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The Genius of Sherlock Holmes’ Only Christmas Mystery
In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” the detective again proves he’s smarter than the London police
Great holiday crime stories are rare. Have the plot of a murder mystery unfold on Christmas Day and you risk accusations of trivializing the birth of Christ or playing it for heavy irony.
Part of the genius of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is that it implicitly acknowledges such realities. Arthur Conan Doyle begins this Sherlock Holmes tale on the second morning after Christmas, the day after Boxing Day.
“The Blue Carbuncle” is a holiday story without the freight it would carry if it took place two days earlier. And it has a plot perfectly attuned to the season. Holmes has the benign (but now married) Watson by his side as usual.
But Holmes doesn’t face his arch-foe, Moriarty, or a killer armed with a gun or a trained swamp adder as in “The Dancing Men” or “The Speckled Band.” He needs only to find out why a priceless gem — the blue carbuncle — turned up in the gullet of a white Christmas goose abandoned on a London street.
To do that he must find the owner of a well-worn hat dropped in the street along with the goose, a task that requires him to use his famous deductive…
