The Valley of Fear

The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle, A.L. Burt Company, 1914

Sherlock Holmes receives an anonymous coded message that something awful is about to happen to a man named Douglas at the manor house in Birlstone. The next morning, he and Dr. Watson, his assistant, are told by the CID that Mr. Douglas was horribly murdered the night before.

At Birlstone, they find the body of a man who was shot in the face, point blank, with a sawed-off shotgun. The initial thought was that Douglas surprised a burglar. That becomes increasingly unlikely considering that the house has a real moat with a drawbridge, that was up at the time of the murder, and that his wife and butler reported that maybe a minute elapsed between the gunshot and the discovery of the body. Suicide is even more unlikely. In the past, Douglas did let slip the fear that someone, or some group, was after him. In his sleep, he might have mentioned The Valley of Fear.

Just before Holmes wraps up the mystery, the story shifts to 1870s Colorado. A man named McMurdo, on the run from the Chicago police, is on his way to a coal mining town called Vermissa. The place is run with an iron hand by Boss McGinty, haed of the local Lodge of the Eminent Order of Freemen. It's a national organization, of which McMurdo is also a member. But, in Colorado, the organization stays in control by means of intimidation and murder of anyone who gets in their way. The law is powerless to stop them.

McMurdo rises quickly in the "organization." One day, he gets word that a Pinkerton detective from back East, a man named Birdy Edwards, has come to town. McMurdo hatches a plan to lure Edwards to a house outside of town, with promises of all sorts of inside information on the Lodge. There, several Lodge members, including Boss McGinty, will be waiting. They plan to torture him to find out what he knows about them, then kill him. Everything goes according to plan, until McMurdo announces to the others that he is Birdy Edwards.

Many, but not all, of the Lodge members face long prison terms, or the gallows, because of the testimony of McMurdo/Edwards. He knows that the surviving Lodge members will not sit still, so he heads to England, changes his name to Douglas, and meets his end (or does he?) at a place called Birlstone.

You can't go wrong with a Sherlock Holmes story. It's an intelligent mystery with a number of twists and turns, it's very well written and the reader just waits for Holmes to put it all together and solve the supposedly unsolvable. It's well worth the reader's time.