On "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" [ENGR] from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
::: PUBLICATION HISTORY :::
The Strand Magazine (UK) March 1892
The Strand (US) April 1892
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Coll.) October 1892
::: NOTES & GRADING :::
This guy has lost a lot of blood. Makes sense, since his thumb was torn off by a cleaver. I SAID IT MAKES SENSE. Welcome to the only documented case in which Watson introduces a client to Holmes. The undocumented and just in-passing mentioned tale is 'Colonel Warburton’s Madness.' Nevertheless, ENGR is a bit of a nod to Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. This is neat because Holmes himself is a bit of a nod to Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. A lot of blood... OK, so this is an adventure that raises some questions regarding the suspension of disbelief. If you allow it to do that. It's also a thrilling if not suspenseful, mood-evoking read. But...
“Good heavens!” I cried, “this is a terrible injury. It must have bled considerably.” The loss of so much blood over so long a time handled so strangely calmly-well. Plus, it seems he cleaned himself up between his 'accident' and Watson's treatment. Thoughtful. Come to think of it, shouldn't there have been stitches? Don't forgers usually cast coins? How did the baddies discreetly set up such a massive operation right by a station? A hydraulic press big as a room to stamp fake coins?... and reinforced with a wood hull? I guess what else is there but wood? (That's what she said.) Actually, "get away from here before it is too late!" is what she said, by whom I mean Elise, the kind heart of the counterfeiting turned murderous brigade.
“An accident, I presume?”
“By no means.”
“What! a murderous attack?”
“Very murderous indeed.”
“You horrify me.”
I'm struck by this conversation between Watson and the newly mono-thumbed “Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3rd floor)” as the good doctor addresses the ::: very ::: bad wound. Is he really horrified or is Doyle ham-fistedly setting the absolutely horrific scenario to follow? A literary version of William Castle placing buzzers under movie seats for The Tingler viewings? Preparation is key. Or, perhaps Watson is braver alongside Holmes... I'd be, the guy's pretty darn capable. Mostly here, I'd imagine, it's stage-setting.
But good God, man--to be horrified by a relayed story while free of danger seems much. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive," after all. Especially with so much therapeutic brandy on-hand with which to soothe as well as invigorate. Brandy in Watson's consulting-room, then more brandy over breakfast with Holmes. Ah, melodrama. Ah, the mandated opulence of Gothic horror. I feel as though I might have the vapours just thinking of it. Do those historic timelines scan?
There are shades here of The Red-Headed League, where Mr. Jabez Wilson gets some wallet over-fattening funding dropped on him for (apparently) simply handwriting out the Encyclopedia. Hatherley has been in business for two years, with one job to show for it. Much more dire straits Money for Nothing than Wilson, who was much more greedy all around. Still, a glimpse at the idea of the potential evils of unfair pay. Or wages as the root of all evil, not simply money. Or, bribery works.
Hard times, daddy. Particularly for an orphan bachelor who has no one to fall back on--or go looking for his cartoonishly pancake-flattened corpse. Regardless of all that, the emaciated German, Colonel Lysander Stark has made an unrefusable offer: fifty guineas for a night's work but really more like an hour. Just don't tell a soul and hey, show up around midnight. The young man even thinks of backing out but hey, fifty guineas is fifty guineas. Besides, what can possibly go wrong? You see the seats tingled during certain scenes to add to the horror, and never mind...
Everything goes wrong but most importantly is all that stuff that I already mentioned not lining up. Plot holes impede travel much as do potholes. And speaking of travel, I'm unclear... transporting out loads of Fuller's Earth bricks on a somewhat regular schedule is somehow the inconspicuous route which to take? Was there even any Fuller's Earth? I feel like maybe there wasn't and also that I'm a little embarrassingly dull in so slowly coming to the killing machine realization. I doubt there were even coins at the point of the story we start at. It was already out of control, murderously spinning in a frenzied, diabolical manner. The absolute horror.
The horror of horrors in these pages is the thought process of how best to meet one's own fresh-squeezed death... then again... how long does this thing... Take. To. Drop? It seemed a lengthy spine-snapping harrowing inner-monologue. And why do the murderers commit murder, speaking of that? No Fuller's Earth probably, a machine too heavy for its purported intended purpose of stamping coins. I suppose one should add that to the horror of horrors--a killing machine made scarier still by lack of reason why. It is what it is.
Maybe tho, it should have been emphasized harder--how Ferguson and Elise saw their whatever operation taken over by the murderous madman Stark. Perhaps from within, perhaps from without; he rose to control the other two. There is tension in their dialog and proof of their not being on the same page. “‘Fritz! Fritz!’ she cried in English, ‘remember your promise after the last time. You said it should not be again." AGAIN? Mr. Doyle, you horrify me. Please bring me to my fainting couch. There is a rich, unwritten back-story at play within this group; you can just feel it. I'd like to read it.
I guess we're still on the dialog. Weirdly, I feel the go-between of Holmes and Watson isn't so sharp. Or at least not so memorable. Appropos of not that entirely, my favorite deducing bit of the thing involves conversation and Holmes figuring the gang's location as neither up north, down south, nor out neither west or east but instead horrifyingly near.
“One horse?” interjected Holmes.
“Yes, only one.”
“Did you observe the colour?”
“Yes, I saw it by the side-lights when I was stepping into the carriage. It was a chestnut.”
“Tired-looking or fresh?”
“Oh, fresh and glossy.”
Yes, I am struck again by the crisp, natural yet cinematic dialogue. Its nonchalant depths. A camera filled with B&W film pans between close-ups of riveted faces. Bum bum bum! I suppose being struck makes it quite striking, no? The setting talks almost as much as the characters and it tells a scary tale. So that's cool. Is it sacrilege to say that this all feels a bit like a Scooby-Doo mystery? I think it's the characters themselves--I just deducted half-a-point. Zoinks. They're all sorta quite... expected. One-dimensional. Flat as a coin.
I'm all over the place here and trying to rein it in but THERE IS NO ANCHOR. Untethered and lost. I feel like I'm typing a lot of question marks out onto my screen? The plot ain't great, again too many holes. Its highlight is it gets you to turn pages. It's suspenseful then, in and of that. I mean but... yeah. The problem is sneaky big; bigger than a mere thumb. That being the threat of a large amount of funny money messing up the economy. I suppose. I don't feel like my gaze is shifted there near enough. If it were, in all honesty, it probably wouldn't care. Not every big problem is mine--nor is every monkey from my circus.
Oh and here we are at the solution. The operation goes up in flames due to a squished lamp's oil, the gang makes off with loads of what we should maybe think are knock-off coins but might also be family pictures and long johns, and Holmes has a chuckle over his client's bounteous booty--a good yarn to spin. Definitely not the agreed-upon price. Although a good story probably did go further back then before the availability of all of these streaming services. Ultimately though, I can make a case that Holmes is more cleanly-beaten here than in SCAN but would make no friends in that process and carry on too long here. Plus, he was probably just cued in too dreadfully late.
Nevertheless the heinous Colonel Lysander Stark runs free! This being alive thing makes him much more horrid indeed than the dead guys in FIVE. Thankfully, he seems to need a lot of space, time, and clumsy accouterments in order to wreak his particular brand of mad scientist mayhem. A silent movie damsel in distress tied to railroad tracks. Seems they were almost always rescued in time--but I've minimal experience to pull from there. He twirls his swarthy handlebar mustache and pulls closed his black silk cape.
Worthy of note to my particular mores, we get a glimpse here of Holmes's smoking habits. "... and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece." I do this, in some varying fashions. I cannot recommend it. Perhaps you might think I cannot recommend this tale either. You'd be horrifically wrong, the pros might not outweigh the cons--but they still are well worth the reading and not so much to be found so well-displayed in other adventures.
CHARACTERS: 1/2
SETTING: 1/2
PLOT: .5/2
PROBLEM: 1/2
SOLUTION: .5/2
FINAL GRADE: 4.5/10
Also, please bear in mind that this post is part of a series in which I'm working through every case in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. For other entries in this series, use the Search Kaplowitz Media. function to the right of your screen and plug in either particular adventures contained within that collection, or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
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