Conan Doyle

The Valley of Fear Annotated and Illustrated Edition Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle published The Valley of Fear in serial form in Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. A book form followed the British serialization in 1915. The manuscript, 176 folio pages with Doyle's deletions and revisions, shows that Watson was not intended to be the original narrator. It is the only Holmes tale to deal directly with Irish issues. Like A Study in Scarlet, one of the more famous Holmes tales, The Valley of Fear features a flashback section inserted after Holmes has put his deductive power to work solving the mystery. This places the reader across the Atlantic Ocean and firmly on the solid ground of actual American history. The historical impetus behind the plot of The Valley of Fear was the real confrontation between the Pinkerton Detective Agency and members of an Irish secret society known as the Molly Maguires who had emigrated to Pennsylvania. Depending on one's point of view, the Molly Maguires were either just a collection of mindlessly violent vigilantes who just so happened to have targeted the anti-union owners of coal mines, or they were guerrilla warriors in the battle for fair and honest treatment of coal miners by an ownership class that wasn't above engaging Pinkerton Detective to dispense their equally violent tactics for keeping the unions under control.