First published in the August 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine

First published in a collection in 1892 in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

 

Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, Jabez Wilson, Duncan Ross

Case Date: 11th October 1890

 

Storyline:

With his pawnbroking business at a slack period, Jabez Wilson is doubly delighted to discover that he has been carrying about a considerable financial asset without knowing it. It would never have occurred to him that his head of fine red hair and a mere four hours a day of his time could be worth £4 a week, had Fate not sent him a new assistant, Vincent Spaulding, with a sharp eye for the classified advertisement columns. From a queue of red-heads which choked Fleet Street and included ‘straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay’, he is pleasantly surprised to be singled out as Mr. Duncan Ross’s choice.

The work is not very edifying: copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But the appointment is virtually a sinecure, an eccentric American millionaire’s way of expressing sympathy for fellow red-heads and doing a good turn to his old home town. So well, in fact, does it suit the pawnbroker that when it comes abruptly to an end he is moved to consult Sherlock Holmes, whose solution to this ‘three-pipe Problem’ is a nocturnal visit to the cellar of a London bank.