The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle [short story]

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, narrated by Alan Cumming, is a fun romp and kept a smile plastered on my face throughout.

I didn’t read much Sherlock Holmes growing up – probably because I was scared out of my wits as a child watching Basil Rathbone in The Hounds of Baskerville (parents of yore were less vigilant about TV content for toddlers than today’s parents). Scary movies are even scarier in black and white and the distant howling of hounds against a gray foggy backdrop was truly terrifying! Because of this early horrific memory, I clearly must have missed out on a lot of fun because this story was an absolute hoot. I read the Purloined Letter earlier this year (because I read Proust’s Mysterious Correspondent before show more that). SH totally reminded me of Poe’s Dupin, but even better I think. The icing on the cake, however, was the narration by Alan Cumming.

Watson comes to visit his friend Holmes, who is preoccupied studying a hat. It transpires that Peterson, the commissionaire, bumped into a man who appeared to be arguing with two brutes accosting him. The man raised his walking stick to protect himself, broke a shop window and fled the scene, afraid of what appeared to be a policeman approaching. The man’s hat had flown off in one direction and the goose he was carrying fell in a different direction. Peterson tried to help by retrieving the items but the man, who was that much poorer at having lost both his hat and his goose, was nowhere to be found. Not knowing how to find the owner of the lost items, Peterson solicited Holmes’ advice. Holmes suggested that Peterson take home the goose for his Christmas dinner, since it would not keep and could be easily replaced, and he would try to find the owner to return the hat. While inspecting the goose, Holmes discovered and retrieved a large blue stone lodged in its gullet. To make a long story short, it turned out to be the most valuable diamond in the world, none other than (drum roll, please) the Blue Carbuncle, recently stolen from the Countess of Morcar’s hotel room. Although a reformed thief had already been arrested for the crime the diamond had never been found. Holmes proceeded to glean every bit of information you would never have guessed from that hat, then he advertised in all the next edition papers with a clue to the owner, who remarkably showed up on Holmes’ doorstep later in the day to retrieve his hat. The goose was, sadly, already cooked but the owner was pleased to accept a substitute goose for his dinner. Next the plan comes together, Holmes learned how the owner came upon the goose and traces his leads back to the culprit who had stolen the stone. Every part of this story is fun…what Holmes learns from the hat, how he develops his leads, dupes his foils into giving up information, and his eventual interrogation of the true thief, whose proverbial goose was cooked (okay okay, keep those raspberries to yourselves, please).

If you have Audible+ look for this. When I saw that Cumming was the narrator, I knew I was going to have fun.

If you don’t have audible+ you can enjoy this story on East of the Web
here or in the full collection (VII) of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, at Project Gutenberg here show less

This was a free audiobook from Audible for the holiday season, and the fact that Alan Cumming was the narrator is the only reason I downloaded it. I am not a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes canon, but I adore Alan Cumming and thought he would be an excellent test to see how deep my dislike of Holmes runs. Even with Mr. Cumming’s wonderful performance - always energetic and delightful - Sherlock Holmes is not for me. Everything others love about him – his curiosity, his bombast, his superiority complex - do nothing to make him a fascinating character for me, and I felt all three negative character attributes were on full display in this particular adventure. The mystery of the Blue Carbuncle is interesting if only because the strange show more events that oblige Holmes to get involved are so unusual and widely circumstantial. Because it takes less than an hour to listen to the entire mystery, it was not a complete waste of time, and Holmes’ fans will enjoy Mr. Cummings’ enthusiastic performance. For me, it was a good test that the Sherlock Holmes stories are ones I would do well to avoid. show less

I rarely stray into fiction, but this yuletide gift from Aubible makes me think tales of Sherlock Holmes may have something to offer me. I thoroughly enjoyed Holmes' exagerrated but supported hyper-deduction and Watson, playing banana to the great detective. Still, I couldn't get the picture of Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes out of my head!

At Christmastime, Sherlock Holmes is tasked with returning a lost goose to its rightful owner, whose identity Holmes deduces from the hat he lost with the goose. The case gains a new urgency when the goose is discovered to hold a valuable secret. This is one of the more familiar Holmes stories since it’s often included in anthologies of Christmas mysteries. It’s a good entry point to the Holmes canon. Holmes gives a magical performance as he extracts a man from his hat!

This is Conan Doyle's Christmas Sherlock Holmes story, about a lost jewel concealed within the crop of a Christmas goose. It's a good story that manages to combine Christmas humour with a serious backdrop of a man wrongly accused with the theft of the jewel. Not one of Conan Doyle's very best, but always comes up well.

A very entertaining mystery short story from the Sherlock Holmes short stories collection. The plot is quite simple and intelligent: Watson visits his friend Holmes at Christmas time and finds him contemplating a battered old hat, brought to him by the commissionaire Peterson after the hat and a Christmas goose had been dropped by a man in a scuffle with some street ruffians. Peterson takes the goose home to eat, but later returns to Holmes with a blue carbuncle his wife had found in the bird's crop (throat). Holmes makes some interesting deductions concerning the owner of the hat from simple observations of its condition, conclusions amply confirmed when an advertisement for the owner produces the man himself: Henry Baker.
Holmes cannot show more resist such an intriguing mystery, and he and Watson set out across the city to determine exactly how the jewel, stolen from the Countess of Morcar during her stay at a hotel, wound up in a goose's crop. The man who dropped the goose, Mr. Henry Baker, comes to reclaim his hat in response to Holmes' advertisement. Holmes drops hints about how he saved the "innards" of the goose, but Baker fails to respond to them, simply saying that he is afraid goose remains are not much use. He does, however, give Holmes valuable information, eventually leading him to the conclusive stage of his investigation, at Covent Garden. Holmes offers a fresh goose to Henry Baker, who responds with gladness and departs, whereupon Holmes tells Watson that Baker is eliminated from the suspect list as he obviously knows nothing about the carbuncle. At Covent Garden, a salesman named Breckinridge gets angry with Holmes, complaining about all the people who have pestered him about geese sold recently to the landlord of the Alpha Inn. Clearly, someone else knows that the carbuncle was in a goose and is looking for the bird.
Holmes expects that he will have to visit the goose supplier in Brixton, but it proves unnecessary: the other "pesterer" that the salesman mentioned shows up right then, a cringing little man named James Ryder whom Holmes prevails upon to tell the whole sordid story, by first mentioning that Ryder is probably looking for a goose with a black bar on its tail, a remarkable bird that "[laid] an egg after it was dead". Of course, Holmes has already deduced most of it.
Ryder, believing he was being pursued for the theft, fed the carbuncle to a goose being bred by his sister Maggie Oakshott. He was to have had that goose as a gift, but lost track of which one it was.
When Ryder cut open the goose and found no gem, he went back to his sister, who had provided the Alpha Inn geese, and asked if there was more than one goose with a black bar on its tail. She said there were two, but he was too late: she had sold it to Breckinridge at Covent Garden. Breckinridge had already sold the geese to the Alpha Inn, and the other goose with a black bar on its tail had found its way to Henry Baker as his Christmas fowl. Ryder and his accomplice — the countess's maid, Catherine Cusack — contrived to frame John Horner, a plumber who worked at the same hotel as Ryder and had previously been imprisoned for robbery, for the crime.
Holmes, however, does not take the standard action against the man, it being Christmas, concluding that arresting the clearly anguished Ryder will only make him into a more hardened criminal later. Ryder flees to the continent and Horner will be freed as the case against him will collapse without Ryder's perjured testimony. Holmes remarks that he is not retained by the police to remedy their deficiencies.
I recommend this book to all readers that love a good mystery story, mainly those who enjoy Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. show less

This is a short Sherlock Holmes Christmas mystery involving a Christmas goose and a missing gem. Holmes's classic deductive reasonings are demonstrated and there is a nice holiday message. Alan Cummings as the narrator was excellent. A fun listen and a nice free Christmas gift from Audible.