The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set in 1888, The Sign of the Four has a complex plot involving service in India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts (“the Four” of the title) and two corrupt prison guards. It presents Holmes’s drug habit and humanizes him in a way that had not been done in the preceding novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). It also introduces Dr. Watson’s future wife, Mary Morstan.

When I read my first original Sherlock Holmes novel, ‘A Study In Scarlet‘ (1887), ten months ago, I was surprised at how different the characters of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes and the storytelling style were from the expectations I’d gained from the adaptations of Sherlock Holmes for movies and television.

‘The Sign Of Four‘ (1890) was even more of a surprise. This was more of a thriller than a mystery. Written to be serialised in a magazine, it was crammed with scenes of action and derring-do that were told with gusto, wringing every drop of melodrama possible out of the plot in each episode. We had a story of treasure stolen and then lost, of revenge triggered by violence and betrayal during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, of mysterious benefactors gifting pearls to a young woman, and of arcane symbols left as warnings. There was a murder in a locked room, a chase by boat along the Thames, and death by bullet, blade and blowpipe.

This was a fast-moving story that was focused more on the action and the exotic attributes of the characters than on the unravelling of abstruse puzzles. The prose was breathless rather than deathless. Much of it felt as if it had been flung together. Some of Watson’s exclamatory remarks were so bombastic that they felt like a heavy-handed action movie soundtrack, all bluster and no content.

Holmes was shown as a brilliant but unstable man, addicted to the adrenaline rush of the chase or the sharp bite of the cocaine syringe. Watson was in love, in the repressed, undemonstrative but deeply felt way, unique to the British middle-class white male of the late nineteenth century.

The supporting characters, villains, victims, accomplices and police officers were as stylised and as brightly painted as characters from the Commedia dell’arte. We had the egotistical, over-confident police officer, the grizzled one-legged ex-soldier intent on revenge for twenty years’ hard labour in the swamps of an Andaman Island prison, and disreputable officers of the East India Company buying respectability with plundered wealth. Then there is Tonga, a native of the Andaman Islands, who never speaks, carries a blowpipe and darts, and is described as a savage “black cannibal”. He is made to seem more like a dangerous animal than a person. 

The episodic structure of the story made the novel feel uneven and disjointed. The last piece of exposition, in a chapter called ‘The Strange Story Of Jonathan Small’ contained the explanation of everything but felt like a clumsy add-on to the novel, although it probably made for a gripping “Season Finale” episode in the magazine.

As always, Stephen Fry’s narration was flawless. I also enjoyed his introduction, where he explained the extraordinary meeting in which ‘The Sign Of Four‘ was commissioned