Holiday read: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

This weeks reading is from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes because the book ends with The Final problem which is set in, you guessed it, Switzerland in the Bernese Oberland area I am staying in. But before we get to that things start with the case of a missing race horse.

Highlights from Silver Blaze

Sherlock Holmes is reading the papers avidly consuming as many facts as he can about the disappearance of a race horse and the murder of its trainer in Dartmoor. He decides to travel down to be on hand to solve the case and asks Watson to go with him explaining that he thought the case might have been solved by the local police and that’s why he had not rushed down

On the way down in the train the facts of the case are outlined with a mysterious character, who is now prime suspect, turning up one night and asking to see the stable boy who was then drugged with opiate in his food. The trainer wakes in the middle of the night and disappears to be found on the moor with his head caved in holding the cravat of the mysterious man and a blooded knife.

Holmes arrives and asks for new clues, on of which is the close proximity of a band of gypsies near the murder scene. But he starts asking strange questions about lame sheep, the bills in the dead man's pockets and is interested in the cataract knife the trainer took with him on the moor. His first task is to find the horse which he tracks to a neighbouring stables and then tells the trainer there that he has rumbled his game.

Then Holmes needs to solve the crime. He reveals after the Silver Blaze has turned up and won that the person who killed the trainer was the horse which he tried to maime in a bid to fix the race and pay off debts run up by his mistress, which were catalogued in the reciepts found in his pockets. The three lame sheep had been experiemnets where he had tried to cut the tendon and he chose curry to drug the stable lad because it was the only flavour that would cover the drug.

More tomorrow...