Weekly Short Story: The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

For many years I have been an ardent fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed Sherlock Holmes mystery stories.  At first I began by watching all of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies, made in the 1930s and 40s...they often diverged widely from the stories, especially those World War II movies where they're riding around in cars and protecting a scientist who designed a bombsight for a bomber plane: Doyle's stories were set in the late nineteenth century!  But the flicks did capture the spirit of super-sleuth Holmes even if they did portray his sidekick Dr. Watson as a bit of a silly stumblebum.  Since then I've read all of the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories and quickly downloaded them onto my Kindle after discovering that they were free, being in the public domain.  Of course, you can read any of them from a variety of sources on the Internet, including the story I'm discussing today: The Red-Headed League, from the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...

In The Red-Headed League, Holmes has a new client: Jabez Wilson, a red-headed pawnbroker who has answered an ad in the paper.  It seems that a wealthy-but-eccentric red-headed gentleman has passed on and willed that an organization...hence the title of this story...be set up as a benefactor to those who, like him, have red hair.  A good-paying part-time job is available and Mr. Wilson seeks it along with many others in town of his hue...he gets hired and goes off to work, handing off his business during those hours to his newly-hired assistant.  The "work" consists of sitting in a room for four hours and copying the Encyclopedia Britannica by hand, with the stipulation that he cannot for any reason leave the room until those four hours are up.  An easy, but very strange job indeed.  He continues doing this for weeks until one day he reports to work and discovers that the room is locked and a notice attached: the Red-Headed League is dissolved!

Holmes and Watson set off to investigate, and of course the wily detective figures it all out, knowing just the right questions to ask.  And that's really what it's all about: learning how to ask the right questions...questions the answers for which will lead to ultimate enlightenment.  So now I'd like to pose something more general: are we asking the right questions to ourselves and others in our own lives? In order to do this, though, we need to know, like Sherlock Holmes, what our goals are in the end...and I'm afraid that too many of us haven't a "clue"...

It was refreshing to reread one of the good old Sherlock Holmes stories...I'll have to do it again soon...