Sherlock Sunday: The Sign of Four

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Challenge #9

In your own space, create a fanwork.

This is my Sherlock Sunday entry #2 for 2025.

The Sign of Four is the second of four Sherlock Holmes novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Interesting fact: Oscar Wilde and Doyle attended a party in 1899 sponsored by Lippincott Publishing and both ended up with book deals by the end of it. The Wilde book was The Picture of Dorian Grey and Doyle's was The Sign of Four

I listened to an audiobook version of The Sign of Four with David Timson as narrator who does a solid job. And I made a collage. (a physical collage made with sticker and paper in a notebook and scanned).

The Sign of Four is where Watson gets a wife and we see Holmes' cocaine addiction. We meet the Baker Street Irregulars and a certain dog named...?

The dog in the collage is the only dog sticker I had. He doesn't look like that in the book! I included 6 pearls for the ones Mary receives from an anonymous benefactor and a map of the Andaman Islands. It's unlikely that kind of shaped bottle would hold cocaine but the other ones were less likely.



One of the best parts of The Sign of Four is that we get the Watch deduction which BBC Sherlock riffed on in the first episode of that series. And the scene in the cab of Sherlock explaining the clues from John's phone has to be one of my very favorite scenes in all of fandom.

Watch on YouTube

And a drabble I did inspired by the phrase 'neat Moroccan case' which we get in The Sign of Four

Title: Neat Moroccan case
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Length: 100
Prompt: confused
Notes: Angst. set during Hiatus (when Holmes is 'dead')
Summary: Watson tries to find a cause for his bad mood.


The day’s mood confused me. I swung between the poles of querulous and melancholic, a most illogical, to employ a word often used by my late friend Sherlock Holmes, state. If Mary noticed my temper, she did not remark upon it. That evening, I reflected upon the day’s happenings, seeking a cause.

And then I hit upon it.

My calls had taken me by a market, and my gaze had been caught by a Maghrebi rug of the same pattern of Holmes’ loathsome ‘neat Moroccan case.’

Thus, explained, the mystery ceased to be, but the grief, new and old, remained.