Watson introduces this story in an interesting way. He tells us that the public will probably already be familiar with it since it has “been told more than once in the newspapers,” but that it’s worth telling again because of the way he’ll tell it. The effect such a story has “is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on the complete truth.”

I say this is interesting because it shows Watson’s self-awareness as a mystery writer, and not just someone who’s interested in presenting the facts. There’s an art to what he’s doing, a point that I think is glanced at in the story’s final paragraph, where Holmes laughingly tells the engineer that while he may have lost a thumb he has gained “experience.” He has “only to put it [his story] into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.” As we might say (and perhaps they were already saying at the time), he’ll be dining out on this adventure for years.

And it is quite an adventure. It has a gang of counterfeiters, and a hapless engineer who first gets stuck in a room that’s actually a giant press, with a hydraulic ceiling that threatens to crush him, and who then finds himself hanging from a window sill until the bad guy cuts his thumb off with a hatchet. It’s all he can do to find his way to Watson’s office so he can tell his story.

It’s not a bad little mystery either. Though Watson begins by apologizing that it “gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results,” that just means there aren’t any of those silly “magic act” scenes where Holmes tells where someone went to university by knowing the size of his shoes. Instead there is just the one point where he cleverly outdoes everyone in locating where the counterfeiters’ house is. This is prepared for by a clue that he even draws attention to, asking the engineer to repeat a crucial point when telling his story. We’re given a nudge that this is important, and the challenge to the reader is to understand its relevance. In these early days of mystery fiction you could probably rely on it being an actual clue, whereas later you’d have to wonder if it was only being introduced as a red herring.

Holmes index