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The Copper Beaches Mystery

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Brief overview

A governess hired to impersonate a locked-away daughter brings Holmes to unmask her captor father.

  1. Money far above the rate signals a hidden motiveHolmes asks why anyone would pay one hundred and twenty pounds a year when they could have their pick for forty pounds.
  2. Every whim served a disguiseThe blue dress, the fixed chair and the cut hair existed only so Alice's suitor on the road would see her happy and content.
  3. Isolation, not the city, is what shelters crueltyHolmes tells Watson the smiling countryside hides a worse record of sin than the vilest alleys of London, because the five miles of country is what makes the danger.
Executive Summary AI
  • Holmes, complaining that his practice has sunk to recovering lost pencils, tosses Watson a note from Violet Hunter, who wants advice on whether to accept a post as governess.
  • At the Westaways agency in the West End, the stout Jephro Rucastle offers her one hundred pounds a year instead of the four pounds a month she earned with Colonel Spence Monroe, but attaches conditions: wear a dress of his wife's choosing, sit where told, and cut her chestnut hair short.
  • At the Copper Beeches she is made to sit laughing in the window in an electric blue dress, and a shard of her broken hand-mirror shows a small bearded man in a gray suit watching her from the Southampton road until Mrs. Rucastle draws the blind.
  • After she finds a coil of her own shade of hair locked in a drawer and sees a shadow moving behind the barred door of the empty wing, Holmes tells her she was brought there to personate the imprisoned daughter, Alice Rucastle, said to have gone to Philadelphia.
  • The rescue party finds the room empty and the prisoner gone through the skylight; the starved mastiff seizes Rucastle's throat, Watson shoots it, and Mrs. Toller reveals that Alice, kept from the money left her by will, has fled with Mr. Fowler, whom she marries by special license in Southampton.
Key Quote
“Crime is common, logic is rare.”
— Sherlock Holmes
Key Quote
“Why should they give you one hundred and twenty pounds a year when they could have their pick for forty pounds?”
— Sherlock Holmes
Key Quote
“I should feel so much stronger if I felt that you are at the back of me.”
— Violet Hunter

Transcript

0:00 XII. Adventure number 12. The Adventure of the Copper Beaches.
0:31 To the man who loves art for its own sake, remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, it is frequently in its least important and
0:37 lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe,
0:43 Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our incidents which may have been trivial in themselves,
1:09 but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis,
1:17 which I have made my special province. And yet, said I, smiling, I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.
1:22 You have erred, perhaps, he observed, taking up a glowing cinder
1:27 with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his
1:31 clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood. You have erred, perhaps,
1:38 in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to
1:43 the task of placing upon record that severe
1:46 reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.
1:52 It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter, I remarked with some coldness,
1:58 for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong
2:02 factor in my friend's singular character.
2:12 "'No, it is not selfishness or conceit,' said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing,
2:18 a thing beyond myself. Crime is common, logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell you have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of
2:46 dun-colored houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the
2:51 heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal,
2:58 for the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning,
3:04 dipping continuously into the advertisement
3:06 columns of a succession of papers, until at last, having apparently given up his search,
3:12 he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
3:19 At the same time, he remarked after a pause, during which he had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism for out of those cases which youary sutherland the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip and the incident of the noble bachelor were all matters which are outside the pale of the law
3:56 but in avoiding the sensational i fear that you may have bordered on the trivial the end may so, I answered, but the methods I hold to have
4:07 been novel and of interest. Pshaw! my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public,
4:15 who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth, or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the
4:21 finer shades of analysis and deduction? But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you,
4:28 for the days of the great cases are past.
4:31 Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality.
4:37 As to my own little practice,
4:38 it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils
4:43 and giving advice to young ladies from boarding
4:45 schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks
4:52 my zero point, I fancy. Read it. He tossed a crumpled letter across to me. It was dated from
4:59 Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus. Dear Mr. Holmes,
5:09 I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess.
5:13 I shall call at half-past ten tomorrow, if I do not inconvenience you.
5:18 Yours faithfully, Violet Hunter.
5:22 Do you know the young lady? I asked.

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