Watson tells us, “We could not doubt that justice, if belated, had come at last.” To Conan Doyle the story takes a stand against the immoralities of nation-plundering; to most readers, the story induces heavy sleep. The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, a complete list of articles published about the Holmes cycle, had yet to show a single article about this story as late as 1974 (though several have been written since). When Conan Doyle set his Holmes stories the task of reflecting world concerns, rather than providing exciting mysteries, his readers weren’t so eager to follow.

In this story Conan Doyle continues to humanize Holmes. He gives him little work to do. In fact, because Holmes is so competitive with the local Inspector Baynes, they nearly cancel each other out, leaving it to the dictator’s gardener to save the day. Though still capable of remarkable insight and brilliant deductions, Holmes isn’t the superman he appeared to be in the early tales. His list of mistakes will grow in this series, setting up a new pattern that in its turn will be broken to surprise us.

The second story in the cycle to be published, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” appeared in December 1908.a Conan Doyle was very much concerned about the laxity of the government’s defense of Britain against the growing power of other European nations, particularly Germany. This story functions as a cautionary tale for ministers oblivious to mounting danger. It also continues the theme of Holmes as ordinary mortal. He has to ask Mycroft for the names of the spies most likely to be involved in the matter; we recall that in “The Adventure of the Second Stain” he knew them without having to ask. Although he makes some clever deductions about the reason for the odd placement of the body of Cadogan West and the absence of blood at the presumed murder scene, he’s completely off-track about West’s involvement. He has been steered away by Mycroft from the true source of treason, the brother of Sir James Walter, because the elder Holmes can’t imagine that a long-time government minister could be involved in any kind of intrigue against his government. Sir James is protected by the same kind of “he’s one of us” feeling that later sheltered Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Don ald Maclean when they were Soviet moles working inside British Intelligence. Holmes suspects everyone but the real villain. When he discovers the truth, Holmes says to Watson, “ ‘You can write me down an ass this time, Watson,’ said he. ‘This is not the bird that I was looking for.’ ”

This story adds to the growing list of crimes Holmes is ready to commit in order to get at the source of worse crimes. Although there’s talk of getting a warrant to search the premises of Hugo Oberstein, Holmes concludes that the evidence he has wouldn’t persuade a magistrate. When Watson agrees to be the lookout while Holmes once again turns to breaking and entering, a moment of personal affection follows that in some ways is more rewarding to readers than another demonstration of Holmes as supersleuth. “He sprang up and shook me by the hand. ‘I knew you would not shrink at the last,’ said he, and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen.”

In February 1909, two months after this story was published Conan Doyle was recuperating from an illness when a Cornish boatman said something to him that must have stung him, for he repeated the incident many times in later years. “ ‘I think, sir,’ the boatman said, expressing the popular reaction to the resumption of Holmes’s career, ‘when Holmes fell over the cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.”’ (Memories and Adventures, p. 116). This implied criticism spurred Conan Doyle to set his next story in Cornwall. “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” published in December 1910, combines a number of themes. First, Holmes returns to his old form by solving a string of baffling murders. The adventure also deepens the relationship between Holmes and Watson, as Holmes would have either been killed or driven insane had not Watson pulled him out of the deadly vapors to which Holmes had subjected them both as an experiment. We have never seen Holmes so vulnerable. Holmes’s face, “white, rigid and drawn with horror,” his “clammy forehead” and “unsteady voice” testify to his mortality. The terrors of the hallucinatory visions produced by the spell of the drug show us that even his admirably balanced mind might sink into madness.