The Red Headed League Essay

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In Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Red-headed League", we follow Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they unravel a new case. One of the main themes in almost any Sherlock Holmes story is the power of logic, which he uses in untraditional ways to solve tough cases. Sherlock Holmes is a detective that uses pure logic in observing the people he is investigating as well as the people who hire him to do the investigation. In this story, Watson comes into the story after Sherlock has already met briefly with the client. However, Watson is really only able to see the common details of their client, but Sherlock sees the fine details. Watson sees "an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow." But Sherlock sees a lot more: “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I …show more content…

He is able to solve very hard cases that many have not been able to solve. For example, in the story, Holmes and Watson travel to their client WIlson's shop to meet his assistant. Watson assumes they are going to talk to the man and ask him questions about the crime they are investgating, but Sherlock walks around the outside of the front of the shop, looks closely at the sign, taps his cane vigorously a few times, then knocked on the door of the shop. Instead of introducing himslef and questioning the man, Holmes only asks him which direction he would take to walk to The Strand, then the man closes the door. Yet in those few moments, he was able to take in a great amount of detail, mainly observing the man had dirty knees. Then Holmes loos around at businesses on the backside of Wilson's shop, and it able to figure out that they are digging a tunnel to the bank

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