The Adventure of Silver Blaze: a Sherlock Holmes short story by Arthur Conan Doyle

"The Adventure of Silver Blaze”¹ is a Sherlock Holmes short story from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes collection. According to The Annotated Sherlock Holmes², it was Holmes’ 29th case chronologically.

Silver Blaze is the favorite in the upcoming Wessex Cup. Just a week before the race, the horse comes up missing, and his trainer is brutally murdered. Silver Blaze, depicted here by Holmes illustrator Sydney Padget, is a fictional horse, sired by the real-life champion Isonomy.

One of my favorite parts is how Holmes gets Watson to assist him. Watson observes Holmes thinking, pacing, stewing for several days, when Holmes announces he is leaving to pursue a case. Watson volunteers…

I should be most happy to go down with you if I should not be in the way

And Holmes replies…

My dear Watson, you would confer a great favour upon me by coming. And I think that your time will not be mis-spent.

This sort of thing is becoming cliché between them. Holmes does not want to ask outright, but instead tempts Watson into volunteering. Once that is achieved, Holmes is gracious and happy to have Watson’s assistance. But I think Holmes is happy just to have Watson’s companionship. There is a heart in Sherlock Holmes.

Another bit that made me smile: Holmes is explaining that the case is somewhat muddled:

The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.

As a word-nerd I loved this, because Holmes used “plethora” correctly. Of course he did; he’s Sherlock Holmes. But it is often misused. It does not simply mean a lot; no, it means a lot of something unwanted, but that is not quite precise yet. It means an OVER-abundance of something that would ordinarily be good but that in excessive quantities is undesirable. It is from the medical term “plethoric” where there are too many white blood cells. White blood cells are good, but too many of them can be fatal. Sorry to school, but it’s a pet peeve of mine, and it made me happy when Holmes used it so perfectly.

The mystery? I’m won’t spoil it. It was very good, with a most unusual culprit. The last couple Holmes’ adventures I’ve read were not great, so it was nice to read of Holmes back up to snuff. 

 

¹ A note about titles: When first published serially, many Sherlock Holmes short stories did not include the noun phrase “The Adventure of” as part of the title. It was only added later, in most cases, when the short stories were compiled into one of five collections: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holms; and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. This short story was originally titled Silver Blaze, and later changed to "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" when it was published as part of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

² The Annotated Sherlock Holmes attempts to put all of Sherlock Holmes’ cases into their proper, fictional, chronological order.

 

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