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sherlock60Hey, everybody! What did you all think of The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez? It's a good case, with bizarre characters and an excellent deduction and experimentation process by Sherlock Holmes. Here are a few questions/thoughts to get you started. Please add your own!
- As in some other cases, we get introduced here to a number of intriguing cases that Watson mentions only in passing. Those are always fun. Every reader gets to imagine something different from tidbits like "the red leech" or "the Boulevard assassin".
- FYI (thank you, Wikipedia!):
"A palimpest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again."
"Pince-nez are a style of spectacles, popular in the 19th century, which are supported without earpieces, by pinching the bridge of the nose."
A Chubb lock is "a type of lever tumbler lock with an integral security feature which frustrates unauthorised access attempts and indicates to the lock's owner that it has been interfered with."
- No wonder Professor Coram in an invalid! He says he gets a shipment of 1000 cigarettes every fortnight. That works out to 71.4 cigarettes a day, or roughly 3 cigarettes per hour, every hour. And that's if he never stops to sleep!
- I love that when Holmes makes a deduction he still has some level of doubt in, he says he doesn't "insist upon the point". I also love that he's right on those points anyway.
- Does Doctor Watson just watch this woman Anna die? Is that possible? Let's say any intervention he provided was omitted here to keep the story moving quickly. Because read as is, Watson comes across as a remarkably bad doctor here to see a person obviously severely ill and in pain and do nothing.
- As in some other cases, we get introduced here to a number of intriguing cases that Watson mentions only in passing. Those are always fun. Every reader gets to imagine something different from tidbits like "the red leech" or "the Boulevard assassin".
- FYI (thank you, Wikipedia!):
"A palimpest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again."
"Pince-nez are a style of spectacles, popular in the 19th century, which are supported without earpieces, by pinching the bridge of the nose."
A Chubb lock is "a type of lever tumbler lock with an integral security feature which frustrates unauthorised access attempts and indicates to the lock's owner that it has been interfered with."
- No wonder Professor Coram in an invalid! He says he gets a shipment of 1000 cigarettes every fortnight. That works out to 71.4 cigarettes a day, or roughly 3 cigarettes per hour, every hour. And that's if he never stops to sleep!
- I love that when Holmes makes a deduction he still has some level of doubt in, he says he doesn't "insist upon the point". I also love that he's right on those points anyway.
- Does Doctor Watson just watch this woman Anna die? Is that possible? Let's say any intervention he provided was omitted here to keep the story moving quickly. Because read as is, Watson comes across as a remarkably bad doctor here to see a person obviously severely ill and in pain and do nothing.
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Date: 2011-11-14 08:46 am (UTC)I imagine at first it would have been difficult to tell if Anna was just suffering the effects of being hidden, not to mention inhaling the amount of smoke from Holmes and Coram, together with the result of her life in Russia. Clearly her bearing would have discouraged any attempt to help her whilst she told her story.