Mary and Watson are immediately attracted to each other, but Watson realizes that since she is a client, he shouldn’t act on his feelings until the case is resolved. Watson – because she thinks there is a chance that he can help find her father, Captain Arthur Morstan, who went missing ten years earlier.

Mary Morstan, a governess, seeks out Sherlock Holmes – and his friend, assistant, and roommate Dr. In this novel, we also learn that Holmes has an addiction to cocaine, loves playing the violin, and is slightly less of an antisocial automaton than he had seemed to be. Doyle had already described him as an extremely perceptive, keen-eyed detective who solves cases through deductive reasoning and logic, methods that he has perfected to such a superlative degree that he sometimes seems superhuman. On top of its own self-contained plot, The Sign of the Four expands what we had previously learned about Sherlock Holmes. The work was published in the London Lippincott’s in February of 1890, with the subtitle The Problem of the Sholtos. In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Doyle explained that he had been commissioned to write a Sherlock Holmes narrative for Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, a Philadelphia literary publication that was looking to create a London version as well. The Sign of the Four is a novella by the late-Victorian author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring the second case of his now iconic detective character Sherlock Holmes.

The sign of four by arthur conan doyle