The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
Published 1889 · 42,900 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Sign of Four to read?
The Sign of Four scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Victorian professional vocabulary; occasional legal and Indian terms.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Comfortable late-Victorian sentences, clear rather than difficult.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete throughout.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- A steady supply of clues and background, as the form requires.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Watson is reliable and explains as he goes.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- Little symbolic weight; the objects are evidence, not emblems.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Straightforward, apart from Holmes's dry manner.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Everything is explained in the final chapters, as the genre demands.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Linear, with one long embedded backstory.
How The Sign of Four is regarded
The Sign of Four holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.