The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
The curse is powerful because someone knows how to use it.
Sherlock Holmes
A detective who can read a life from a walking stick walks into a case staged to look beyond reason.
221B Baker Street
A visitor's forgotten walking stick turns a quiet breakfast room into the first puzzle to solve.
Watson risks embarrassment as Holmes tests whether his logic can match genius.
Read →Watson Reads the Walking Stick
“I think,” said I, following as far as I could the methods of my companion, “that Dr. Mortimer is a successful, elderly medical man, well-esteemed since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation.”
“Good!” said Holmes. “Excellent!”
“I think also that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.”
“Why so?”
“Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick-iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it.”
“Perfectly sound!” said Holmes.
Watson is doing Holmes's job for once, and doing it out loud. Holmes has handed him a stranger's walking stick and asked what he can read from it, and Watson, pleased with himself, builds a whole man from a worn tip and an engraved gift: a respected old country doctor who tramps between patients on foot. Holmes's short praise ("Good!", "Excellent!", "Perfectly sound!") sounds like a teacher rewarding a pupil, which should make us suspicious of how easily it comes.
The Curse Reaches Baker Street
A country doctor leaves behind a walking stick and a manuscript about a demon hound — and within days a baronet is dead in a yew alley, the tracks of a gigantic hound beside his body.
Dr. Mortimer’s Walking Stick
A visitor forgets his cane at Baker Street, and Holmes reads his whole life off it.
Dr. John Watson
A brave observer writes from the moor with courage enough to report what he cannot yet explain.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
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