could be concealed. There is-a disused well, which has not been searched because apparently nothing is missing. Sherlock, however, insists on the well being explored. A village boy consents to be lowered into it, with a candle. Before he goes down Holmes whispers something in his ear-he appears surprised. The boy is lowered and, on his signal, pulled up again. He brings to the surface a pair of stilts!
‘Good Lord!’ cries the detective. ‘Who on earth could have expected this?’
‘I did,’ replies Holmes.
‘But why?’
‘Because the marks on the garden soil were made by two perpendicular poles-the feet of a ladder, which is on the slope, would have made depressions slanting towards the wall.’
(N.B. The soil was a strip beside a gravel path on which the stilts left no impression.)
This discovery lessened the weight of the evidence of the ladder, though the other evidence remained.
The next step was to trace the user of the stilts, if possible. But he had been too wary, and after two days nothing had been discovered. At the inquest the young man was found guilty of murder. But Holmes is convinced of his innocence. In these circumstances, and as a last hope, he resolves on a sensational stratagem.
He goes up to London, and returning on the evening of the day when the old man is buried, he and Watson and the detective go to the cottage of the man whom the girl suspects, taking with him a man whom Holmes has brought from London, who has a disguise which makes him the living image of the murdered man, wizened body, grey shrivelled face, skull-cap, and all. They have also with them, the pair of stilts. On reaching the cottage, the disguised man mounts the stilts and stalks up the path towards the man’s open bedroom window, at the same time crying out his name in a ghastly sepulchral voice. The man, who is already half mad with guilty terrors, rushes to the window and beholds in the moonlight the terrific spectacle of his victim stalking towards him. He reels back with a scream as the apparition, advancing to the window, calls in the same unearthly voice, ‘As you came for me, I have come for you!’ When the party rush upstairs into his room he darts to them, clinging to them, gasping, and pointing to the window, where the dead man’s face is glaring in, shrieks out, ‘Save me! My God! He has come for me as I came for him.’
Collapsing after his dramatic scene, he makes a full confession. He has marked the revolver, and concealed it where it was found-he has also smeared the ladder-foot with soil from the old man’s garden. His object was to put his rival out of the way, in the hope of gaining possession of the girl and her money.