Good morning.
Today, we will be covering a short summary
of the story, The Red Headed League.
The story opens into Holmes’s drawing room
on an autumn day.
Doctor Watson finds Holmes deep in conversation
with Jabez Wilson, a stout and portly elderly
man with fiery red hair.
Holmes invites Watson to join them as Watson
shares his love for all that is bizarre and
has chronicled his little adventures, albeit
with embellishments.
Holmes states that it is life itself that
holds the most extraordinary of combinations
and as a case in point asks Mister Jabez Wilson
to narrate, his own singular extraordinary
story.
Jabez Wilson begins his narration with a little
pride.
He takes out a wrinkled newspaper from his
greatcoat and as he is glancing down the advertisement
column, Watson attempts to inspect his appearance
as Holmes is often wont to do.
Jabez Wilson is described with the most average,
common place adjectives- obese, pompous and
slow like any British tradesman.
He wears baggy trousers, a not over-clean
frock coat, a drab waistcoat with a heavy
brass chain and a dangling metal ornament.
Watson finds nothing remarkable in the man,
save for his expression of chagrin and discontent.
Holmes remarks there is nothing to be deduced
except the obvious which is that he has done
manual labour, he takes snuff, he is a freemason
and that he has been to China and that he
has done quite a bit of writing lately.
Mister Wilson is surprised and Holmes demystifies
his deductions in his usual nonchalant manner,
making it appear as if it was nothing at all.
Mister Wilson produces an advertisement, which
invited red headed people over the age of
21, to a vacancy open in the Red Headed League.
The post offered a pay of 4 pounds a week
with purely nominal obligations.
Jabez Wilson is a small pawnbroker from Coburg
square.
He employs an assistant, Vincent Spaulding,
who brought the advertisement to his notice
and urged him to apply.
Spaulding is described as a man, whose age
cannot be quite determined, very smart, but
with a penchant for photography and spending
a lot of his time in the cellar, to develop
the films.
Wilson says that, he is a good worker with
no vice in him and goes on to narrate the
dialogue that passed between them, as the
assistant brought the advertisement to his
attention offering him a short history of
the Red Headed League.
Wilson was interested in the pay and right
away, he left with Spaulding to the address
given.
He encountered many red headed people on the
streets, but Spaulding encouraged him, that
none had the vivid flame coloured tint of
his own hair.
In a sparsely furnished room, they meet with
Mister Duncan Ross, who introduced himself
as one of the pensioners of the league.
He was instantly favorable towards Mister
Jabez Wilson and offered him the post.
But only after tugging at his hair to ascertain
its authenticity, until Mister Jabez Wilson’s
eyes were filled with tears.
The scene has an absurdly real quality to
it, with the whole enterprise gaining a surreal
believability by the antics of Ross and by
his obvious disappointment in learning that
Mister Wilson has no family of his own.
The work assigned to him is to stay put in
the office for 4 hours every day and copy
the Encyclopedia Britannica.
He is not allowed leaves of absence or to
venture outside during the work hours without
forfeiting the week’s pay.
For 8 weeks, he works there.
That day when he showed up for work, he found
the door shut and locked with a square cardboard
piece that declared that the Red Headed League
had been dissolved.
The comedy of it all makes Holmes and Watson
break into laughter, at which Wilson is not
a little offended.
Holmes mollifies him by saying that he is
interested in this refreshingly unusual case.
Wilson tells him that he enquired of the whereabouts
of Mister Duncan Ross with the landlord, whom
he identified as William Morris, a solicitor.
The landlord refers to him to another address,
which turns out to be a dead end.
Holmes continues to ask Wilson a few questions,
including a physical description of his assistant.
He is described as a man, who is quick in
his ways, not short of 30, with a white splash
of acid on his face and pierced ears.
Upon Wilson’s leaving, Holmes retires to
smoke, calling it a three pipe problem.
When he springs out of his curled up position
in the chair, it is to see Sarrasate playing
in Saint James’s Hall.
On their way they take a walk through Saxe
Coburg square.
The appearance of the street with Wilson’s
shop is described as pokey and shabby genteel
with weedy grass and a few clumps of faded
laurel bushes.
He thumbs the pavement in front of the pawnbroker’s
house with a stick and then knocks on the
door and asks the clean shaven fellow who
opens the door for directions to the strand.
Holmes observes that he is a smart fellow,
who is the fourth fourth smartest man in London
and has a claim to the third as the most daring.
When Watson asks him, Holmes says that it
was to see not him, but the knees of his trousers
that he had made the enquiry.
They explore the other side of the square
and just by rounding a corner, they enter
what is described as a stately business premise
with fine shops and bustling footpaths.
Holmes takes a note of the buildings, which
include the Coburg branch of the city and
suburban bank.
From the streets, they go to the concert and
Holmes appears perfectly happy as he languidly
listens to the music.
At 10 in the night they meet again, along
with Jones from the Scotland Yard and Mister
Merryweather, the director of the bank.
It is from Jones, whom Holmes compares to
a bulldog who is an imbecile at his profession,
that we get the first mention of John Clay
the murderer, thief, smasher and forger, who
has been eluding the law for a long time.
Young, but at the head of his profession and
with royal ancestry, Jones confesses that
he has been on this man’s trail for years.
They go to the underground cellar of the bank,
where 30000 Napoleons from the bank of France
is stored.
Holmes is in control of the scene and he insists
on quietness as everyone waits in the dark
cellar in anticipation of what is going to
happen.
Watson waits with his revolver, and Holmes,
with his hunting crop ready.
John Clay emerges from beneath the ground
and the narrative turns immensely atmospheric,
with a lurid spark on the stone pavement opening
up like a gash, from which appears Clay’s
almost womanly hand.
There is a confrontation and Clay is captured
while his accomplice is taken into custody
by Jones’s men waiting at the door of the
pawnbroker’s establishment.
Clay is unperturbed by his capture.
He regards Jones’s hands as filthy, which
he does not desire to be touched with, proud
as he is about his own lineage.
The scene is interesting, as Jones plays along
with mock respect and Clay answers in the
most serene manner.
What follows is Holmes making obvious the
patterns of his reasoning which led him to
this finale.
The scheme was to have the not over bright
pawnbroker out of the way for a couple of
hours every day.
The assistant’s habit of vanishing into
the cellar, the intactness of the pavement
in the front of the building and the conveniently
situated bank on the other side, allowed Holmes
to reason in the direction of the robbery
and the worn and stained knees of the assistant’s
trousers confirmed his suspicions of their
borrowing a tunnel.
The story draws to a close with Watson’s
unfeigned admiration and Holmes’s comment,
that his life is spent in a long effort to
escape the commonplaceness of existence and
that this case saved him from his ennui.
It ends with a quote attributed to Flaubert,
, that all that matters is the work of the
man and not the man himself.
And that was the end of this short summary
of the Red Headed League, by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle.
This is a selection, from a talk with Doctor
Conan Doyle.
A great big breezy athlete not in the least
once ideal literateur, came forward to meet
me as I entered Doctor Conan Doyle’s little
house in Norwood, wherein having altogether
given up his medical practice, he now devotes
himself entirely to books and bookmaking.
He told me, he was looking forward with great
joy to the cricket season.
He talked of his travels and how he had once
spent seven months in the Arctic regions.
Never had such a jolly time in my in my life.
He spoke of his experiences in Vienna, where
he had lived a year in order that he might
make a special study of the eye.
We discussed mutual friends in South Sea,
where he had practiced as a doctor for 8 years.
We exchanged opinions on America and the Americans.
He would fain establish a more friendly and
familial footing between the two countries.
And then, at last we got to his books.
I asked him how on earth he had evolved apparently
out of his own inner consciousness, such an
extraordinary person as his detective Sherlock
Holmes.
With which the readers of The Strand are so
familiar.
‘Oh but!’ he cried with a hearty ringing
laugh, and his is a laugh that does one good
to hear, ‘Oh but, if you please, he is not
evolved out of any one’s inner consciousness.
Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment,
if I may so express it, of my memory of a
professor of medicine at Edinburgh University,
who would sit in the patients’ waiting room
with a face like a red-Indian and diagnose
the people as they came in, before even they
had opened their mouths.
He would tell them their symptoms, he would
give them details of their lives and he would
hardly ever make a mistake.
Gentlemen, he would say to us students standing
around, I am not quite sure whether this man
is a cork cutter or a slater.
I observe a slight callous or hardening on
one side of his forefinger and a little thickening
on the outside of his thumb and that is a
sure sign he is either one or the other.
His great faculty of deduction was at times
highly dramatic.
, he would say to another man, you are a soldier-
a noncommissioned officer and you have served
in Bermuda.
Now how did I know that gentleman, he came
into the room without taking his hat off,
as he would go into an orderly room.
He was a soldier.
A slight authoritative air combined with his
age shows he was an NCO.
A slight rash on the forehead tells me he
was in Bermuda and subject to a certain rash
known only there.
So, I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock is utterly inhuman.
No heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.
I know nothing about detective work, but theoretically,
it has always had a great charm for me.
The best detective in fiction is Edgar Allan
Poe’s Monsieur Dupain.
Then Monsieur Lecoq, Gaboriau’s hero.
The great defect in the detective of fiction
is that he obtains results without any obvious
reason.
That is not fair.
It is not art.
I have written two little books about him.
A Study in Scarlet, the first thing I wrote
and Sign of Four.
I get many letters from all over the country
about Sherlock Holmes.
Sometimes from schoolboys, sometimes from
commercial travelers who are great readers,
sometimes from lawyers pointing out mistakes
in my law.
One letter actually contained a request for
portraits of Sherlock at different periods
of his life.
And that is the end of this short excerpt
from an interview of Arthur Conan Doyle written
as an article by Raymond Blathwayt and published
in The Bookman in May 1892.
Thank you.
