Apparently there are no blue carbuncles, a carbuncle being a red gemstone cut a particular way (with a polished convex face and not faceted). So I guess that’s why this particular carbuncle, which is found in the crop of a goose, is worth so much. Given liberties like these I always wonder why people get so worked up over confusions in dates and geography and other consistency errors within the Holmes canon. Doyle was just making things up.

How did the carbuncle get into the crop of a goose? That’s the mystery Holmes is out to solve, and it’s one which leads him on a wild goose chase through London. It’s all a lot of fun and I don’t think it’s meant to be taken that seriously. Holmes, for example, is fine with letting the thief go at the end (while also, presumably, pocketing the reward for finding the carbuncle). There’s also not a lot of deduction going on but more the wearing out of shoe leather as Holmes, in bloodhound mode, drags Watson back through the reverse supply chain of dinner table to barnyard. The one tour de force of drawing inference from the observation of the slightest cues comes at the beginning when Holmes tells us everything we need to know about Henry Baker just from looking at his hat, and I’m not sure how seriously we’re supposed to take that either. We can give him a mulligan on determining that Baker was an intellectual based on hat size alone since at the time the big head=big brain connection was currently the fashion. The other conclusions he draws, however, are so far-fetched as to be what we’d expect in a parody of his method. Though of course they all turn out to be correct. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” Indeed it is.

Noted in passing: at one point Holmes is described as laughing “in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.” This made me wonder what a hearty, noiseless fashion of laughter would look like. I guess it wouldn’t sound like anything, as it’s noiseless. Did Holmes throw his head back and shake quietly?

Holmes index