Canon Discussion: The Three Students
Sep. 3rd, 2017 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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sherlock60This week we are reading The Three Students. It carries the themes of dishonesty and loyalty. My apologies for not posting a reminder for it. (*hides*)
Holmes and Watson, owing to a few difficulties, have taken some time away from London to have some quiet time (though I quite sympathsize with Holmes, being away from his roost; all the work in the world cannot make up for familiar home comforts!). Despite Holmes' low mood and disinterest in taking a case when he wishes for some quiet research, he listens with interest to a tutor whose proofs have been peaked at.
We are assured from the first that the tutor's servant would not have been the one to have copied the proofs, but he was the one who left the key in the door. So who then copied the proofs? Three students, all with the same position on the line. If they score the highest marks on the test, they win a scholarship. They and the tutor -- and we can assume the servant as well -- live in the same building; any one of the students could have seen the key left in the door when going up to their rooms.
The clues lie with a pencil shaving -- left from the copying -- and a bit of black clay. Suspicion falls first on the students with seemingly the most to loose -- I suspect that he was trying his hardest to make up for the fact that his father had fallen to a lower station in life, but as we can see is the usual pattern throughout ACD's stories, suspicion also falls on the Indian simply I suspect for being not white, though perhaps I missed something in the story.
Holmes tells the tutor to wait a day and in the morning he'll have an answer. Naturally he tries to determine the make of the pencil to narrow down the list of suspects, but finds nothing immediate. In the morning, likely when most of the village was sleeping, Holmes found out where the black clay came from. Armed with that knowledge, he arrives again at the tutor's rooms where he lays out the case.
The clay came from an athletic field and of the three students, only one of them is an athlete -- the one on whom suspicions first fell upon. But! We also discover that the servant isn't innocent. He doesn't condone the cheating (I think, I hope), but he did help conceal the athlete having served the family before the father's fall.
Nice and neat of an ending, though I do wonder about whether Holmes' good mood lasted -- or if he went back into his sulk on the carriage ride back to their hotel. I find it remarkable that neither tutor nor Watson suspected that the servant was important to the case. I don't think Holmes discounted him as part of it, but he gave none of it away. He also gave no indication which of the students had done the job. I find it a bit too fitting however that the athlete, the one most likely to have committed the crime, was in the end responsible. It felt a little too neat. What do you say?
Holmes and Watson, owing to a few difficulties, have taken some time away from London to have some quiet time (though I quite sympathsize with Holmes, being away from his roost; all the work in the world cannot make up for familiar home comforts!). Despite Holmes' low mood and disinterest in taking a case when he wishes for some quiet research, he listens with interest to a tutor whose proofs have been peaked at.
We are assured from the first that the tutor's servant would not have been the one to have copied the proofs, but he was the one who left the key in the door. So who then copied the proofs? Three students, all with the same position on the line. If they score the highest marks on the test, they win a scholarship. They and the tutor -- and we can assume the servant as well -- live in the same building; any one of the students could have seen the key left in the door when going up to their rooms.
The clues lie with a pencil shaving -- left from the copying -- and a bit of black clay. Suspicion falls first on the students with seemingly the most to loose -- I suspect that he was trying his hardest to make up for the fact that his father had fallen to a lower station in life, but as we can see is the usual pattern throughout ACD's stories, suspicion also falls on the Indian simply I suspect for being not white, though perhaps I missed something in the story.
Holmes tells the tutor to wait a day and in the morning he'll have an answer. Naturally he tries to determine the make of the pencil to narrow down the list of suspects, but finds nothing immediate. In the morning, likely when most of the village was sleeping, Holmes found out where the black clay came from. Armed with that knowledge, he arrives again at the tutor's rooms where he lays out the case.
The clay came from an athletic field and of the three students, only one of them is an athlete -- the one on whom suspicions first fell upon. But! We also discover that the servant isn't innocent. He doesn't condone the cheating (I think, I hope), but he did help conceal the athlete having served the family before the father's fall.
Nice and neat of an ending, though I do wonder about whether Holmes' good mood lasted -- or if he went back into his sulk on the carriage ride back to their hotel. I find it remarkable that neither tutor nor Watson suspected that the servant was important to the case. I don't think Holmes discounted him as part of it, but he gave none of it away. He also gave no indication which of the students had done the job. I find it a bit too fitting however that the athlete, the one most likely to have committed the crime, was in the end responsible. It felt a little too neat. What do you say?
