The Sign of the Four The Sign of the Four The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories featuring the fictional detective. The story is set in 1888. "The Sign of the Four" has a complex plot involving service in India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts ("the Four" of the title) and two corrupt prison guards. It presents the detective's drug habit and humanizes him in a way that had
Jean Conan Doyle and the 1990s. His ex-wife, Lady Duncan's daughter, administered the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate until November 2014. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., a privately owned UK company formed in 2005, claims that Dame Jean regained some of the US rights following the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, although all works of Arthur Conan Doyle's published after 1 November 1925 remain with the "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate", which sued the Executors of the Dame Jean Conan Doyle Estate for infringement of copyright. When Warner Brothers made "Sherlock Holmes," released in 2010, the studio was granted a