Book – His Last Bow - The Cardboard box

Book – His Last Bow - The Cardboard box
Author : Arthur Conan Doyle

Score: 10/10

Year: 1893 (serialized) ; 1993 (this edition) 

Publisher: Wordworth

ISBN 978-1-85326-070-4

Pages 266 to 287 ( 1 story) 

Language: English 

As Sherlock is busy and seems uncommunicative, and Watson is bored by reading the newspaper, the doctor puts it down and starts drifting off, until his friend leaves his own studies and raises a point upon which they had previously disagreed. After which, Sherlock points an article Watson had missed in that newspaper, and also hands a telegram from earlier that blazing hot August morning, pertaining to the same case: the telegram is from Lestrade, who is asking Holmes to come to Croydon and investigate it. This case is about a pair of severed ears which Miss Susan Cushing had received in a cardboard box. Holmes and Watson join Lestrade in the attempt to understand the nature of this delivery, and possibly criminal act. 


Doyle reminds of the Study in Scarlet and the Sign of the Four, and since he had published in 1893 and situated the action to a hot August, it is generally given the year 1888 by all sources that I checked. 

This story had been published in the Strand magazine in January 1893, had been included initially in the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes as the second of twelve stories, which is really its best position for a person who wants to read it in chronological order of publication, instead of where it ended in most american editions such as this present once from Wordworth : the second of eight stories in the Last Bow. I say so, because the Last Bow are stories from 1908-1913, and the Last Bow story ending this collection was published after the Valley of Fear novella (from 1914-15), was published in 1917, as stand alone story and then in the collection. 

Reading it now, after I read later stories is a bit odd, hence my choice to review it alone.

There were, as to this date, 3 adaptations for this story. The Granada episode 41 (the very last to be made), aired 11 April 1994, was more or less faithful, with minor variations. Instead of actions at sea, they are changed to a pond ; instead of August in the written form, it is changed to Christmas time in a cold and snowy winter.