The man’s wife and best friend are on the scene but behaving oddly. The spy, Porlock, in a following message, refuses to continue, so Holmes and Watson deduce how to decode the cipher, only to be interrupted by news of a bloody murder. The book opens with Holmes getting a coded message from an informant amongst Moriarty’s organization. Culbard), The Valley of Fear is a faithful retelling of the book, even to the language used, which gives it a flavor that I love.
As with the other SelfMadeHero Sherlock Holmes graphic novels (all adapted by Ian Edginton and illustrated by I.N.J. The adaptation here is, as expected, outstanding. In contrast to the drawing-room mystery, the flashback section is more hard-boiled, with an undercover operative infiltrating a nasty gang with his own life at stake. There’s a cipher message, a mention of Moriarty’s machinations, a missing ring, a locked-room murder in a house with a drawbridge, of all things… as Leslie Klinger points out in his introduction, these “puzzles were fresh and original ideas at the time”. In this case, it’s loosely based on the Molly Maguires, a secret society amongst Pennsylvania coal miners that controlled through violent intimidation and murder. Like most of the other novels, there’s a lengthy digression where Arthur Conan Doyle writes an adventure story to explain the modern-day murder. It was written late, first appearing in 1914, but it’s a good mystery. The Valley of Fear is the least-known of the four Sherlock Holmes novels, and I’m not sure why that is.
0 kommentar(er)
