You have sixpence in your pocket, fog in your lungs, and no idea that the magazine on that bookstall is about to break your heart.
The fog this morning is the colour of weak tea, and it has crept inside Waterloo Station and curled around the gas lamps. You elbow through porters and umbrellas to the W. H. Smith bookstall, coin already in hand. It is the same ritual performed by hundreds of thousands of Britons every month: sixpence on the counter, and in return, the new number of The Strand Magazine in its familiar pale-blue cover.
For two and a half years, this ritual has had one true purpose. Since “A Scandal in Bohemia” appeared in the summer of 1891, the magazine has carried a new adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street — the hawk-eyed consulting detective who can read a man’s life story from his hat brim. Half a million copies sell each month. People queue on publication day. You have friends who claim, only half-joking, that Holmes is a real person, and letters addressed to him arrive in Baker Street with the morning post.
You tuck the December issue under your arm, find a corner of the platform, and open it to the story every reader turns to first. The title stops you cold: “The Final Problem.” And then the first line, in Dr. Watson’s steady voice, which today does not sound steady at all.
Around you on the platform, other readers are opening the same pages. A man in a bowler has gone pale. A woman near the ticket gate presses a gloved hand to her mouth.
Click the magazine (or the button) to turn the pages Watson wrote “with a heavy heart.”
Here is the strangest part: the murderer left a confession, two years in advance. In November 1891 — with Holmes barely six stories old and already the most famous character in Britain — Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, Mary Doyle, the person he called “the Ma’am”:
Her reply has become legend:
Doyle wanted to be remembered for serious historical novels, not for what he considered clever puzzle stories. So he tried to price himself out of the job: he demanded the outrageous sum of £1,000 for the next twelve stories, fully expecting The Strand to refuse. The magazine accepted by return. Holmes, it turned out, could not be starved to death.
By 1893 Doyle’s life had darkened. His father died that autumn; his wife Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given only months to live. Travelling in Switzerland, Doyle stood before the Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen — a black chasm where meltwater thunders down some 250 metres — and knew he had found it: “a terrible place,” he later wrote, “and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him.” He invented a villain worthy of the drop — Professor James Moriarty, “the Napoleon of crime,” a spider at the centre of a web of villainy — for one purpose only: to take Holmes over the edge. In his diary for the month he finished the story, Doyle wrote two words: “Killed Holmes.”
Two men grapple at the lip of a roaring waterfall. That is where the December 1893 story leaves them. But no bodies were ever found in the story — only churned footprints leading to the edge, an alpenstock against a rock, and a farewell note weighted by a silver cigarette case. Drag the slider from what readers believed in 1893 to what Holmes finally confessed in 1903.
The December issue detonated. The Strand’s staff would refer to it for years afterward simply as “the dreadful event.” More than 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions, nearly sinking one of the most successful magazines on Earth. Furious letters poured into Doyle’s post. One lady’s began, simply, “You brute.” Legend says young men in the City wore black mourning bands for a detective who had never lived — the evidence for that is thin, but the fact that everyone believed it tells you how it felt.
You have just finished reading “The Final Problem” on that foggy platform. What do you do?
For nearly eight years Doyle held out, writing the books he thought mattered. The public never stopped asking. In 1901 he blinked halfway — and in 1903, an American magazine made him an offer that raised the dead. Drag through the timeline to watch the whole story: death, mourning, and the greatest comeback in publishing history.
Holmes once said he never guesses — it is destructive to the logical faculty. Let us see about you. Seven questions; instant verdicts.