Deciphering Sherlock: Holmes’s Last and First Decryption

Abstract

Frank Kermode explains that the god Hermes concerns himself “with oracles, including a dubious sort known as klēdōn, which at the moment of its announcement may seem trivial or irrelevant, the secret sense declaring itself only after long delay.” Irene Adler from “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes short story, is one such klēdōn. Despite Holmes’s success in tricking Adler into revealing the hiding place of an incriminating photograph, she secretly manages to replace this picture with a message ending, “I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Very truly yours.” Beyond this calculated rebuff, however, the lasting significance of the case concerns the glimpse Adler afforded the detective of the photograph’s original hiding place, safe, or crypt, a lesson that Beatrice Falder confirms in “Shoscombe Old Place” (1927), the final adventure in the Holmes canon. Two women thus enlighten Holmes: enigmas will replace mysteries, encryption will subsume encipherment.