Valley of Fear ch. 1-4 blog post

I have never really read or watched any Sherlock Holmes stories, and thus have not had much prior knowledge about Sherlock Holmes. However, it is clear from the story that the author tries to depict Sherlock Holmes as a very intelligent, meticulous and speculative detective who is able to solve even the hardest cases. Though the murder case depicted in the Valley of Fear was nothing unique in terms of plots in thriller stories, the extent and depth to which the author depicted the process of Watson and Sherlock Holmes deciphering the code they received and in searching for clues demonstrated Sherlock Holmes’ speculative nature and incredible deduction skills. For example, it was quite surprising how quickly they figured out which book the code was written from, and that the sentence “‘Douglas - rich - country- now - at - Birlstone - House - Birlstone - confidence - is - pressing” (179) meant that a rich person Douglas who lived at Birlstone was in danger and that he was confident in it.  

I was not familiar with the Sherlock Holmes series, so I was surprised to see that the narrator was not Sherlock Holmes. This sort of created the effect of allowing us to view Sherlock Holmes’ character in the eyes of another person who seems to look up to him, therefore portraying him as again, an intelligent and famous detective who is known for his skills.

I was also pleasantly surprised at some small sections where the author brought up some interesting, small ideas. For example, he stated that the name Porlock was simply an identification mark, and that behind that name was a personality. This made me question the importance of names in our identity and whether or not our names had any importance in actually defining us. Also, when Sherlock Holmes brought up Johnathan Wild and how he was quite similar to Professor Moriarty and did similar things in the past. He mentioned that “the old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up” (185), which reminds me of how we always say that history repeats and learning from the past is the best way to help us in the present. I felt like this was a good addition to Sherlock Holmes’ reasoning and added some reasonable and realistic deductions in what seemed like many somehow unrealistic deductions.  

The author did a good job of building mystery and suspense by allowing readers to fully appreciate the process in which the detectives discovered and deduced certain things. However, a lot of the themes and plot in the story are quite common themes, such as a rich wealthy man (which somehow reminded me of The Great Gatsby and the elaborate, wealthy parties) who obtained money illegally and who is connected to some powerful figure who seems to also be entangled with some sort of secret society with a particular symbol (though we are still not yet quite sure what those symbols meant). However, despite these familiar backgrounds, the fact that the mystery of the murder and the identities of these characters and their connection to the murder are still unknown maintains the suspense of the story and allows us readers to be curious about the solution.