The Valley of Fear (Illustrated Edition)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930) was a Scottish physician and writer known around the world for his stories about detective Sherlock Holmes, which all but created the literary field of crime fiction and made the name Sherlock Holmes synonymous with detectives. Aside from the Sherlock Holmes stories, he was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. In December 1893, in order to dedicate more of his time to more "important" workshis historical novels Conan Doyle had Holmes and Professor Moriarty apparently plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the story "The Final Problem. The public was having none of it, however, and there was an outpouring of support for bringing Sherlock Holmes back, leading Conan Doyle to write a new story in 1901, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Valley of Fear is the final Sherlock Holmes novel written by Conan Doyle, first published in the Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. The first book edition was published in New York on 27 February 1915. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson receive a letter from an informant who is known by the pseudonym Fred Porlock. The letter is written in a numeric code, and Holmes realizes that the numbers refer to words in a book , by page and column, and the detectives set out to find out what the code says. This edition of The Valley of Fear is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and includes images of Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and scenes from the novel.