 The Red Headed League
 Synopsis
MR WILSON calls on Holmes with an extraordinary tale. He is a pawnbroker, who has recently taken on a very intelligent new assistant named SPAULDING. Admiring Wilson’s red hair, Spaulding had told him about a job going at “the Red-Headed League”, an organisation set up to help redheads. The League hired Wilson, and paid him handsomely for going to an office every morning and copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All went well for eight weeks, until suddenly Wilson went to the office and found only a sign claiming that the League was dissolved. Holmes realises that Wilson is being paid to get out of his shop every day, and realises that Spaulding and his accomplices are tunnelling through to the nearby City and Suburban Bank. He takes the police and lies in wait to arrest the gang. He successfully captures “Wilson” (really John Clay, a known villain) and prevents the robbery.
Comments
As in many of the Holmes stories, at least part of the solution is quite obvious to today’s sophisticated audience (Wilson is clearly being got out of the way by Spaulding for purposes of his own) but the device of the Red Headed League is imaginative and very funny. |
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