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Undoubtedly, this tale is a clever demonstration of Holmes’s opening assertion—closely observed truth is indeed stranger than highly wrought fiction. But Holmes’s refusal to

Women and property

For much of the 19th century, a woman who married ceased to be a legal entity in her own right, and as such was unable to formally own property—all her possessions would belong to her husband. All this changed with the three Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870, 1882, and 1893, which gave married women rights to their own earnings and property, and to property, such as an inheritance, acquired during the marriage. These reforms made it harder

A CASE OF IDENTITY 69

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

Sherlock Holmes

reveal the truth to Mary, arguing that it would be dangerous to take away her delusions, is a troubling loose end. It effectively places her in the same position she was in at the outset—filled with longing for her so-called suitor—and she has gained nothing by seeking help. She is portrayed as a weak, comical figure, yet emerges from the story as a stoical and faithful victim whose innocence and naiveté are cruelly exploited by the people closest to her. Most disturbingly of all, her own mother has colluded in the deceit—a poignant betrayal. ■

for greedy and unscrupulous husbands, like Windibank, to use marriage as a way of acquiring property. In “A Case of Identity,” Windibank devised a convoluted and malicious plan to acquire the fortune of both his wife and stepdaughter. He first managed to convince his wife to sell her first husband’s business, apparently at a loss. As a single woman, Mary had the right to bestow her income where she chose, but Windibank was able to prey on her innocence and generosity to appropriate it for himself.

THERE IS NOTHING

MORE DECEPTIVE THAN

AN OBVIOUS FACT

THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY (1891)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: October 1891

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS Charles McCarthy Murder victim, tenant farmer originally from Australia.

James McCarthy Principal suspect, and Charles McCarthy’s only son.

John Turner Wealthy, widowed landowner, and landlord of Charles McCarthy.

Alice Turner Daughter of John Turner.

Inspector Lestrade Scotland Yard detective.

Holmes deduces the position of a window

Watson is known for his characteristic military neatness.

He shaves every morning by sunlight.

His shaving is less complete on the left of his face, suggesting that the right is better illuminated.

Watson’s bedroom window must be on the right-hand side.

A

s Watson is enjoying a leisurely breakfast in his matrimonial home, a telegram from Holmes arrives, summoning him to the 11:15am train out of Paddington. Holmes has not given him much notice, and the doctor immediately panics, despite living close to the train station. Fortunately, as Watson’s wife points out, a neighboring doctor, Anstruther, can cover his comparatively busy medical practice, freeing him to hightail it for the train. There, Holmes is waiting for him with the facts of “one of those simple cases which are extremely difficult.”

A fatal quarrel

Charles McCarthy, a tenant farmer from a rural country estate, has been found murdered near a small wooded lake called Boscombe Pool. He has few friends in the area, save for his landlord, John Turner, who amassed a great fortune in Australia many years earlier and has been very generous to McCarthy on account of their acquaintance in those more adventurous days. Suspicion has fallen squarely upon the victim’s hot-blooded son, James, who was

THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY 71

seen having a heated argument with his father at the scene of the crime, before allegedly returning later to find the old man dying of his wounds, which were caused by a blow to the head.

James has refused to divulge the cause of their dispute, and when quizzed about old McCarthy’s final mutterings, he recounts an unintelligible reference to “a rat.” Furthermore, the young man appears wracked by guilt, and was seen carrying a gun, the stock of which could have been the heavy, blunt object used as the murder weapon. Holmes has been enlisted by Turner’s daughter, Alice, who has known James since they were children, and who believes unquestioningly in his innocence.

A jaunt to the countryside

“The Boscombe Valley Mystery” is the first story in which Holmes and Watson head out into the English countryside, leaving the “great cesspool” of London behind them, and in his telegram, Holmes clearly tantalizes Watson with the promise of fresh air and perfect scenery. The trip also provides an opportunity for the

Sherlock Holmes’s

iconic deerstalker

The deerstalker—a soft cloth cap with peaks in front and behind, and ear flaps—has become an iconic accoutrement of Sherlock Holmes, although, surprisingly, this hat was never mentioned explicitly by name in any of the original stories. Here in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Conan Doyle refers to Holmes’s headgear for his country trip as “a close-fitting cloth cap,” while in the later story “Silver Blaze” (pp.106–09),

characters to forgo their urban attire. Holmes cuts an “even gaunter and taller” figure than usual in his “long grey travelling-cloak,” while there is a hint of comedy in the apparel of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who meets them at the station—he is conspicuous as ever as a city detective “in spite of the light brown dustcoat and leather-leggins which he wore in deference to his rustic surroundings.”

Another detective in town

Lestrade has already been on-site for some time when they arrive, and although it may appear that he is acting privately, he actually is still functioning at this time also as an official policeman. Like Holmes, he has ostensibly been hired to clear James of the crime. However, his priority is to persuade everyone around him of the young man’s guilt. In his opinion, “McCarthy senior met his death from McCarthy junior and… all theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine.”

Throughout the Holmes canon, Lestrade’s relationship with Holmes is often a fractious one, and never

he describes it as “his earflapped traveling cap.” The full credit for Holmes’s now-iconic image must in fact go to illustrator Sidney Paget, who first provided Holmes with his signature deerstalker in his illustrations of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” for The Strand Magazine. It is odd that Paget should have picked such an incongruously rustic hat for a traveling city gentleman, but the deerstalker was Paget’s favorite hat to wear in the country. As the reader later observes Holmes with his nose to the ground, tracking his prey

What a tissue of mysteries and improbabilities the whole thing was!

Dr. Watson

more so than during this particular case, where those occasional glimpses of mutual respect that appear in other stories are markedly absent. Lestrade is “indifferent and contemptuous” toward Holmes’s methods, while Holmes berates the inspector most bitterly for trampling all over the crime scene. The two detectives snipe at each other incessantly (and enjoyably), and there is one moment, during a coach journey, where a string of jibes ends with Lestrade nearly losing his temper and snapping at Holmes (“with some warmth”). ❯❯

through the muddy hollow of Boscombe Pool and completely absorbed by the chase, perhaps the deerstalker is not such an odd choice after all.

72 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

Sherlock Holmes

Holmes’s resolution of the case relies on a mixture of psychological insight and tenacious crime-scene analysis. Where others see guilt in James’s remorse, reticence, and apparent invention, Holmes divines the predictable emotional turmoil of a grieving but innocent man. His interrogation of James is “off-camera” in the cells, but he returns with a full testimony. As is so often the case with earnest young men who refuse to give up information, James’s silence had been because the honor of a lady is at stake.

Nevertheless, despite James’s former reluctance to talk to the police, Holmes, the master manipulator, manages to wheedle some highly significant truths out of the young McCarthy.

More beast than man

The scene in which Holmes investigates the surroundings of Boscombe Pool is one of the most vivid portrayals of the great detective imitating a bloodhound. Picking his way along the trail, he undergoes a transformation, appearing more beast than man, as “his nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase.” His body warps as he becomes tense and hunched, his steely eyes fixed on the ground, his veins standing out “like whipcord in his long sinewy neck.” Indeed, his metamorphosis is so complete that, as Watson remarks, “men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him.”

Despite the obscured state of the crime scene, Holmes of course turns up a whole string of clues that

I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.

Inspector Lestrade

everyone else has missed, eventually presenting Lestrade with the true murder weapon— a jagged stone—and announcing to the skeptical inspector that the criminal “is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket.” The solution is at hand, and Holmes has both murderer and motive.

Antipodean intrigue

Later, in a private meeting with Turner, Holmes reveals the truth. Turner’s riches, it seems, had come not from enterprise, but from a lucrative spree as a highway robber in Australia, where he had been known as Black Jack of Ballarat— hence the dying man’s garbled allusion to “a rat.” McCarthy, a witness to one of Turner’s violent crimes, had been blackmailing his landlord for years, but when he demanded that his son marry Turner’s daughter Alice, it was too

Holmes’s quest for clues can be so intense that he takes on the manner of a bloodhound, as captured in this Strand illustration during his exhaustive investigation of Boscombe Pool.

THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY 73

John Turner becomes a Present

murderer when he cracks

under the combined

pressures of his past,

present, and future.

Past: as a former violent

highwayman in Australia,

one of his crimes was

witnessed by Charles

McCarthy and threatens to ruin Turner. Present: Past Future

McCarthy then used his

knowledge to blackmail

Turner for money, land, and

a home. Future: McCarthy finally is demanding the The pressures on

one thing Turner refuses to John Turner

consent to—his daughter’s

hand in marriage.

much for the old man to bear. With his own health failing rapidly, and the very real prospect of his only child ending up at the mercy of his worst enemy, Turner was driven to silence McCarthy once and for all.

When anarchic and disreputable goings-on creep into Conan Doyle’s ordered English society, they often appear to have originated from the younger nations. Primarily it is America that stands by with a ready supply of corrupt Mormons, Texan racists, and migrant Irish gangsters, but occasionally the trouble has its origins in Australia. At the time this story was written, the country had long since ceased to be a penal colony, with the last convict ship having disembarked on the coast of Western Australia some time before the young Conan Doyle’s tenth birthday, but the notion of exile there, albeit voluntary, persisted.

Conan Doyle’s Australia is a land of myriad opportunities and few questions, where new starts and fortunes can readily be made, legally or otherwise. The return of a prodigal son from profitable yet dubious antipodean adventures, as with Turner in this case, was a theme to which Conan Doyle would return later in his career, and there are distinct echoes of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” in “The Gloria Scott” (pp.116–19).

Getting away with it?

“The Boscombe Valley Mystery” is neither the first nor the last time that the trickiest aspect of the case, for Holmes at least, is the moral dilemma presented by its solution. In revealing the full details of what he has discovered, Holmes will clear James McCarthy, but as a consequence, both John Turner and his daughter will be ruined. Fortunately, there are some benefits to being a consulting detective rather than a police officer, and Holmes is able to use his discretion in this particular case.

Provided he fulfills his obligation to keep young McCarthy from the gallows, Holmes is free to stack the odds in favor of a happy ending: having obtained, following their meeting, a signed confession from the ailing murderer, Turner, he promises not to use it unless absolutely necessary. In the end, Holmes manages to get the case thrown out on the strength of a number of objections, and young James and Alice are free to build a future together, happily ignorant of their turbulent family history. ■

Your own deathbeds, when they come, will be the easier for the thought of the peace which you have given to mine.

John Turner

I AM THE

LAST COURT

OF APPEAL

THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS (1891)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: November 1891 US: December 1891

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS John Openshaw Young landowner from Horsham, West Sussex.

Joseph Openshaw John’s late father and owner of a bicycle factory.

Elias Openshaw John’s late uncle, who had emigrated to America before retiring back to Sussex.

C

onan Doyle wrote “The Five Orange Pips” early in 1891, but was delayed in posting it to The Strand Magazine until May that year by an attack of influenza. It is one of the strangest and saddest of the Holmes tales—Holmes fails to prevent the murder of his young client or apprehend the murderers, and never quite gets to the bottom of the mystery. And yet Conan Doyle listed it as among his favorites.

Watson partially explains why when he introduces the story. He says that there have always been

THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS 75

Three members of the Openshaw family meet their death after receiving five dried orange seeds through the post: first Elias (John’s uncle), then Joseph (John’s father), and finally John himself.

Uncle

Elias was found face-down in a shallow pool of water seven weeks after receiving the letter from India.

Father

Joseph fell into a chalk quarry three days after the letter from Dundee arrived.