His Last Bow
Arthur Conan Doyle
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4.2 • 81 Ratings
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Publisher Description
An Apple Books Classic edition.
This late entry in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon reflects a turning point for both its hero and the world he inhabits.
Dr. Watson looks back on a series of demanding cases, from calculated acts of revenge to the return of Holmes’ perhaps even more brilliant and mercurial brother Mycroft. In the title story (one of the few not narrated by Watson), Holmes returns from retirement to serve his country on the eve of the First World War.
His Last Bow is quietly suspenseful and steeped in atmosphere. These stories capture Holmes in his final phase of rich character development: still formidable, still precise, but newly aware of forces beyond even his control.
Customer Reviews
August 1914
There is a strange correspondence between this, the chronological finale of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures and reading Barbara W Tuchman’s marvellous history, ‘The Guns of August’. The observations by the German characters at the story’s opening are reflected in Tuchman’s minutely detailed and careful analysis of the British position in August 1914, a position that Conan Doyle clearly appreciated in August 1917 when was writing this story. Critics have argued that Holmes should not have revealed his identity and destroyed his ‘cover story’ and usefulness as a spy, but this ignores the title; this is clearly Holmes’ last effort and he was either unable or unwilling to carry on after two difficult years of tense undercover work. It’s a moving final encounter with Watson too, still Holmes’ trusted companion but not, in this one case, his biographer nor the story’s narrator. For us, as Holmes’s fans, this is not quite the end though, as in 1915 on the Sussex Downs he will meet the extraordinary young women (disguised as a young man), Mary Russell. But that is another series and another story…