The film's plot is a mostly original story not directly based on any of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes tales, but it uses minor plot elements of "The Adventure of the Empty House," "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax," and The Sign of the Four.
Canonical scholar Leslie S. Klinger wondered if Morton was the companion to Inspector Brown in The Sign of the Four.
The Sign of the Four, a novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes
Unlike most other adaptations of the Holmes stories, which retell only one of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, this film incorporates elements from the novel The Sign of the Four, as well as the short stories "The Final Problem", "The Adventure of the Empty House", "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" and "The Adventure of the Speckled Band".
It consists of two episodes: Part One, based on The Sign of the Four (beginning), and Part Two, based on A Scandal in Bohemia and The Sign of the Four (continuation and conclusion).
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In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four, Small wonders "how my folk would stare when they saw their ne'er-do-well coming back with his pockets full of gold moidores" when justifying his decision to help end Achmet's life for the treasure he carried.
In this unusually broad comedy for Fairbanks, the acrobatic leading man plays "Coke Ennyday," a cocaine-shooting detective parody of Sherlock Holmes (a self-injecting cocaine addict in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1890 novel The Sign of Four) given to injecting himself with cocaine from a bandolier of syringes worn across his chest and liberally helping himself to the contents of a hatbox-sized round container of white powder labeled "COCAINE" on his desk.