Does anyone use the word “pip” for “seed” anymore? Perhaps it’s still current in the UK, but I’ve never heard the seed of a fruit referred to as a pip in my life. Outside of this story, I don’t recall encountering it in a book either, though probably at some point I have.

Anyway, the five orange pips in question are death threats from the “KKK,” which Sherlock Holmes (having recourse to the American Encyclopedia) identifies as the Ku Klux Klan. I guess that wasn’t so obvious in 1890s London. Once again the plot revolves around a crime in a foreign country being avenged back in England, resulting in a series of murders. That was also what happened in both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. The difference here, perhaps due to space constraints, is that it’s a mystery that’s not fully resolved, not to mention one that Holmes flubs.

The introduction tells us up front that Holmes did have cases that “baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him.” Watson puts “The Five Orange Pips” into the latter category, and Holmes admits at the end that that the murder of the young man who initially had sought his help offends his pride. But even during that initial intake interview he had cautioned that he had only ever been “generally successful” at solving crimes. Even a proud man can possess genuine humility.

Doyle considered this one of his favourite stories, and it has found a lot of popular favour, but to me it feels rushed. The deductions that lead to Holmes discovering the identity of the killer are pedestrian, and it may be that the reason it ends the way it does is because Doyle couldn’t think of any other way for justice to be done. What was sending five orange pips to Captain Calhoun supposed to do? Holmes says he’s cabled the police in Savannah, but what evidence does he have against the killers?

That said, I didn’t mind being left with no explanation for the killings. That goes with Holmes’s earlier musings about “the ideal reasoner”: someone possessed of perfect knowledge who would, “when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.” This is a vision of a mechanical, deterministic universe, one where if one could but know all the forces at play one would be able to predict every outcome. I don’t know if Holmes (or Doyle) actually subscribed to this point of view, but it’s nicely undercut by the outcome here, which checks the hubris of such a philosophy. Today I think we’re even further from it, accepting that the best that even the most godlike knowledge can aspire to is a calculation of the probability of different results.

Holmes index