The Valley of Fear

The Valley of Fear is a novel by the Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle, serialized in the Strand Magazine from September 1914 to May 1915 and published in book form later that year, the fourth and final novel to feature the detective Sherlock Holmes. Its first part opens when Holmes and Dr. Watson are consulted about the murder of John Douglas, a wealthy American found shot and disfigured in the moated manor house of Birlstone, and Holmes, guided by a coded warning received from an informant inside the criminal organization of his great rival Professor Moriarty, gradually deduces that the dead man is not who he appears to be. The novel's second part shifts to a lengthy flashback set decades earlier in the coal and iron country of Pennsylvania, narrating how the Pinkerton detective Birdy Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers, a murderous secret society modeled closely on the real nineteenth-century Molly Maguires, and brought about the destruction of the gang from within, a past that explains both Douglas's true identity and the vengeance that finally catches up with him at Birlstone. Doyle's structure, splitting the book between a present-day detective puzzle and an extended historical narrative explaining its origins, echoes the earlier Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet, and The Valley of Fear is also notable as the story in which Professor Moriarty makes his first appearance in the internal chronology of the Holmes canon, cementing his role as Holmes's principal antagonist.