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‹ In The Sign of the Four (also published as The Sign of Four)Companion Guide · Whole-book primer

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Illustrated Story

The Sign of the Four in 10 Minutes — A Foggy-City Detective and Colonial Loot Sunk to the Riverbed

Conan Doyle's most action-packed Sherlock Holmes novel.

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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委托人玛丽·摩斯坦（Mary Morstan）连续六年在同一天收到一枚匿名寄来的贵重珍珠——恰是她父亲阿瑟·摩斯坦上尉（Captain Arthur Morstan）神秘失踪的纪念日；如今她收到一封匿名信，邀她赴约，于是请福尔摩斯与华生陪同

A Box of Pearls Nobody Divided

A neatly folded card lay at the bottom of the box, cushioning six identical, flawless pearls, and beside it sat an anonymous letter asking Mary Morstan to a meeting that same evening — the same day, it turned out, as the sixth anniversary of her father's disappearance. Mary laid it all out on the mantelpiece at 221B Baker Street; her hands hadn't started shaking yet, but her voice already had.

Holmes picked up the pearls one by one and held them to the gaslight, then turned the card over and sniffed the back of it. He said nothing, just set his pipe down on the table and remarked that the fog was thick enough tonight for a man to get some work done. Watson, meanwhile, was staring at Mary; he admitted later that his eyes never left her. This is Conan Doyle's second novel, published in 1890: The Sign of Four. It solves a crime and, along the way, makes an army doctor fall in love with a governess.

This Is Not a Drawing-Room Detective Story

By 1890 Conan Doyle had grown tired of writing Holmes as a clever man who did nothing but hold forth from an armchair. This time he tried something else: a locked-room poisoning, a bloodhound on the scent, a steam-launch chase down a foggy river, all crammed into one book. London fog and the damp of the Thames are the novel's real second protagonist.

A thread runs further back, all the way to India. Just after the Rebellion of 1857, a group of British officers and merchants stole a hoard of treasure in Agra; it traveled halfway around the world, by way of the Andaman Islands penal colony, and washed up in a gutter in Victorian London. The novel's real geography stretches from the fog-bound city to a labor camp on the far side of the ocean.

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雨夜伦敦桥头，煤气灯昏黄，萨迪厄斯·舒尔托裹着大衣站在桥栏旁，身后是一辆等候的马车，雾气里只看得见他颤抖的手和半张苍白的脸

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众人赶往彭迪切里别墅（Pondicherry Lodge）准备平分宝藏，却发现巴塞洛缪·舒尔托（Bartholomew Sholto）死在反锁的密室中，脸上凝固着诡异的狞笑，颈侧插着一根毒刺，藏宝箱内财宝已空，现场留下一张写着'四签名'（T

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This Contrast Only Bites If You Read the Original

On the night of Watson's engagement, Holmes leans back in his chair, picks up the cocaine syringe again, and says the line that chills every reader: he congratulates Watson, then admits that all that is left for him is to go back to his old habits. Retold, it is a couple of sentences. In the original, it is a slow, interior scene, paced like rain against a window.

There is also the splash of water the instant Tonga falls, the dull thud of the chest lid striking the gunwale as Small wrenches it open, the frozen grin on Bartholomew's face. None of it survives a plot summary. It lives in Conan Doyle's sentences. Reading it again once you already know the ending only sharpens the chill.

This is a novel where everyone wants the money and no one ever gets it. Victorian London used the Thames to sink a colonial debt in its own riverbed.

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Art Direction4 plates

Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.

Character · The Sign of the Four in 10 Minutes — A Foggy-City Detective and Colonial Loot Sunk to the Riverbed

Watson goes the other way. The wound he carried home from Afghanistan has not fully healed, and yet his heart is already racing the night he meets Mary Morstan; by the end of the book, the pearls scattered and the treasure sunk, he has proposed to the governess. The contrast sits right there on the page: one man reaching for a syringe, the other reaching for the woman he loves, two paths splitting off from the same case.

The two villains are twin brothers, alike in looks and opposite in fate. The elder, Bartholomew, is a reclusive miser who dies in a locked room guarding an empty treasure chest; the younger, Thaddeus, is nervy, health-obsessed, and fussy about his clothes, and he survives, only to be hauled off in handcuffs by Inspector Jones, who takes him for the murderer. Behind it all is Jonathan Small, an escaped convict with a wooden leg, trailing everyone like a shadow with his small Andamanese accomplice, Tonga.

How the Story Unfolds

Since 1882, Mary has received a single pearl, punctually, on the same day every year. In the sixth year, no pearl arrives; instead, a letter summons her to a late-night meeting. Holmes and Watson go with her, and the man who greets them is a jittery Thaddeus Sholto, who tells them, hands shaking, about his father: Major Sholto served in India alongside Mary's father, Captain Morstan, and the two of them conspired to split a legendary hoard known as the Agra treasure. The Major kept it all for himself and sat on it for years; on his deathbed, trying at last to confess, he saw a bearded man with a wooden leg at the window and died of fright.

The group heads straight for Pondicherry Lodge in Chelsea to find Bartholomew and split the treasure with him. The moment the door swings open, everyone freezes: Bartholomew is dead in a locked room on the second floor, a frozen grin on his face and a thorn no thicker than a sewing needle lodged in his neck. The chest is still there, emptied out. A scrap of paper weighted down on the windowsill reads four words: The Sign of the Four.

Holmes crouches to count the footprints on the windowsill. One is ordinary; the other is a size too narrow, the print of a wooden leg, alongside a set of tiny bare footprints. He looks up at Watson and says what they need is not the police but a good dog.

A Bloodhound, a Steam Launch, and the Boat Lost in the Fog

Holmes fetches a mongrel tracking dog named Toby from a lane behind Baker Street and follows the scent of creosote all the way to a boatyard on the Thames. That same night, Inspector Jones of Scotland Yard arrives at the Lodge with great fanfare, takes one look at the scene, and slaps the cuffs on Thaddeus — the most self-assured inspector in London, and the most confident producer of wrongful arrests.

Holmes does not argue with him. He learns that the steam launch belonging to the man with the wooden leg, the Aurora, is being serviced at the yard and is set to sail that very night, so he hires a police launch and lies in wait downriver. The fog closes visibility down to twenty yards, and on the Thames two launches tear two white lines across the water, one chasing the other.

Right as they close in, Tonga raises his blowpipe and aims it at the most exposed figure at the bow. A shot rings out, and the small Andamanese man pitches into the black water and never surfaces again. With nowhere left to run, Jonathan Small wrenches open the chest at his feet and tips the whole hoard of jewels into the Thames. He would rather no one have the money, not even himself.

Small's Confession: From Agra to the Penal Colony, Half a Life Spent on an Old Debt

Once he is caught, Small lights a cigarette and tells the whole story from the beginning. He was an ordinary English sailor, transported to the Andaman Islands penal colony after an accident, where he and three other convicts swore a blood oath, the sign of four, and bribed two of the guards. One was Captain Morstan, Mary's father; the other was Major Sholto. Together they conspired to rob a wealthy merchant coming out of Agra and made off with a fortune. Small later escaped with Tonga and spent decades chasing what he was owed.

It is a rare cross-continental sweep for Conan Doyle. In the space of a few paragraphs you get an Indian merchant in 1857, palm trees and shackles on a tropical island, gaslight in Victorian London, and a black river that swallows everything. It lays England's own dirty work bare: the treasure never belonged to a single one of the men who fought over it.

What Sinks to the Riverbed Is the Money, and the Whole Order Behind It

The sharpest cut in The Sign of Four is hidden in its ending. Everyone wants the money: one man hoards it, two are murdered for it, one spends half his life escaping prison for revenge, and the last man tips the whole chest into the river. The ill-gotten fortune ends up in no one's hands, and Mary Morstan never becomes a wealthy woman.

So she can marry Watson with a clean conscience. No fortune, no gossip, no one to say she did it for the money. She keeps the last pearl and lets the rest scatter into an old drawer. A dirty colonial ledger, of all things, hands a young London couple the most respectable way out.