The Red-Headed League
The Red-Headed League or The Adventure of the Red-headed League is a Sherlock Holmes short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that first appeared in Strand Magazine in August 1891 and was illustrated by Sidney Paget . The story was included in October 1892 in the anthology The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes ( Eng. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes ). German translations were published under various titles such as Der Bund der Rothaarigen or Die Liga der Rotschöpfen .
In this second story by Doyle with the detective character Sherlock Holmes as the main character, it is about clearing up the mysterious activities of a so-called league of redheads and preventing a planned crime.
action
One autumn afternoon in 1890, Dr. Watson , the first-person narrator of the story, and his friend, the well-known private detective Sherlock Holmes, in his apartment. Holmes already has a guest named Jabez Wilson with noticeably flaming red hair who needs his advice and has piqued his interest in an interesting case.
In the presence of Watson, the visitor reports on the strange happenings that he has experienced in the past eight weeks. Wilson, a Freemason and former ship-carpenter, as Holmes found out, runs a small pawnshop in Saxe-Coburg Square in London, not far from the City, but its business is not particularly good. He therefore had to fire his former employee. For about three months he has only been employing an assistant named Vincent Spaulding, who is willing to work for half his wages in order - as he says - to learn the profession of pawnbroker. Spaulding is well versed in business, but spends a lot of time in the basement to pursue his hobby and develop photos.
Two months before his appearance at Holmes, allegedly on April 27, 1890, Jabez Wilson was brought to the attention of his clerk about an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle in which the League of Redheads advertised a vacancy. A high level of remuneration is offered for a simple sideline job of a few hours a day. All Londoners with fiery red hair can apply. As Spaulding reports, the league was founded by an American millionaire, the red-haired eccentric Ezekiah Hopkins. He had spent his youth in London and wanted to use his foundation to do something good to needy red-haired men in his old homeland.
At the urging of his employee and with his company, Jabez Wilson applied for the position at the League's office on Pope's Court on Fleet Street . Despite a large number of competitors, Duncan Ross, the London head of the league, was the only one to offer Wilson the job after a brief interview. He receives an order Monday to Friday from 10am to 14h, the Encyclopædia Britannica write off. During these times, he must not leave his workplace under any circumstances; the weekly wage of four pounds is paid every Saturday.
Wilson agrees that the shops in his pawnshop are mostly done in the evenings and Spaulding can replace him in his absence.
For eight weeks, Wilson fulfills his job to the satisfaction of his employer and receives four gold pounds from Duncan Ross every Saturday. On the morning of October 9, 1890, however, Jabez Wilson found a sign at his place of work announcing the dissolution of the league. His further investigations are unsuccessful; neither the League nor Duncan Ross seem to exist.
Wilson feels duped and asks Holmes to resolve the mysterious event. He is certain that he will be able to clear up the mysterious matter shortly. Before that, however, he would like to find out more about Wilson's employee.
After a good hour of reflection, Holmes suggests to his friend Watson that they attend a concert by the famous violinist Sarasate at St. James Hall that Saturday afternoon . Before going to the concert, they both go to the pawn shop on Saxe-Coburg Square, where Holmes taps the sidewalk in front of Wilson's shop with his stick several times. He also exchanges a few words with the pawnbroker's clerk without identifying himself. He also leads Watson to the back of the building to get an idea of the location and to fathom the parts behind. Holmes then lingers for a short time on a street corner, where he tries to memorize the order of the houses as a memory exercise. He casually points out to Watson that the pawnbroker's supposedly skilful assistant is a terrible person who may be planning a daring prank.
After attending the concert, Holmes explains that he still has a few things to do as the matter in Coburg Square will come to a head that evening. He asked Watson to be at his apartment on Baker Street at ten o'clock that evening with a loaded revolver; the situation could be dangerous. Although Watson cannot understand his friend's train of thought, he knows from experience that Holmes never acts rashly.
When Watson arrives at the detective's apartment that evening, Holmes is waiting for him, along with Scotland Yard official Peter Jones and Mr. Merryweather, the director of the City and Suburban Bank. Holmes announces that they will arrest the long-sought, extremely intelligent criminal John Clay that night.
Together the four go to the business premises of the City and Surban Bank, where large amounts of French gold are currently stored, and hide in the steel chamber in the bank's basement. After waiting in the dark for an hour, someone starts breaking up the ground from below. Two intruders appear, Spaulding and an accomplice who have dug a tunnel into the vault . Holmes seizes one perpetrator, the other can be caught by the police officers who Jones has posted at the other end of the tunnel.
A few hours later, Holmes informs Watson about the background of the incident and his investigative work in his apartment. He suspected from the start that the whole story of the League of Redheads was just an attempt to lure the not particularly alert Wilson out of the house for a few hours a day. However, since there was nothing in the house to justify such an effort, it had to be something nearby. Spaulding's penchant for long periods of time in the cellar drew Holmes' attention to a project in the cellar that required a long period of preparation. His suspicion fell on the construction of a tunnel. During the on-site visit, he was able to convince himself of the correctness of his hypothesis when he found traces of the ditch on Spaulding's trouser knees and discovered that the City and Surban Bank is directly adjacent to the pawnshop.
The dissolution of the League of Redheads showed that Wilson's absence was no longer necessary, so the tunnel was complete. Since a discovery was imminent and the gold holdings could be removed from the bank, the break into the vault was imminent. Saturday also gave the two criminals two days to escape, so Holmes expected the break-in that evening.
Interpretative approach
The short story begins, like almost all other Holmes stories, with a ritual opening scene in Holmes' apartment on Baker Street. After a brief introduction of the characters by the narrator, Holmes delivers an art sample of his extraordinary abilities and thereby characterizes himself at the same time obese pawnbroker Jabez Wilson with the conspicuously red hair, in order to draw further conclusions from his external appearance. On closer inspection of the new client, Watson saw nothing remarkable except the flaming red hair and a look of annoyance; Wilson appears to him to be a very ordinary, average person who - judging by his appearance - probably belongs to the merchant class.
Holmes, too, claims to have only perceived what is evident; however, his conclusions are far more detailed and astonishing. For example, he notices that Wilson has long been a craftsman, is a Freemason, has lived in China and has recently written a lot. The client confirms Holmes' perceptions; He and Watson are startled, wondering how Holmes could deduce all of this from the outside world without being a clairvoyant. Holmes then explains his discoveries as simple deductions from precisely observed details, occasionally combined with recourse to his extensive specialist knowledge. For example, the rubbed crease and stain on Wilson's right elbow point to his recent paperwork.
In short, the opening scene demonstrates the typical intellectual process of Holmes's investigative activity, which will be repeated later in this story and which also characterizes the other Holmes stories as a model. Holmes has a penchant for the bizarre and peculiar beyond ordinary everyday life; he usually finds the extraordinary where others cannot find anything extraordinary. He then reduces the unusual back to the normal, which can be explained with common sense.
In the introductory part, the narrative characters are positioned intellectually and socially in the puzzle game. Sherlock Holmes towers above all other characters with his intellectual powers. Although Dr. Watson, unlike the less alert client, who hardly understands anything, is by no means dull, he is always inferior to Holmes. The reader also takes a certain position in the puzzle: He is encouraged to identify with Holmes and to participate in his solutions. It is suggested to him that he can see or understand more than Watson.
In fact, however, the reader cannot get any further than Watson, since the first-person narrator only tells him what he has observed. Before the case is resolved, Watson, who in retrospect is an omniscient narrator, adheres strictly to the limited perspective of the experiencing self. In the opening scene, he first describes Holmes' conclusions and only then the detailed observations on which they are based. Holmes' identification of the pawnbroker as a Freemason first and foremost becomes a surprising and remarkable detective achievement because the reader only learns afterwards that Holmes read this from a pin with the Masonic symbols of compasses and squares.
On a social level, Holmes and Watson have a lot in common; Despite their preference for the unconventional, both of them, as gentlemen, adhere to the code of conduct of their social class . Both belong to the academic professional group of professional people , Watson as a doctor and Holmes as a detective working with scientific methods and a representative of the science of detection . Their professional ethos obliges them not to work primarily for money, but to make their services available to others in an unselfish way . For example, Holmes only requires the bank, which he has saved from major damage, to reimburse his expenses, not a fee . In the end, it refers to Watson, who has worked himself often without their own advantage, specifically as a "benefactor of mankind" ( benefactor of the race ).
In terms of its structure, the story is divided into a sequence of ritual scenes. The opening scene is followed by the presentation of the history of the case through the report and the questioning of the client. Already in the opening part the reader is supplied with suspicious factors through remarks and hints from Holmes. Something can be wrong with the league and Spaulding, the pawnbroker's assistant, must be somehow involved. At the same time, the increasingly terse and cryptic statements made by Holmes make it clear that the detective is now far ahead of the reader, as is Watson, in solving the case. Holmes lets it through that he knows who is actually hiding behind Spaulding, and that there is more than a harmless joke at the expense of the inexperienced pawnbroker.
In the interlude that follows, Holmes suggestively smokes his pipe and ponders, with Watson watching. After the pause for thought, Holmes has solved the "three-pipe problem" in his head. The subsequent site visit is followed by a narrative element that should not be missing in the detective stories. This site inspection has a double function: On the one hand, it is an important part of the puzzle solution, and on the other hand, it provides impressions of Victorian London, which contribute to the further entertainment of the reader. The narrative tension is maintained as Holmes makes decisive progress in confirming his hypotheses and resolving the case, but Watson and the reader are not yet able to understand this. Holmes' behavior and his hints are thus increasingly becoming part of the puzzle.
The more unclear the case seems to Watson and thus to the reader, the more Holmes' announcements pile up that the climax and the enlightenment are imminent. The intellectual processes of detective investigative work are thus converted into narrative actions in which the intellectual analysis of the past becomes the starting point for current action.
The solution to the riddle consists of two parts: The scene at the crime scene is mainly used for the additional generation and subsequent resolution of tension; For example, the dangerous nature of the worsening situation requires a loaded revolver to be carried. After the crime at the scene of the crime has been finally resolved, the complete answer to all the questions previously asked is given in a reflective review in Holmes' apartment on Baker Street.
This makes the solution plausible and acceptable for the reader, who had just been groping in the dark. Holmes builds his conclusive and plausible chain of evidence from links, all of which were mentioned in the narrative report - sometimes even in conspicuous places - and are known to the reader.
For the reader, however, the traces or clues were not usable up to this point for their own attempt at a solution, since either a final piece of information was missing or was embedded in a misleading context.
This narrative strategy of misleading or distracting contextualization is clearly shown in the example of the City and Suburban Bank. In retrospect, it seems very obvious to suspect a connection between the weeks of activity of the already suspicious Spaulding in the basement of the pawnshop and the adjacent bank. Such a presumption, however, is prevented by various barriers in the course of the narration for the reader. The location of the pawn shop and the street with the bank are not discussed in the narrative from the point of view of spatial proximity, but instead from the perspective of a stark contrast. In addition, the description of the shopping street is not presented as part of the tour of the crime scene, but as a pure memory exercise by Holmes, who devotes himself to his topographical hobby horse to relax before going to the concert . Even in this context, the reader's attention is not focused on the bank as a single building, but is further distracted by the listing of the various shops and houses in the street.
Only in the final clarification is the wrong contextualization replaced by the correct and immediately illuminating one, which now turns out to be part of a whole.
Conan Doyles London as the setting
The story is set in a Victorian London that Doyle constructs from an interlocking of real and fictional locations. By explicitly naming actual street names and districts in which the fictional locations of the story are embedded, Doyle tries to give the reader a sufficiently clear and detailed idea of the area in which the case takes place.
The whole thing leads to the image of a city that is primarily shaped by the social diversity of the individual city districts. Baker Street, where Holmes lives, is a neutral, bourgeois place that is neither part of the old part of the city nor one of the newer suburbs. For contemporary Doyle readers, the street was considered neither poor nor rich, not particularly quiet, but well connected to traffic. In the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes stories, Baker Street is therefore a good starting point for exploration trips and crime scene visits in other parts of the city and social milieus.
By linking the fictitious crime scenes and scenes with nearby real fixed points, the imaginary scenes are concretized. Holmes lives on a real street, but in house number 221 B , which does not exist in reality.
The League of Redheads' rooms are located on a fictional Pope's Court believed to be behind the famous Fleet Street . The tour of the pawnshop also leads from the real starting point of Aldersgate , a station on the London Underground on the border between the City and the East End , after a short walk to the imaginary Saxe-Coburg Square. This place is then described as shabby and shabby, mainly from a social perspective: “It was a small, gloomy place that may once have seen better days; it was surrounded on all four sides by dark two-story houses, and in the middle was a fenced-in grass square, on which several laurel bushes led a miserable existence in battle with the smoke-laden, misty air ”(“ We traveled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate; and a short walk took us to Saxe-Coburg-square, the scene of the singular story which we had listened to in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass, and a few clumps of faded laurel bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere ”).
On their investigation, Watson and Holmes go just one street corner further and arrive in a completely different area, one of the city's main arteries with fine shops and impressive commercial buildings (“ the line of fine shops and stately business premises ”), the liveliness of which is emphatically described: “When we turned the corner of the quiet square, we saw a completely different sight. We were in one of the main arteries of business life. On the road the traffic flooded back and forth in a double current, and on the side lanes the hurrying army of pedestrians swarmed like ants ”(“ The road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the corner from the retired Saxe-Coburg- square presented as great a contrast to it as the front of a picture does to the back. It was one of the main arteries which convey the traffic of the City to the north and west. The roadway was blocked with the immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inwards and outwards, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians ”).
Impact history
After A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League is one of the first two short stories that Conan Doyle was able to publish in Strand Magazine as a hitherto unsuccessful writer and ophthalmologist without patients . After appearing in this new prestigious magazine in the summer of 1891, Doyle, whose previous publications (including two longer novel-like stories about Holmes and Watson) had received little response, quickly became a famous and highly paid author.
With this story, Doyle laid the foundations for expanding the genre of the classic detective story into a successful literary model. As a real tension story , The Red-Headed League contains all the essential functional and effective elements of the detective story: The figure of the outstanding, ingenious, eccentric and always successful detective is accompanied by an accompanying figure who acts as a narrator. An initially extremely puzzling and mysterious case is finally resolved analytically in a way that is both surprising and illuminating. At the same time, the story gives the reader an insight into a social world that appears interesting.
However, Doyle did not invent these genre-specific elements himself or developed them from the beginning, but mainly adopted what he found, especially from his declared role model Edgar Allan Poe , who had already shaped the prototype of the genus in his three Dupin stories.
Doyle's achievement is to have made the detective story into a serial text. Each individual text with the main character of Sherlock Holmes offers a new, self-contained story, which at the same time follows on from the previous stories and enables the reader to re-encounter well-known and popular main characters, locations or plot patterns.
This creates a literary scheme for an entertaining puzzle and storytelling game in Doyle's detective stories, which varies over and over and can be repeated almost indefinitely. The action can be rather simple in design as here or contain complicated cases and events; Likewise, social milieus or the number and type of people involved in the case can be changed; the reader's attention can be drawn more to the eccentric idiosyncrasies of the detective or the puzzling nature of the case.
The rules and modalities of the game, which give Doyle's schema its literary historical significance, remain the same: the narrative structure of the stories with its specific form of puzzling and surprising resolution at the end corresponds to the intention of entertaining the reader by distracting from everyday life.
In The Red-Headed League , this desire for distraction is addressed at the beginning of the story itself. Holmes and Watson are looking for distraction from the “leather monotony of everyday life” (“ the humdrum routine of everyday life ”). The new case fulfills this need and leads into areas of the seemingly bizarre and peculiar, far beyond normal. Ultimately, however, the extraordinary can be reduced to the normal again with the help of common sense. The everyday world is finally restored; At the end of the story, the reader and protagonist are back in the initial situation.
Film adaptations (selection)
The short story provided the template for cinematic adaptations several times:
- In 1921 the story was first filmed under the title The Red-Haired League as part of a film series starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes.
- In 1951 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired the case as an episode in a television series starring Alan Wheatley as Sherlock Holmes.
- 1954 followed a film of the same name as the 11th episode of the American series Sherlock Holmes with Ronald Howard in the title role. The German version of this episode appeared under the title "The Fall of the Red-Haired Gentlemen".
- In 1965 the story was filmed again for the BBC as the fourth episode of a television series with Douglas Wilmer as Holmes.
- In 1967 a film adaptation for German television followed as the third case in a Holmes series with Erich Schellow as the title character.
- Filmed in 1985 by the private English television company Granada Television with major changes in the events and broadcast as the 12th episode of a Sherlock Holmes series (with Jeremy Brett ).
- In 2000, various motifs from the narrative were used for the 16th episode of the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century .
Settings (selection)
In the English-speaking world, WorldCat's bibliographic database at the end of 2014 listed almost eighty different audio versions of the story.
- For example, in April 1977 the CBS broadcast a version of The Red-Headed League with Kevin McCarthy as Sherlock Holmes, which was adapted for American radio, as part of its radio drama series Radio Mystery Theater .
Numerous radio play and audio book versions have also been produced in German-speaking countries:
- In 1947 the story was broadcast as a radio play on the Northwest German Radio with Fritz Wagner and Manfred Steffen as speakers.
- In 1965 the Saarländischer Rundfunk produced a radio play version with Alexander Kerst and Heinz Leo Fischer as speakers.
- In 1980 the story was published as a radio play by Polyband with Joachim Hansen and Mogens von Gadow as speakers.
- In 2005 the Argon Verlag published an audio version with Daniel Morgenroth as the narrator.
- In 2006 the story was published as an audio book in the box The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on Radioropa , read by Christian Poewe.
- In 2008 a radio play version was published by Maritim , with Christian Rode and Peter Groeger .
- In 2012 the story was published as an audio book by Hörverlag , read by Oliver Kalkofe .
- In 2013 the story was published in the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as an audiobook download from Audible , read by Erich Räuker .
- In 2014 another radio play version was published by Titania Medien with Joachim Tennstedt and Detlef Bierstedt as speakers.
Secondary literature
- Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-15-017509-7 , pp. 42–53.
- Ulrich Suerbaum : Crime. An analysis of the genus. Reclam Publishing House. Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-15-010331-2 .
Web links
- Adventure II. The Red-Headed League . Original English text on: Project Gutenberg .
- The League of Redheads . German translation to: Project Gutenberg-DE .
Individual evidence
- ↑ German translations have also appeared under titles such as The Red Haired Club , The Red Haired League , The Red Haired Men League , The Red Headed League or The Red Haired Club . See The League of Redheads . On: Sherlock Holmes Wiki . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ This date of publication does not coincide with the other times in the text. The dissolution of the League of Redheads is dated October 9, 1890, and Wilson visits Holmes that Saturday, an autumn afternoon. The advertisement should have appeared at the end of July or beginning of August. Doyle's mistake has been corrected in some translations.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , pp. 43–45.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 45.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 45 f.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 46 f.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 50.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 51 f.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swif t, pp. 48–50.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 42.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 43.
- ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : Arthur Conan Doyle: The Red-Headed League. In: Raimund Borgmeier (Ed.): English Short Stories from Thomas Hardy to Graham Swift , p. 52 f.
- ↑ See The Red-Haired League (1921) on : Internet Movie Database . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ See The Red Headed League (Nov. 24, 1951) . On: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ See The Case of the Red Headed League (December 27, 1954) . On: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ See [1] on fernsehserien.de . Retrieved June 12, 2016.
- ↑ See The Red-Headed League (March 13, 1965) . On: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ See [2] . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
- ↑ See the information in the catalog of the German National Library and the listing in: Die Liga der Rotschöpf . On: Sherlock Holmes Wiki . Retrieved December 26, 2014.
A scandal in Bohemia (1891) | The League of Redheads (1891) | A question of identity (1891) | The Secret of Boscombe Valley (1891) | The five orange pits (1891) | The Man with the Disfigured Lip (1891) | The blue carbuncle (1892) | The Speckled Ribbon (1892) | The Engineer's Thumb (1892) | The noble bachelor (1892) | The beryl crown (1892) | The beeches (1892)