A simple story, and not deceptively simple either. Though things do begin with Holmes reminding Watson of his axiom that “The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring home.”

I don’t think the crime here was featureless or commonplace though. It’s apparent simplicity is that it seems an open-and-shut case, with a young man arrested for the murder of his father. But Holmes sees deeper into these things, and knows how circumstantial evidence can be “a very tricky thing” and lead you astray. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

What I mean by calling it a simple story is something different. I mean that as a mystery story, and in particular a Sherlock Holmes story, it doesn’t throw any curves. There’s only one suspect, and the plot follows what had already become a standard script pretty closely. There’s Holmes showing up the police by getting down on the ground with his lens and tracking clues (footprints, tobacco residue) like a bloodhound on the scent. There’s the exercise of his métier of “observation and inference.” There’s the usual backstory involving a crime in a faraway country (in this case Australia), and a pair of young lovers whose path to matrimony has to be made clear. There’s the guilty party who had his reasons, and who is going to expire soon anyway.

I raised an eyebrow at Lestrade calling himself Holmes’s “colleague,” not so much because he’s presuming a lot putting himself on an equal footing with Holmes but because they seem to actually have the same job. Lestrade has been called to Boscombe Valley by some of the locals who believe in the charged man’s innocence. Specifically, he is said to have been “retained.” I’m not sure how that works, or what makes it any different from Holmes’s role as consulting detective. Lestrade’s just not as good at it.

An annotation in the Baring-Gould edition though offers this:

Some have pounced on the word “retained” as used by Holmes to conclude that Lestrade had gone into private practice for a period, but that judgment is not necessarily warranted, for it was not uncommon for Scotland Yarders to aid the provincial police, and Holmes’ use of the word was purely conversational.

This suggests to me that there’s some wiggle room. The line between the police and private practice wasn’t as sharp in the nineteenth century as it is today, and Doyle himself might not have been clear on all the practical distinctions. And some of it can also be attributed to genre logistics. Fifty years later Miss Marple was routinely being given access to crime scenes and even requested to conduct official interviews with suspects and witnesses. I just think the conjunction of “retained” with the later use of “colleague,” not to mention the way Holmes is usually employed (retained?) by the police in these stories, shows how fluid the boundaries were.

Holmes index