The Boscombe Valley Mystery — Stories
Good Fit
- Readers who want to read Sherlock Holmes in Azerbaijani
- Lovers of short classic detective stories that finish in one sitting
- Teenagers — a good introduction to Holmes's world
- Fans of «The Hound of the Baskervilles» and «The Sign of the Four»
Not a Fit
- Readers sensitive to translation accuracy — the adaptation was made from Turkish and the meaning is distorted in places
- Anyone expecting a modern, fast-paced thriller
- Those who have already read the Holmes stories in full in another language — there is no new material
The story opens with a domestic scene: Watson, now married, receives a telegram from Holmes over breakfast, and his wife sends him off saying he has been looking pale and the change will do him good. On the train Holmes summarises the case: in the Boscombe Valley in Herefordshire, Charles McCarthy, tenant of John Turner — a landowner who made his fortune in Australia — has been killed by a heavy blow to the head beside a pool. A gamekeeper saw his son following him with a gun, and a fourteen-year-old girl saw father and son in a violent quarrel.
Doyle's mastery lies in demonstrating Holmes's famous principle: 'There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.' Watson and the inspector focus on the details against the son — his father's cry of 'Cooee' although he did not know his son was back, the son's refusal to explain the quarrel, the dying man's word 'arat' — while Holmes reads the same details in the son's favour. His deduction on the train, working out from Watson's shaving which side of his bedroom the window is on, is a small but delicious display.
The second half is a classic Holmes set-piece: in Ross we meet Lestrade, then the violet-eyed Alice Turner, who swears James is innocent and has known him since childhood. Holmes's prison visit reveals the young man's secret: he secretly married a barmaid in Bristol, which is why he resisted his father's pressure to marry Alice. At the pool Holmes, in Watson's words, reads the tracks in the grass and mud 'like a hound on the scent', and finds cigar ash and a stub at the foot of a tree.
Holmes's description of the killer — 'a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket' — is one of Doyle's most famous deduction lists. The finest moment is the unravelling of 'arat': when Holmes lifts his hand from a map of the colony of Victoria, the full word — 'Ballarat' — appears. Every detail has a logical explanation: the limp comes from the depth of the footprints, left-handedness from a blow struck from behind on the left side of the skull.
What lifts the story above a mere puzzle is its ending: the killer is dying, and Holmes does not hand him to the police but takes a written confession solely to save James. This gap between 'law' and 'justice', and Holmes's compassionate stance above the law, is a motif Doyle returns to in later stories. Holmes's closing reflection on the games fate plays with 'poor, helpless worms' gives the story a melancholy note.
The translation reads smoothly overall, but its origin in a Turkish edition shows, and in a few places the meaning is distorted. For example, Richard Baxter's famous line that Holmes recalls at the end — 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes' — becomes something like 'Sherlock Holmes acts only on God's behalf', and the fact that the barmaid already had a husband in the Bermuda Dockyard turns into an unclear sentence. There are small typos too. Even so, the story reads comfortably in Azerbaijani and is a fine doorway into Holmes's world.
- First-person narration by Watson
- Memorable reveals such as the deduction list and the 'Ballarat' map
- A closing dilemma between law and conscience
- A collection of six self-contained stories, each readable in one sitting
Holmes's second novel, built around an Indian treasure — reviewed on our site
Another Holmes story from the same «Adventures» series — reviewed on our site
The killer is Alice's father, the wealthy landowner John Turner. As a young man in Australia he was a bushranger known as 'Black Jack of Ballarat' and, while robbing a gold convoy, spared the life of the wagon driver — McCarthy. Years later McCarthy recognised him in England and blackmailed him for twenty years: land, money, a house — he took everything, and finally wanted his son to marry Alice so as to gain Turner's entire fortune.
At the meeting by the pool Turner, smoking a cigar behind a tree, overheard the father–son quarrel; when he heard McCarthy speak of his daughter as if she were a woman of the streets, he struck him down from behind and, while fleeing, went back for the cloak he had dropped. Dying of diabetes, Turner signs his confession in Holmes's presence; Holmes promises to use it only if James is convicted. James is acquitted, Turner dies seven months later, and Watson hopes James and Alice will live happily, unaware of the dark cloud over their past.
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