The Red Circle
It's an exciting story, this Adventure of the Red Circle. I have to admit I love the dark-and-light aspects of it: the flashing candle business, the lightning-fast glimpse of Emilia's face in the mirror, the darkened room where the detective's lantern casts a pool of light onto a pool of blood. If you're into gothic horror, this is the Sherlock Holmes story for you. Maybe the only other story to match it would be The Hound of the Baskervilles – but that's not a fair comparison. Hound spreads its sinister blackness over a whole novella; Red Circle takes us into the same depths in a two-chapter short story.
There are, as Holmes would say, many other points of interest. Almost as soon as we begin reading we encounter one of the most-quoted lines of the Canon: "Holmes was accessible upon the side of flattery." Less-often-cited is the completion of the sentence: "... and, to do him justice, upon the side of kindliness."
But almost immediately we then find another quote – sort of. After asking if he might smoke, Holmes snaps "Watson – the matches!" If you've ever heard anyone say "Watson – the needle!" you have to be reminded of it here. This must be the inspiration for the "needle" business, which persists in many people's memories as being an authentic quote. Rather like "Elementary, my dear Watson."
Note that the cigarette-end, by the way, was apparently not smoked by Gennaro, but by Emilia! I can't think of any other Canonical reference to a woman smoking a cigarette. Can anyone enlighten me with an exception?
As the first half of the story draws to a close we encounter two issues that have plagued Sherlockian scholars for decades. One is Holmes's remark "journey's end in lover's meeting," made when seeing Gregson is on the case. Can you remember the other occasion on which Holmes quotes this line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night? Many people feel that Twelfth Night (January 6th) must be Holmes' birthday because he refers to the play twice in the Canon – and here in Red Circle we hear the second one. (The other, in case you don't remember, is The Empty House.) But isn't that logic more than a bit tenuous?
The second point is this business about using a candle to spell out messages in Julian cypher. Watson describes Gennaro's message as coming in flashes – but when Holmes imitates it he passes the candle back and forth in front of the window. Try to spell out words this way sometime when you have nothing better to do. Gennaro spells the word "Attenta," which has three "t"s -- twenty flashes each. This means he moves the candle back and forth sixty times just to spell those three letters! And he spells the whole word out three times! That's one hundred and eighty passes of the candle. If I'd been Emilia I would've gone across the street and administered a "dope slap" before he got to his real message -- which, you'll notice, he never does. What an idiot.