Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle – a Sherlock Holmes short story

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle – a Sherlock Holmes short story


The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes short story from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collection. According to The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, it was Holmes 15thcase.

A good story; I liked it, but I gotta tell you something I’m getting tired of.

Holmes sees some insignificant item, a worn out old hat in this case, and deduces all sorts of things about the owner – and Watson is incredulous, just can’t believe it.

C’mon Doc (actually C’mon Sir ACD). At some point, Watson – pretty smart bloke himself, should just realize – I don’t know how he does it, but he’s done it before, and he’s always right, so I’ll just believe him.

But back to the story, about an old hat – missing its owner, and a Christmas goose, probably of the same owner, with some very surprising giblets: an enormous, and valuable, blue carbuncle.

Spoiler alert – Holmes solves the case, but he does something quite unexpected: he lets the culprit go.

It was a day or two after Christmas after all, and the man was not a hardened criminal. Nice to see the softer side of Holmes.

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2 comments:

  1. I have never read ANY of the Holmes stories! I have the complete stories on audio, but the collection is so long it's daunting. I hope to get to it this year, though, as I'm trying to read a bunch of books that have been hanging out in my Audible library.

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    1. I put off Holmes for a long time, for the same reason...and then I just started reading one every month or so. I'm really enjoying them. I'm not a huge fan of detective genre, but Sherlock Holmes is so much more. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is a delight. You should start...you'll enjoy it.

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