Valley of Fear (Version 4 Dramatic Reading)

The Valley of Fear is the fourth novel Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about private detective Sherlock Holmes. First published serially in The Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915, this novel was published as a book three months before its serialization was complete. Doyle went on to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, but The Valley of Fear was his last novel about the character. This novel is the only one of the four in which criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty appears, and one of only two stories by Doyle in which Moriarty plays a direct role; despite the prominence that later Sherlock Holmes adaptations have given to Moriarty, this antagonist plays a minor role in Doyle’s original oeuvre. In writing The Valley of Fear, Doyle used a similar structure to that of his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet; both novels are divided into two seven-chapter parts, the first part focusing on Sherlock Holmes’s investigation of a murder and the second part exploring the m