Showing results by narrator "Jess Leander" in All Categories

The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter is a tense story from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Cambridge rugby star Godfrey Staunton, known as the "missing three-quarter," vanishes on the eve of a crucial match against Oxford, leaving his team in crisis. His friend and teammate Cyril Overton seeks Holmes's help. Holmes soon discovers that Staunton had secretly married a woman against the wishes of his wealthy and domineering uncle, Lord Mount-James, and that her sudden serious illness is the reason for his disappearance.

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of the most memorable and morally complex tales in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Charles Augustus Milverton is London's most notorious and repulsive blackmailer, who ruins lives by extorting money from the wealthy using stolen compromising letters. A desperate client hires Holmes to retrieve her letters before Milverton can ruin her upcoming marriage. Holmes and Watson go undercover and eventually burgle Milverton's heavily guarded villa at night in one of the few times Holmes deliberately breaks the law.

In The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, Inspector Lestrade consults Sherlock Holmes about a peculiar series of incidents—someone is smashing plaster busts of Napoleon across London. The first bust is destroyed in Morse Hudson's shop, and two more, previously sold to Dr. Barnicot, are also smashed after burglaries at his home and office. Holmes observes the pattern of the smashed busts and deduces that the destruction is not random but connected to a hidden object inside the busts.

The Adventure of the Three Students is a clever, university-set story from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. While staying in Cambridge, Holmes is consulted by Hilton Soames, a tutor whose rooms were broken into the night before a major Greek scholarship examination. The proof sheets of the exam paper had been partially copied, and three students living in the same building are the prime suspects: the athletic Gilchrist, the Indian student Daulat Ras, and the idle McLaren.

In The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist, a classic tale from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Violet Smith, a young music teacher, seeks Holmes’s help because a mysterious bearded man on a bicycle silently follows her every Saturday as she cycles from her remote employer’s house to the train station. She is working as a live-in governess for the wealthy Mr. Carruthers at Chiltern Grange, shortly after her uncle’s death in South Africa left her as his potential heir.

The Adventure of the Empty House is the story that marks Sherlock Holmes’s dramatic return to London after his presumed death at the Reichenbach Falls. Three years after the event, Holmes suddenly appears in Watson’s study disguised as an elderly bookseller, revealing he survived and spent the intervening years traveling. The two friends are soon drawn into the baffling murder of Ronald Adair, a young aristocrat who was shot in the head inside a locked room with no apparent motive or entry.

The Adventure of the Black Peter is a story from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Retired whaling captain Peter Carey—nicknamed “Black Peter” for his savage temper—is found brutally murdered, harpooned through the chest inside his locked garden shed one stormy night. His terrified family calls in Holmes after the police arrest an innocent young man (John Neligan) whose father had once been ruined by Carey. Holmes quickly realizes the murder is connected to a past crime at sea and sets a clever trap by advertising for a skilled harpooner.