Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Read Online Free PDF

pay the bills.
    No wonder that, when these stories
became a chore done at public demand, he considered killing off his detective.
The magic and escape were gone. Sherlock Holmes became another obligation not
unlike the practice of medicine itself. He turned to mysticism and science
fiction, but the public would not have it. They wanted Holmes.
    Today these adventures provide a
wonderful escape for the contemporary reader. And that, of course, is what
detective fiction is largely about: a chance to forget one’s own problems and
take on those of the royal house of Bohemia or the Red-Headed League.
    In that spirit, let us take down our
pipes and deerstalker caps, and join the world’s greatest consulting detective
as he sets off on another adventure down the gas-lit streets of Edwardian
England. This time he proposes to cook someone’s goose. Or will he? Take a
gander at “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”
     

    I had called upon my friend Sherlock
Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing
him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple
dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of
crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the
couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and
disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several
places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that
the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination.
    “You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps
I interrupt you.”
    “Not at all. I am glad to have a
friend with whom I can discuss my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial
one”—he jerked his thumb in the direction of the old hat—”but there are points
in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of
instruction.”
    I seated myself in his armchair and
warmed my hands before his crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and
the windows were thick with the ice crystals. “I suppose,” I remarked, “that,
homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is
the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the
punishment of some crime.”
    “No. no. No crime,” said Sherlock
Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will
happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within
the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a
swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take
place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and
bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such.”
    “So much so,” I remarked, “that of
the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely
free of any legal crime.”
    “Precisely. You allude to my attempt
to recover the Irene Adler papers, to the singular case of Miss Mary
Sutherland, and to the adventure of the man with the twisted lip. Well, I have
no doubt that this small matter will fall into the same innocent category. You
know Peterson, the commissionaire?”
    “Yes.”
    “It is to him that this trophy
belongs.”
    “It is his hat.”
    “No, no; he found it. Its owner is
unknown. I beg that you will look upon it not as a battered billycock but as an
intellectual problem. And, first, as to how it came here. It arrived upon
Christmas morning, in company with a good fat goose, which is, I have no doubt,
roasting at this moment in front of Peterson’s fire. The facts are these: about
four o’clock on Christmas morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest
fellow, was returning from some small jollification and was making his way
homeward down Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in the gaslight, a
tallish man, walking with a slight stagger, and carrying a white