The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb, is the ninth of the twelve stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A young London engineer, contracted to service a hydraulic press at a country house, discovers that the owner is using the machine for illegal purposes. After confronting the owner, the engineer narrowly escapes death and loses a thumb when the owner turns on him. Holmes deduces the actual use of the machine and sets off ...
In The Man with the Twisted Lip, Dr Watson is called upon late at night by a female friend of his wife whose husband has been absent for several days. Frantic with worry, she seeks help in fetching him home from an opium den. Watson finds his friend Sherlock Holmes in the den, disguised as an old man, trying to extract information about a new case from the addicts therein. The case of double identity and potential murder presents Holmes with a t ...
In The Five Orange Pips, a young Sussex gentleman named John Openshaw tells the strange story of his uncle Elias Openshaw, who came back to England after living in the United States as a planter in Florida and serving as a colonel in the Confederate Army. His uncle begins receiving threatening letters inscribed “KKK” and including five orange pips. He is killed shortly thereafter. The job of unraveling this sordid transatlantic mystery falls to ...
In The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Inspector Lestrade summons Holmes to a community in Herefordshire, where a local landowner has been murdered outdoors. The deceased's estranged son is strongly implicated. Holmes, employing his trusty magnifying glass quickly determines that a mysterious third man may be responsible for the crime, unraveling a thread involving a secret criminal past, thwarted love, and blackmail. This is the fourth of the twe ...
In A Case of Identity Miss Mary Sutherland, a woman with a substantial income is engaged to a quiet Londoner who has recently disappeared. Of the fiance, Mr. Hosmer Angel, Miss Sutherland only knows that he works in an office in Leadenhall Street. All his letters to her are typewritten, even the signature, and he insists that she write back to him through the local Post Office. The climax of the sad liaison comes when Mr. Angel abandons Miss Sut ...
The Red-Headed League is the second of the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in 1892. In it, Jabez Wilson, a flame-haired London pawnbroker, comes to consult Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Some weeks before, Wilson responded to a newspaper want-ad offering highly-paid work to only red-headed male applicants. Wilson is hired on the basis of the precise hue of his hair color and performs menial work at a ...
A Scandal in Bohemia is the first short story, third overall work featuring Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson recounts that a masked visitor to Baker Street is quickly deduced to be the hereditary King of Bohemia. The King is to become engaged to a young Scandinavian princess. However, five years before, he had a liaison with American opera singer, Irene Adler. Fearful that the marriage would be called off, he had soug ...
Based on Melville's travels in the Society Islands of the South Pacific, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas is told by an unnamed narrator who boards a whaling vessel bound for Tahiti. The narrator becomes involved in a mutiny and afterward is imprisoned on the island of Tahiti. His observations of the island, its way of life and the customs of the natives follow. Omoo” is the sequel to Melville's hugely successful Typee ...
Based on Melville's real-life experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, his first novel was extremely popular, provoking public skepticism until the events within were corroborated by a fellow castaway. Typee is properly considered a work of fiction, as the three week stay on which the author based his story is here extended to four months, and the book is supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of m ...