All illustrations
The Red-Headed League
Chapter 1 · 7 illustrations Wilson's tale of the dissolved League
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1·1 A high, wide view down onto a soot-dark Baker Street terrace on a smoky autumn morning, with a hansom at the kerb and a single amber window glowing on the first floor.
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1·2 A close detail of a stout client's wrist and waistcoat: a pink-scaled fish tattoo above the cuff and a square-holed Chinese coin on a brass watch-chain, the last clues in a detective's deduction.
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1·3 Dr. Watson, newspaper flattened in both hands, stares at the absurd Red-Headed League advertisement, baffled.
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1·4 From a high vantage, a sea of red-headed men packs Fleet Street and the stair of Pope's Court, while stout Jabez Wilson and his assistant shoulder their way toward the League's doorway.
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1·5 A top-down insert of Jabez Wilson's thick fingers holding up the curt white card that announces the end of the Red-headed League.
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1·6 In Holmes's Baker Street sitting room, the detective and the doctor collapse in laughter at the curt card announcing the dissolved League, while the red-headed pawnbroker sits stiff and rueful, holding it up.
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1·7 At the mention of Spaulding's acid-splashed forehead, Holmes snaps upright in his armchair and asks about the pierced ears.
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Chapter 2 · 6 illustrations Reconnaissance, music and the night party
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2·1 Saxe-Coburg Square seen from high above: a small, sooty, forgotten pocket of quiet sunk in the smoke of the City, with the roaring main road just behind it.
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2·3 A tight, eye-level insert on the knees of the pawnbroker's assistant's dark trousers, creased and stained with clay.
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2·4 A quiet, soot-stained plan of the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, towering over the little newspaper shop, with its dark side passage beside it.
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2·5 Lost in the music at St. James's Hall, Holmes sits in profile with a gentle smile and half-lowered eyes while his fingertips drift in time to the melody.
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2·6 By the mantelpiece in the gaslit Baker Street sitting room, Holmes holds his hunting crop and tells the banker and the detective, with a dry smile, that tonight's play is for £30,000 and for the man Jones has hunted for years.
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2·7 In Holmes's lamplit sitting room, Peter Jones names John Clay with a stabbing forefinger while the once-sceptical Mr. Merryweather bends to listen.
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Chapter 3 · 9 illustrations The bank cellar ambush and Holmes's explanation
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3·1 From three storeys up, a lamp-lit City street at night, where four tiny silhouettes file into the dark passage beside the shuttered bank.
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3·2 Four small figures stand in the beam of a single lantern at the threshold of the bank's vast cellar.
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3·3 In the pitch-black bank vault, a single lurid yellow spark flares in a flagstone joint, the first sign that the tunnel below is opening.
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3·4 A white, almost womanly hand pushes up through a gash between the vault's flagstones, groping in a small pool of lurid yellow lantern light.
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3·5 In the black bank vault, John Clay's lantern-lit face rises over the edge of the tipped flagstone and scans the dark.
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3·6 In the lantern-lit bank vault, Sherlock Holmes bursts from the dark, seizes John Clay by the collar and raises his hunting crop over the gun hand.
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3·7 In the lantern-lit bank vault, the cuffed John Clay bows low to Holmes, Watson and Merryweather like a prince leaving court.
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3·8 A close, evidence-like study of the shop assistant's earth-stained, threadbare trouser knees, the clue that told Holmes of months of burrowing.
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3·9 At dawn in the Baker Street sitting room, the weary detective shrugs off his friend's praise while the doctor listens with a fond smile over their whisky and soda.
In the text →