Stories / His Last Bow · 1917
His Last Bow
August 1914: an Irish-American motor expert delivers naval codes to a German spymaster — and is Sherlock Holmes, two years undercover, with an east wind coming.
✅ Public domain — read, share, and adapt freely.
⚠️ Spoilers below. The analysis discusses the solution, including who did it and how it's found out.
Summary & analysis
On the eve of the Great War, a German master-spy, Von Bork, packs years of stolen British secrets and awaits one last delivery from his prize agent — an embittered Irish-American named Altamont — while an east wind gathers over England.
Told from the spy's side, the story withholds Holmes until the reveal: Altamont is Holmes, two years undercover, who has fed Von Bork worthless codes and rounded up his network. The 'delivery' is a book on beekeeping and a chloroform sponge.
Von Bork is trussed in his own study, his intelligence exposed as chaff; Holmes and Watson, older now, look out over the coming storm. Less a puzzle than a patriotic coda, it demonstrates the long-game disguise sustained across years rather than an evening.
Deeper reading
The valediction
His Last Bow steps outside the usual form — narrated in the third person, set on the eve of the First World War, told partly from the enemy\'s side — to give the saga a deliberate farewell. Holmes, drawn from retirement, has spent two years undercover as an Irish-American agent to gut a German spy network, and the case is less a puzzle than a patriotic curtain call.
An east wind coming
The closing exchange between the two old friends, looking out over the gathering storm of the war, is among the most quoted passages in the canon — elegiac, forward-looking, and unmistakably an ending. It places Holmes in real history at last, and lets him bow out in service rather than detection.
Techniques on display
Disguise & misdirection
Seeing through appearances built to deceive.
In this story: The ultimate long con: a two-year assumed identity, complete with a fabricated history and network, sustained until the enemy hands over his own destruction.
Practise: 🚨 Lestrade's Lineup Practise: 👁️ The Science of Deduction
Argument & fallacy
Untangling claims, premises, and the flaws between them.
In this story: Holmes reasons at the scale of statecraft — feeding an adversary plausible falsehoods so consistent that acting on them cripples him — deception as strategy rather than trick.
Practise what this story preaches: every technique above links to a tool or game built on the same method. The best way to learn the canon is to reason along with it.