Orange Alert

I recently wrote of the "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" that, more than other Sherlock Holmes stories, it had not aged well in the more than a century since it was written. Unfortunately, the next story suffers a similar problem.

"The Five Orange Pips" is a case where a young man comes desperately to Holmes after the death of his uncle and father. Both deaths were ruled accidental, but the threatening letters they received before their deaths -- branded with the initials "K.K.K." -- suggest something more sinister. And now the young man has received such a letter himself, and fears for his life.

Doyle certainly loved to craft his stories around people and ideas from foreign lands, things he assumed his British audience would not have wide knowledge of. I've just begun my journey through his complete Holmes writings, and he's already tackled Mormons, India, a pygmy, and more. I assume his aim in this was to make his mysteries more sensational and fantastical for his audience; any inaccuracies or exaggerations he introduced in his portrayal of these aspects were simply in the name of telling a better story.

In this short story, the young man recounts his uncle's history to Holmes, including the fact that he lived in America for a time, worked with the Confederates, and opposed efforts to end slavery. Thus the "mysterious" initials KKK aren't mysterious at all for a modern reader.

Doyle could not possibly have planned for the future here (even if he'd been inclined to; this early in his Holmes writing, he could not possibly have been thinking of any kind of legacy for himself or the character). I did some research of my own (my Google outpacing Holmes' Encyclopedia), and learned that the pro-segregation version of the Ku Klux Klan most widely known today is actually the third distinct incarnation of the group. The first was active in the decade right after the Civil War and, by the time Doyle was writing this story, was essentially no longer active. He thought he was writing about a defunct organization from a faraway country that none of his readers would know a thing about. Little did he know that the group would reemerge more hateful than ever in the next century, and that few of his readers (in the U.S. anyway) would not have heard of them.

So essentially, Doyle's big reveal is completely blown in this story. The motives and perpetrators of the crime here are known to the reader even before they're known to Holmes. This fact alone might not necessarily sink the story... but the resolution does.

I don't see a way to dance around this one without spoiling the ending, so here's your fair warning to skip this paragraph. This mystery ends with the perpetrators getting on a ship back to the United States before Holmes can apprehend them... and then with that ship sinking in the Atlantic by fluke. The culprit eludes Holmes' justice. Indeed, Holmes perhaps can never even be sure of his conclusions in the crime, because the perpetrators can never be apprehended to confess. It's an odd and unsatisfying ending, rendered odder still in the rapid way Doyle tells it. Holmes and Watson are practically mid-conversation, discussing their plans to apprehend the criminals in America, when Watson suddenly ends his narrative with a single paragraph explaining the sinking of the ship. Though he did warn at the opening of telling the story that it didn't have a conclusive outcome, the abruptness of the ending makes the whole thing feel like a TV show canceled after ending its season on a cliffhanger.

So ultimately, I'm afraid I must give "The Five Orange Pips" a failing mark. I'd call it no better than a D+, a truly disappointing Sherlock Holmes tale.