The Sign of Four

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Sherlock Holmes novels

The Sign of Four (1890) was the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 stories starring Holmes, whom many regard as the best-known literary character ever invented.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Set in 1888, The Sign of Four has a complex plot involving service in colonial India, a stolen treasure and a secret pact among four ex-convicts. It presents the detective's drug habit and humanizes him in a way that had not been done in the first novel, A Study in Scarlet. It also introduces Doctor Watson's future wife, Mary Morstan.

The novel first appeared in the February 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine as The Sign of the Four, appearing in both London and Philadelphia. The British edition of the magazine originally sold for a shilling, and the American for 25 cents. Surviving copies are now worth several thousand dollars.

Doyle was reputedly commissioned to write the story over an August 30, 1889, dinner with Joseph M. Stoddart, managing editor of the magazine, at the Langham Hotel in London. Stoddart wanted to produce an English version of Lippincott’s with a British editor and British contributors. The dinner was also attended by Oscar Wilde, who eventually contributed The Picture of Dorian Gray to the July 1890 issue. Doyle discussed what he called this "golden evening" in his 1924 autobiography Memories and Adventures.

The novel was published in book form in October 1890 by Spencer Blackett, this time as The Sign of Four; the title lacking the second the of the original. Different editions over years have varied between using one or other title and even some modern editions use the original five word title. As with the first story, A Study in Scarlet, produced two years previously, it was not particularly successful to start with. It was the short stories which were published from 1891 onwards in Strand Magazine which rapidly made Sherlock Holmes and his creator household names.

It has been filmed numerous times, both for motion pictures and television, the first time probably being in 1932 and starring Arthur Wonter and Ian Hunter.

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Trivia

The Sign of Four is the title of an album by guitarists Derek Bailey and Pat Metheny

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Plot holes

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

It's a bit surprising that it took the Scholto brothers six years to find the treasure -- considering the fact that it was hidden in a kind of attic which had a trapdoor to the roof. That trapdoor would have been visible from the outside, and the brothers should have noted it had to lead somewhere.

The room in which Bartholomew Scholto was found dead was obviously in constant use. Yet there appears to be a dust layer on the floor thick and undisturbed enough that Holmes can deduce who was in the room and what they were doing.

Jonathan Small, who seems a vivid person with no suicidal tendencies, unaccountably puts his own neck in the noose by gratutiously admitting to murdering a prison guard and even providing the police with the murder weapon. At the very least he would face being returned to the same unpleasant Andaman prison colony which he escaped. Had he avoided giving his real name, the London police would hardly connect him with an escaped convict in faraway India. Of course, it is neccasary for Small to tell his story in order to solve the mystery, but Doyle could have easily enough found a way for him to do it without incriminating himself (for example, to have him get killed during the final chase and let Holems and Watson find his story written down beside the body, or to have him severly wounded and dying so that he has nothing to lose by telling all).

It is a very touching belief in human nature for four hardened robbers and murderers to confide the secret of a hidden treasure to their prison guard without asking for any guarantee whatsoever that he would fulfill his part in the deal, set them free and give them their share of the treasure. Their confidence in Sholto is all the more surprising considering that they themselves had no hesitation in betraying and murdering a man for the sake of the selfsame treasure.

Jonathan Small proclaims repeatedly and loudly his loylaty to his three Indian co-conspirators. Indeed, this is the main redeeming feature which makes him a sympathetic character albeit a criminal. Yet when he found a way of escaping from the Andamans he did not share it with them, nor did he later make any effort whatsoever to set them free.

Doyle could have set right the last two points, without substantially changing the story line, by having Sholto help the four prisoners esacpe, come with him to Agra and point out the treasure - whereupon he betrays them to the British authorities, in battle with which the three Indians are killed and Small is returned to the Andamans while Sholto makes off with the entire treasure. With that in the past of the story, Small would do exactly the same things he did in the course of the book - indeed, he would have an even stronger motive for doing them.

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