I went back to reading The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes after Ramadhan reached its happy conclusion and now have around fifteen tales left to go before I can say I have completed the canon. Unfortunately there's something of a critical consensus that by the last couple of collections, His Last Bow and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle had run out of steam - and, possibly, real interest in his creations - and was running on empty. I'm five stories into the penultimate collection and I can see what the critics mean.
But having said that I must say that the fourth of the novellas featuring the Great Detective, The Valley of Fear, which I read back in February, struck me as being the best of the bunch. This is despite the fact that like A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four it features the clumsy telling of an extended back-story after Holmes has solved the initial mystery. In this case, though, there's a genuine puzzle as to how exactly the characters in the back-story relate to those in the first half of the murder mystery, and the pay-off of the ending is strong and satisfying. Plus the writer invests his fearful valley in the United States, which features in the second half, with real menace such that the reader doesn't miss Holmes & Watson (who aren't there, of course) at all.
I suspect I won't really miss them either once I get to the end of the clunky, chunky Complete. I seem to have been reading it forever, even though it's been only some seven months (with two month-long breaks, I hasten to add.)
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