The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle Summary: A short Christmas themed Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Audible.com gave away The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle as a Christmas gift to its members.  I believe it is still available whether you are a member or not. This is a classic Sherlock Homes story.  And it confirms why I am not a real fan of the great master of mystery.

Part of the problem of Sherlock Holmes is that he thinks he knows everything.  In the more modern incarnations like the new TV show Elementary, Sherlock is brilliant, but frequently wrong because he makes assumptions based on what he knows.  As the assumptions are informed by new evidence he makes new assumptions.

But in the original Arthur Conan Doyle version, Holmes is able to find a man and then solve a crime because he found a hat.  The best example of the cultural weakness of mysteries of this sort is that Holmes says he knows several things from looking at the hat.  One of them is that the owner must be intelligent  because the hat size is large.  This was a widely held, but mistaken belief.  (It was one of the reasons that women were thought to be less intelligent than men because women have smaller head circumference on average than men, about 1 inch).

It is not a bad story and there is a little nod to Christianity and the understanding of grace because it is a Christmas story.  It is not a bad way to spend 40 minutes of your time.  But I double I will be listening to longer Sherlock Holmes stories anytime soon.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle Free Link

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