His Last Bow

’There’s an east wind coming... such a wind as never blew on England yet.’

Arthur Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow features a selection of Sherlock Holmes stories written at a time of growing tensions in Europe. First published as a collection in 1917, against the backdrop of the First World War, the volume covers tales that deviate from the pattern of earlier Sherlock adventures which focus on individual culpability and the comfort of a simplistic restoration of order. The titular story in this collection was influenced by Doyle’s personal experience of the war, and in these tales the solutions to seemingly small-scale, local, mysteries uncover crimes concerning national security, or even expose the covert evil actions of organizations and powerful dictators.

This edition contains a new introduction by Trish Ferguson which offers a richly detailed contextual backdrop for understanding the work as an act of war service designed to offer a morale boost to both British troops abroad and readers at home.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Trish Ferguson is Associate Professor of English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her primary research focus is literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of Literature and Modern Time: Technological Modernity, Glimpses of Eternity, Experiments with Time (2020), Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon (2016), Victorian Time: Standardisations, Technologies, Catastrophes (2013), and Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013).

Darryl Jones (General Editor) is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Oxford World’s Classics editions of M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Gothic Tales, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as Horror: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2021).