Showing results for "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in Literature & Fiction

This is a story from the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I collection.

Violet Hunter consults Holmes after being offered a governess job subject to a number of unusual conditions, including cutting her hair short. The wage is extremely high, £120, and she decides to accept the job, though Holmes tells her to contact him if she needs to. After a number of strange occurrences, including the discovery of a sealed-off wing of the house, she does so. Holmes discovers that someone had been kept prisoner in the wing, but when Holmes, Watson and Hunter enter, it is empty.

When Dr. Watson returns to London from a weekend seminar, he finds hat Sherlock Holmes has been arrested. Inspector Lestrade refers Watson to a questionable psychiatric hospital where Holmes is jailed for mental incapacity.

In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", Violet Hunter asks Sherlock Holmes whether she should accept a job with very strange conditions. She has been offered £120 per year as a governess, but only if she will cut her long hair short. This is only one of many peculiar conditions to which she must agree. The employer, Jephro Rucastle, seems pleasant enough, yet Miss Hunter obviously has her suspicions. After a fortnight, Miss Hunter beseeches Holmes to come and see her in Winchester, as the situation has become even stranger. This is the last of the 12 stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

This story begins with an unusually long discussion between Holmes and Watson before the actual mystery begins. Perhaps it's because Holmes has his cherry-wood pipe out, which signals to Watson (and the reader) that the detective is in an argumentative mood. The debate centers around how Watson has presented Holmes's adventures; Holmes, who is in an atypically argumentative mood, criticizes Watson for presenting the cases in narrative form rather than as a "course of lectures." He also complains Watson has chronicled too many cases in which no crimes were technically committed at all: the ...

'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches' is one of 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock and Watson endeavour to solve one of their strangest cases yet. Violet Hunter has accepted a job as governess, with a remarkable salary, but is most concerned about the peculiar conditions to which she must agree....

Violet Hunter consults Holmes after being offered a governess job subject to a number of unusual conditions, including cutting her hair short. The wage is extremely high, and she decides to accept the job, though Holmes tells her to contact him if she needs to. After a number of strange occurrences, including the discovery of a sealed-off wing of the house, she does so.