Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  “The Final Problem” was, it is has become clearer with each passing decade since its publication in 1893, one of the first exposures of what fandom can do. It also was a testament to the attachment readers had formed not only for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but to the universe he created around him, his friendship with Watson, his connections in London and Scotland Yard, and an accumulating narrative. Unlike more recent examples, Doyle didn’t have a precedence to test his readers (it could be argued he set the precedence with this story). He simply didn’t care enough what they thought. His mind was made up to kill his famous sleuth to, as he wrote to his mother, pursue other callings even at the expense of his bread and butter. Fandom, however, was then a relatively unknown phenomenon and the shocking death of the detective he had been writing about for six years set off a literary fury the likes of which had not be seen outside of scandalous writing. However ...

  Among the finest of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box was cut and mutilated almost as much as the two murder victims whose severed ears were discovered in the titular box.   Published in January of 1893 on both sides of the Atlantic the story, however, was omitted from the works collected in the first British edition The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes , published later that year. Inexplicably, it was included in the US edition of the collection published in February of 1894 but omitted in the immediately following printings. Why? Indeed, this is arguably the grisliest of the Sherlock Holmes stories and may have caused a bit of a stir upon its publication in both editions of The Strand and Harper’s Weekly . There is no evidence of this, however, and fearful may have taken out their scissors preemptively. It’s a pity in either case as the story is first rate Sherlock. There may have been a change of heart or even a change of time and the s...