Hello everyone!
You guessed right, watching Enola Holmes 2 made me dig out and dust off my copies of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Victorian era sleuth.
And let nobody fool you, this is the perfect time to read them.
There's fog outside, the weather's particularly dreary (for the most part) and you just need something cozy to read while you wrap up and sip your hot beverage of choice. Doyle made sure, back in the day, to provide everything you'd ever need in that aspect.
So did several others writing on the topic of crime and solving crime, but I digress.
Tonight we take a look at the original who snooped around London way before Enola was conceived in the heads of Netflix producers.
There's a plethora of stories to choose from, but I picked the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
All related posts can be found at the bottom of the page, as per usual!
We'll begin our recount with the first in the Memoirs, Silver Blaze.
Silver Blaze is actually the story from which we get the famous 'curious incident of the dog in the night time' statement from our Holmes. See, he's contacted by a horse owner whose horse is supposedly stolen, his trainer found dead in the field. How it happened is this: they always had one stablehand on guard at night in the stable Silver Blaze was quartered in, and that night a stranger came by asking for details about the horse and the race.
He was run off, but the next morning the stablehand was found drugged, from opium in the curry they'd had for dinner, the horse was gone, and the trainer dead with a crushed skull. The stranger had been apprehended, but the owner, desperate to recover his horse, went to grab Sherlock, who grabbed Watson, and off they went.
Turns out things were a little bit different, after examining the contents of the dead man's pockets and having a snoop about.
The trainer? Living a double life, and his other wife was fond of expensive things, so he was going to throw the race by injuring Silver Blaze with a surgical tool that would affect the tendons. The horse, spooked, kicked him in the head and was picked up by the rival stable across the moor, cleverly concealed by use of paint.
And the stranger? Well, he was actually just what he said he was, because opium being bitter to consume, the only people who could know there would be curry that night for dinner were the ones already in the house, so the culprit had to be from there (also yes, for those wondering, Silver Blaze ended up winning).
Moving on to The Yellow Face!
The second short story in the Memoirs, this is actually one of Sherlock's failures. See, a husband comes down to him from Norbury, agitated, telling him that his wife has been acting strangely. She'd asked him for one hundred pounds, no questions asked, and then soon after they got tenants in the cottage nearby, which she apparently visited in the middle of the night.
Infuriated, the husband wanted to see who was in there, but she begged him not to, which he agreed on the condition she stops visiting. She broke this so then he went to fetch Holmes, given there's also a yellowish sort of face in the windows any time this man went by.
After learning of the wife's previous married life in America, during which her husband and child died, Holmes suspects the husband is back for blackmailing purposes, and so with the husband they troop down into the house, finding not the husband, but the daughter instead.
And she's an African American, wearing a mask to cover her face since at the time, the colour of her skin would have been problematic in the neighbourhood.
The wife then explains that her husband DID die, but her child just had to recover, so eventually she sent for her and brought her over, but was terrified of telling her now-husband because of the way the kid looked. The man, having more sense in his head than the woman, takes the child into his arms and proves he's one of the good guys.
As for Holmes? Well, he kindly tells Watson to remind him of this failure whenever it seems like he might be getting too full of himself.
In the third story, The Stock-Brocker's Clerk, a finance clerk seeks Holmes out for advice. See, it's like this: he lost his job and was having a hard time finding another until he FINALLY scored a really good position at a big firm in the city, when someone else popped up offering him an even better job, on the condition he didn't write in to resign his original post.
He got a nice advance and was doing what he was supposed to be doing, but the would-be offices and no one else employed eventually got him thinking and so he went to Holmes. Together with Watson, they pay a visit to this other company and are on hand to save the idiot who tries to hang himself shortly afterwards.
Turns out, the reason the clerk was got out of the way was that the guy's brother could take his place, and a robbery could be performed, but something didn't seem right so the police caught the other half of the duo. The one Holmes had in his grasp was also handed to the police, and the clerk's name and reputation cleared.
And finally, The "Gloria Scott". Holmes tells this story to Watson, as it's the first real case he ever undertook, and the one that actually inspired him to become a consulting detective.
His only friend from school invited him over to his father's estate, during which time Holmes made some observations that clearly unnerved the old man. Not to mention the fact that an old sailor came by and was immediately given employ, though Holmes left the house soon after and was not there for the aftermath.
His friend once again sent for him as his father lay dying, after the sailor skulked off and the old man got a message from apparently someone else. Dead upon their return, there was a letter which Holmes was permitted to read, and it explained that the old geezer had been convicted back in the day and sent to Australia on a ship.
However, there was another convict on there who wasn't going to stand for it, and a mutiny was concocted with the help of agents he had placed on the ship before hand. After their liberation, there came a schism since some of the men wouldn't hold with the murder of those sailors who didn't actually fight them but were just in regular government employ, so the head honcho of these convicts sent them off on a rowboat.
The ship exploded soon afterwards, because one of the sailors escaped and raced to the powder barrels which he set alight, and the rowboat hurried back to fish only one survivor out of the water - the old sailor who later came by.
The father of Holmes' friend and another man did in fact go on to become rich through gold mining and returned to England under different names, but the tragedy of the Gloria Scott - the ship they'd been sent to Australia on - remained with them, and the old sailor was blackmailing them both since he knew what happened.
As there was no news from the other guy though, Holmes placed an educated guess that, unlike the one old man he met, this other one killed the blackmailer and disappeared again, to remake his life a third time.
So we leave Holmes and Watson seated beside the fire for this week!
Tune in again next Thursday for the next handful of stories from the Memoirs if you like mystery, the time these stories are set in, the genius of Sherlock Holmes, and the amusing anecdotes that pop up along the way (like the dog never barking during the night).
And I definitely recommend reading any Arthur Conan Doyle story with Sherlock at the helm!
xx
*image not mine
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