RG

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

US: October 1903

UK: November 1903

COLLECTION

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905

CHARACTERS

John Hector McFarlane Young solicitor who seeks Holmes’s help.

Jonas Oldacre Wealthy master builder, believed to have been murdered.

Mrs. McFarlane John McFarlane’s mother.

Inspector Lestrade Scotland Yard detective.

Holmes is lamenting how dull London has become since the demise of “the foul spider” Moriarty when action arrives at 221B Baker Street in the form of a “wild-eyed and frantic” young solicitor, John Hector McFarlane. He is being hunted by the police, suspected of having murdered a prosperous builder, Jonas Oldacre, in his villa in suburban Norwood—a setting familiar to Conan Doyle, who lived in the area between 1891 and 1894. Inspector Lestrade then arrives to make the arrest, but first agrees to let McFarlane tell his story.

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An unexpected inheritance

McFarlane explains that the day before, Oldacre had come to his office with a draft will. McFarlane was stunned to read that he had been made the sole beneficiary in spite of never having met the man.

At Oldacre’s request, he later visited him at his home to finalize the will, before being shown out by Oldacre. Yet the next day police were alerted to evidence suggesting that Oldacre had been murdered, and his body dragged outside, and then burned. Lestrade, typically bull-headed, is sure that McFarlane is guilty of the crime. But to the reader, Holmes’s analysis is more compelling. Holmes deduces that Oldacre only drafted the will on his way to the solicitor’s, on the train from Norwood Junction to London Bridge. The one passage of tidy writing, Holmes suggests, was made at a single station stop, the untidy passages as the train was moving, and the almost illegible passages as it passed over points. Holmes also queries why McFarlane would murder his new benefactor. And if he had, why then seek out Holmes, the one man who can be counted on to find the murderer?

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Unlike the original tale, in the 1985 Granada television adaptation, featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes, the apparent victim, Jonas Oldacre, is himself revealed to be a murderer.

Smoking out the truth

Yet the crime scene also points to McFarlane’s guilt, and the next day when police find McFarlane’s bloody thumbprint on Oldacre’s wall, Lestrade is triumphant. But Holmes can barely contain his glee—from previous observations, he knows the print was not there the day before. A brief scout around is all he needs before indulging his flair for a theatrical “reveal.”

When Holmes orchestrates a false fire alarm, Oldacre suddenly bursts out from behind a hidden door. As Holmes deduced, the builder had installed a secret room within the walls. Oldacre turns out to be an embittered former suitor of McFarlane’s mother, and the intent of his entire plot was to destroy the life of his lost love’s son. “It was a masterpiece of villainy,” remarks Holmes, “…But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop.” Oldacre had crept out at night and made the print using a wax impression of McFarlane’s thumb, taken from a seal—a play on a new technique in criminal detection.

All this drama increases the impact of Holmes’s mischievous nobility in the final moments: while the humbled Lestrade bubbles over with praise, Holmes still insists on handing him all the credit. Even if the case’s high stakes—McFarlane would have faced the death penalty if found guilty—make Oldacre’s malice verge on implausible, they ensure that Lestrade is suitably abject before the superior analyst.

FINGERPRINTING

Although fingerprinting had been used in colonial India since 1897, it was not until 1901 that it became a staple of British criminal investigations, when the practice was imported to Britain by an officer who had trained in Bengal. Both these dates come after the 1894 setting of “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” so Oldacre and Lestrade would both have been ahead of their time. Conan Doyle himself had probably been familiar with the idea for quite a while: the anthropologist Francis Galton’s book Finger Prints, which was first published in 1892, had proved that each person’s fingerprints were unique. This work had built on that of a surgeon named Henry Faulds, whose 1880 article in the scientific journal Nature described identifying a thief by means of greasy thumbprints left on a glass. To Faulds, fingerprinting was as reliable as photography, and it seems likely that Conan Doyle, as a medical man, would have read his work and seen its potential early on.

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