A shorter collection of eight stories with a wider chronological range than its predecessors, published during the First World War and carrying the conflict's shadow throughout. The title story, set on the eve of war in 1914 and narrated in the third person, functions as a deliberate farewell to the Victorian world Holmes had inhabited, and the story's closing lines carry an elegiac quality unlike anything else in the canon. The collection is uneven, containing some of the canon's most unusual cases alongside some of its weakest, and is best understood as a transitional work between the classic period and the final collection.
