In 2026 I plan to read all the Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” works – 56 short stories and 4 novels (here’s why and how). If you haven’t already read it, Michael Green’s “undiscovered letter” from John Watson is fricking hilarious.
I may also read various Holmes homages/pastiches etc. Who knows? (btw I’d recommend the Seven Per Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer where Watson has to trick Holmes into going to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud)
Published: November 1891
Wikipedia here
Online here
Review: I would recommend this, it’s nicely done, with a rising sense of menace and – spoilers – menace arrived. Interesting too, on the “colonial past will come back to bite someone on the ass”. A kind of Imperial Boomerang avant la lettre…
Best sentence(s):
“Some, too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him”
“All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage.”
(aka “it was a dark and stormy night”)
“To tell the truth”—he sank his face into his thin, white hands—“I have felt helpless. I have felt like one of those poor rabbits when the snake is writhing towards it. I seem to be in the grasp of some resistless, inexorable evil, which no foresight and no precautions can guard against.” “Tut! tut!” cried Sherlock Holmes. “You must act, man, or you are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair.”
“…. If I remember rightly, you on one occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my limits in a very precise fashion.”
“Yes,” I answered, laughing. “It was a singular document. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points of my analysis.”
Holmes grinned at the last item. “Well,” he said, “I say now, as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
“No; I shall be my own police. When I have spun the web they may take the flies, but not before.”
Weather = avenger!!
What was going on at the time?
As per Wikipedia
At the time of writing the actual Ku Klux Klan was indeed broken and effectively defunct, and it would be decades before its 20th-century revival. Conan Doyle’s taking it up in this story was in line with his recurrent theme of wild and violent Americans and other foreigners exporting their power struggles to Victorian Britain – which had already formed the basis to A Study in Scarlet, the very first Holmes mystery.
How it was received:
Xx
How it has been adapted etc:
Xx
Words I didn’t know:
EAOY
10 march 1883 “The letter arrived on March 10, 1883. His death was seven weeks later, upon the night of May 2nd.”
Allusions I had to look up: None
See also:
Chakraborty, R. (2024). Race And Sherlock Holmes: Interrogating The Politics Of Ethnicity In Select Fiction Of Arthur Conan Doyle. Educational Administration: Theory and Practice, 30(2), 1210-1212.
Batail, J. (1997). ” The Engineer’s Thumb” or Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the uncanny. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78(4), 801.
Katz, Leslie, Thrills and Chills and Postage and Wills; a Look at a Few Aspects of the Sherlock Holmes Adventure ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (December 14, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4239924 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4239924
marchudson.net 
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