The Adventure of the Empty House was first published in the
Strand Magazine in October 1903 and later collected in The Return of Sherlock
Holmes, published in 1905. Arthur Conan Doyle had “killed off” his famous
detective Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, published in 1893, and finally
gave way to public pressure to bring him back from the dead, which he did in
this story.
Conan Doyle had been genuine enough in his desire to put an
end to the Sherlock Holmes stories, due to his exhaustion in thinking up new
adventures for his hero and wishing to have more time for other work, but he
was perhaps fortunate that his method of dispatching Holmes was one that
allowed for an escape, which he was therefore able to bring to fruition when
the “resurrection” took place. It has sometimes been suggested that this was
always Conan Doyle’s intention, but that does sound unlikely given his comments
at the time.
The Story
The Adventure of the Empty House begins with Dr John Watson
relating the strange murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair. The young
aristocrat was a pleasant young man whose only vice was that of playing cards,
sometimes for money, although he never gambled more than he could afford to
lose.
On the evening of his murder, Adair had returned at 10 pm to
his home on Park Lane, London, where he lived with his mother and sister. He
had gone to his room on an upper floor and locked the door. When his mother
came home she found that he would not answer a knock at the door and eventually
had the door forced open, where Adair is found to be dead having had part of
his head blown off by an expanding bullet.
There were no weapons in the room, and no indication that
anyone but Adair had been in the room. The window was open, but the drop to the
flowerbed below was at least 20 feet and there was no sign of any disturbance
on the ground outside. If anyone fired a gun from the street it would surely
have been heard by people on busy Park Lane, but this was not the case.
Adair had been sitting at a table where it appears that he
had been totting up his winnings and losses at cards, but all the sums were
modest and did not suggest that anyone in his social circle would have a motive
to murder him.
The case was one that puzzled many people, including Dr
Watson, who clearly took the view that this would have been one that Sherlock
Holmes would have been intrigued by. As the story opens, Watson is standing
outside the house, looking up at the window of the room where the crime took
place, and trying to think as he knew Holmes would have done.
As he turns away he bumps into an old man who is standing
nearby and knocks some books out of his hands. Watson picks up the books and
attempts to apologise as he hands them back, but the old man hurries away.
When Watson gets home, he is visited soon afterwards by the
same old man, who apologises for his earlier brusqueness. The man suggests he
might be able to offer him some books to fill a gap on Watson’s shelves, which
Watson promptly turns to look at. When he turns back, he is amazed to see that
the old man is in fact Sherlock Holmes who has just removed his disguise.
When Watson recovers his senses, having fainted with the
shock, Holmes tells him how he had survived the incident that had apparently
caused his death three years previously. As related in The Final Problem, Holmes
had encountered his arch-enemy Moriarty on a narrow path above the Reichenbach
Falls in Switzerland. The two fought and Moriarty slipped and fell to his
death. Holmes had other enemies and he decided that it would help him to catch
them if everyone thought he had died as well. He therefore climbed up a steep
rock-face and hid in a crevice while Watson and the local police searched for
him in vain, concluding that Holmes and Moriarty must have fallen together and
their bodies been washed down the river.
Just as Holmes thought he was out of danger a huge rock
tumbled past him. He looked up to see one of Moriarty’s associates, Colonel
Sebastian Moran, who clearly knew that Holmes was still alive.
There now followed a period of three years in which Holmes
adopted a variety of aliases and disguises as he toured the world acting as a
secret agent for the British government. The only person, apart from Moran, who
knew that Holmes was not dead was his brother Mycroft who was instructed to
keep paying the rent for Holmes’s lodgings in Baker Street.
Holmes only returned to London when he heard about the
murder of Ronald Adair, as it sounded to him like the work of Sebastian Moran.
He can see a way of flushing out his old enemy and bringing him to justice. He
has set up a scheme to achieve his goal, and he is now going to put it into
action, taking Watson with him.
He leads Watson through some obscure back streets to the
rear of an empty house which, to Watson’s surprise, fronts on to the opposite
side of Baker Street from the old lodgings at 221B. From the front window Watson
can see what appears to be Holmes himself, silhouetted in an upstairs window.
Holmes explains that this is actually a wax decoy that their former landlady,
Mrs Hudson, is moving around at intervals so that it appears to be more
lifelike.
After several hours waiting in darkness they hear someone
entering the house and approaching the room. They hide themselves away and
watch as a man converts a cane into a rifle, takes careful aim across the
street and fires it, hitting the wax dummy. Holmes and Watson tackle the man to
the floor, Holmes blows a whistle, and Inspector Lestrade and two policemen
arrive to arrest the gunman who is, of course, Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Holmes explains that the rifle used by Moran was made for
him by a German mechanic such that it would fire expanding bullets with almost
no sound. This was therefore the weapon used to kill Ronald Adair, and Moran
can thus be prosecuted for his murder.
But what could have been Moran’s motive for killing Adair?
Holmes explains that the two of them had been gambling partners and that they had
been winning at cards because Moran had been cheating, which Adair had only
recently realised. Adair must have threatened to expose Moran, but because
Moran’s livelihood depended on gambling, he had killed Adair to keep him quiet.
At the time of his death, Holmes supposes, Adair had been working out the sums
of money he needed to repay the players who had been cheated.
Does the story hold water?
The point of the story is to re-introduce Sherlock Holmes to
Conan Doyle’s demanding readers, by providing both an adventure story and an
explanation of how Holmes survived the encounter with Moriarty and what he had
been doing in the interim. There is therefore not all that much in the way of
Holmesian detection in the story. The clever part is the setting of the trap into
which Moran falls.
But there would seem to be some elements that do not work
particularly well. It is clear that Holmes has taken his brother into his
confidence, due to having absolute trust in Mycroft’s ability to keep a secret.
Mycroft has presumably agreed to keep paying the rent on 221B Baker St in the
expectation that Holmes would return at some stage, but everyone else who knew Holmes,
such as Inspector Lestrade, would be convinced that the former tenant was dead,
so would it not seem odd for the rooms to remain empty for a whole three years?
What possible reason could there be if the original tenant was not expected to
return?
A more troubling aspect of the story, surely, is the
instruction given to Mrs Hudson to keep moving the wax dummy to give the
impression that it is Holmes himself. Clearly Mrs Hudson has been told that
Holmes is alive, but what explanation could there possibly be for this strange
instruction other than that it is intended to be shot at instead of the real
thing? Would you really want, as a landlady, to be expected to handle an object
that somebody might fire a gun at at any minute? Would Holmes really have put
Mrs Hudson into a position of such danger?
And is it not remarkable that Colonel Moran should decide to
try his luck and see if there happened to be an empty house immediately
opposite his target from which he could fire his rifle? Why not fire from the
street, as he had done to murder Ronald Adair?
And how did Colonel Moran know that Sherlock Holmes was back
in London when Holmes had kept the secret from absolutely everybody? Had Moran spent
time wandering up and down Baker Street on the off-chance of spotting Holmes’s
profile in the window?
Why would Holmes know that Moran would choose this precise
moment to make his attack? There must be a reason, because otherwise Holmes
could not have arranged for Lestrade and the two policemen to be on hand to
make the arrest.
There are certainly a few things that do not seem to add up
in this story!
© John Welford
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