The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb is a particularly frustrating tale of Sherlock Holmes. It starts with great suspense and promise of intrigue, featuring a client that unfolds a most extraordinary and exciting tale... and then fizzles out with the most unsatisfying conclusion of any Holmes story I've yet read.
Watson is called upon by a young engineer who has had one of his thumbs severed. After tending to the wound, Watson brings the man to Holmes, where he then explains the night of adventure in which he lost his digit. Having been summoned to perform maintenance on some vast and mysterious machine, he was pursued by criminals for having seen too much, and barely escaped with his life -- though not before having his thumb severed by an axe. The peculiar way in which he was brought to the machine (and his loss of consciousness after his injury) has left him with no idea where these events all took place, so the mystery at issue here is where his adventure occured.
I find that the Sherlock Holmes tales sometimes suffer for the inevitable direction of their narrative. A client always comes to Holmes with a story to recount, and a full half of the story (or more) is taken up by the client relating that story second hand to the sleuth. It's a cardinal rule of storytelling not to talk about something when you can show it, for it often saps the narrative of suspense to be told of things in safe retrospect rather than urgent immediacy. The trouble is, a story of the great Sherlock Holmes could hardly have the detective not entering until the halfway point; so it is that these recounted narratives are a necessary evil.
Here, however, the device actually works to increase tension in the story rather than deflate it. We know that the engineer of the title has escaped with his life... but not unharmed. What we don't know is how he came to lose his thumb. And thus, his retelling of his adventure to Holmes is filled with nice suspense and tension, as we wait to come to the moment of his maiming. What's more, the particulars of his story are sufficiently thrilling to make you think the engineer lucky to have gotten off that lightly. Of all Holmes' clients I've read so far, Arthur Conan Doyle may have done the best with this one in crafting a compelling backstory.
The problem comes after that. Specifically, in that almost nothing comes after that. I didn't realize it as I was reading, but the story is actually three-quarters finished by the time the engineer concludes his tale. The story IS the story, and there's almost nothing in the way of chasing the mystery afterward. The one point to be deduced is where the events took place, and Holmes has a customarily easy time doing so.
Even more disappointing is the fact that he really didn't need to do so. Spoilers follow here in this paragraph, if you intend to read the story yourself.... but it turns out that in his flight from the estate, the engineer accidentally set fire to the building. By the time Holmes and Watson arrive on the scene, the place is a burning hulk -- a story that surely would have made news enough that Holmes need not have deduced a thing. The fire would have been read about, and the engineer would probably have learned the location of his misadventure in due course without Holmes' intervention. Worse still, though, Holmes doesn't actually apprehend the culprits. Having achieved little in finding the estate, Holmes then achieves nothing more, never catching up to or apprehending the criminals who attacked the engineer. Their scheme was thwarted by the fire (again, through no intervention by our hero), but no justice comes.
So I'm left with the conundrum of how to rate an intriguing wind-up with a hopelessly bungled ending. I suppose I'll just average it out to a C, and leave with this parting question: if a person is dangling from an upper story window, shouldn't it be his fingers and not his thumbs that are exposed?
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