Spent the week thinking about a pardon nobody involved lived to see.

Conan Doyle solves his murder in half a book this time — Holmes at his usual unbothered best, a deception unravelled fast and cleanly. Then, instead of wrapping up, the book just keeps going. Drops the reader into a Pennsylvania mining valley decades earlier and tells a much harder, much longer story about how any of it actually started. I don’t think that’s a flaw. I think it’s Doyle admitting the puzzle-box couldn’t carry the weight of what was underneath it.

Turns out the real case behind those American chapters was even less settled than the mystery upstairs. Twenty men hanged on evidence a state government would eventually, formally, take back — not until 1979, not until Doyle himself had been in the ground for almost fifty years. He wrote the whole thing believing the case was closed. It wasn’t, not really. It just took the rest of the century to say so.

Full introduction, two essays, and the rest of it are up on Kindle now. Novel typed live, one keystroke at a time, on YouTube.

— G. H. Schreiber
6 September 2026