Stories / The Return of Sherlock Holmes · 1903
The Adventure of the Empty House
Holmes returns from the dead with a wax bust in the window and Colonel Moran's air-gun in the dark — the great hiatus ends with a snap of handcuffs.
✅ 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
London puzzles over the locked-room murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair; Watson, still mourning Reichenbach, collides with a spillage-selling old bookseller who reveals himself, in Baker Street, as Holmes — alive, three years travelled, and hunting the last of Moriarty's lieutenants.
The Adair killing has no entry and no gun in the street; Holmes reasons an air-gun fired from opposite and sets himself as bait — a wax bust in the Baker Street window, moved by Mrs Hudson on the floor, to draw the marksman to the empty house across the road.
Colonel Sebastian Moran fires at the dummy and is taken with the silent air-gun still warm — the same weapon, and the same angle, that killed Adair over a cards quarrel. The hiatus ends not with a trick of survival but with a trap built from a bust and a shadow.
Deeper reading
The resurrection, engineered
The Empty House had to do the impossible: bring back a character the author had drowned, and make the cheat feel earned. Doyle succeeds through sheer craft — the disguised bookseller, Watson\'s only faint in the canon, and a trap so satisfying (the wax bust, the sniper, the air-gun) that it retroactively justifies the whole ordeal at Reichenbach. The story is less a mystery than a homecoming, and it reads like one.
Tying off Moriarty's last thread
Colonel Moran, the second most dangerous man in London, is the loose end the resurrection needs: catching him closes the Moriarty account and explains why Holmes stayed dead for three years. Doyle uses the tiger-hunt metaphor to the end — the empty house as the crooked tree above the tethered kid. See our essay on death and resurrection for how this template shaped serial fiction.
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Techniques on display
Disguise & misdirection
Seeing through appearances built to deceive.
In this story: Two disguises frame the case: Holmes as the deformed bookseller who fools even Watson, and the wax bust that fools the sniper — appearance deployed as both shield and lure.
Practise: 🚨 Lestrade's Lineup Practise: 👁️ The Science of Deduction
Deduction & inference
Chaining evidence into conclusions on a living board.
In this story: The air-gun is deduced before it is seen: a soundless killing through a closed window across a street demands a silent, powerful, aimed weapon — Moran's signature, built by the blind mechanic Von Herder.
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.