The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
1893
The most disturbing package in Sherlock Holmes's career arrives at a quiet house in Croydon: a cardboard box filled with coarse salt and two recently severed human ears, obviously from two different people. The recipient, Miss Susan Cushing, a fifty-year-old spinster, has received this horror anonymously from Belfast. Inspector Lestrade, stumped, calls for Holmes. What follows is one of Holmes's most extraordinary deductions. There is no corpse, only these grotesque fragments and the faint trail of clues. Through careful observation and relentless logic, he reconstructs a tragedy hidden behind the respectable facade of an ordinary household: a steward named Jim Browner, his faithless wife, and her lover. The ears tell a story of jealousy pushed past all reason, of domestic passion turned to slaughter. This story chills because it exposes the violence that lives quietly behind closed doors. It is for readers who want Holmes at his most brilliant, peeling back the dark layers of human nature until only terrible truth remains.
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“What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.””
— Arthur Conan Doyle
“I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with this case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.””
— Arthur Conan Doyle
“Holmes had sent on a wire, so that Lestrade, as wiry, as dapper and as ferret-like as ever, was waiting for us at the station.””
— Arthur Conan Doyle
“But I have in my hands here a little problem which may prove to be more difficult of solution than my small essay in thought reading,””
— Arthur Conan Doyle
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Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-adventure-of-the-cardboard-box-4de1de40-87b1-4e57-a1d5-19e31d6625c4.Doyle, A. C. (1893). The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-adventure-of-the-cardboard-box-4de1de40-87b1-4e57-a1d5-19e31d6625c4Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-adventure-of-the-cardboard-box-4de1de40-87b1-4e57-a1d5-19e31d6625c4.
