abstract
| - Unusually for a Sherlock Holmes story, "His Last Bow" is not told from the point of view of Dr. John Watson but is instead narrated in the third person. "His Last Bow" is also more of a spy story than a detective story, there being no mystery for Holmes to solve. The action takes place in August 1914, just prior to the start of the First World War, an ongoing conflict at the time of the story's first publication. A German spy named Von Bork has been in England since 1910. Through several agents, he has gathered a significant amount of information relating to the British armed forces and foreign policy. He is unaware that a large amount of that information is false because one of his agents is really Sherlock Holmes, who is working for the British government. Chronologically, "His Last Bow" is the last Sherlock Holmes story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle continued writing more stories about the brilliant detective for almost another decade, those stories being collected into the 1927 anthology The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. However, the action of each of those stories takes place before that of "His Last Bow".
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