The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
Other items of interest
Could Stanley Hopkins’ note have been more useless? It was a note, not a telegram, and yet it fails to mention that someone has been killed. It’s also evidence of the efficient delivery service in England, in that it was written at 3:30 a.m. and delivered before dawn.
Holmes could have been the murderer? Remember that line: “No one but an acrobat or a sailor could have got up to that bell-rope from the bracket, and no one but a sailor could have made the knots with which the cord was fastened to the chair.” Of course Holmes was able to identify the sailor’s knots and climbed up to examine the cut end of the bell rope.
Even though pedestrian, there still was a case. Sherlock in Peoria asks this after Holmes loses interest in the case: “Wait a minute…the Lewisham gang of burglars was still out there, and nobody seemed to be capturing them. Shouldn’t a ‘criminal specialist’ have some brilliant idea about bringing them in? If trapping hidden felons isn’t enough of a challenge for Holmes, is there another specialist in actually catching villains once their identity is known? Or is Holmes’s attitude towards this case just a carryover of the grumpy mood he was in when the case began?”
Favourite blackthorn cudgel? Whenever I need to subdue burglars, I always turn to my favorite cudgel.
Lady Brackenstall’s story implicated innocent people. Not only did she accuse the Lewisham gang of murder, her story also made it seem likely that someone in the household was in collusion with the burglars. Hopkins says: “There can be no doubt that this fellow [Randall, the father] must have known the house and its habits. He must have perfectly understood that the servants would all be in bed at that comparatively early hour, and that no one could possibly hear a bell ring in the kitchen. Therefore, he must have been in close league with one of the servants.”
Finally, I thought I should mention that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a champion of divorce law reform and that he had some reason to chafe at the idea of unhappy marriages (he courted his second wife while his first wife was slowly dying of tuberculosis), and that he might have been prejudiced into making his Great Detective a little gullible in this instance.