You look at THESE SCATTERED HOUSES, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there . . . Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in [the city of] Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY which makes the danger.”
June 12, 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” was published in the New York Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Herald, the Pittsburgh Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Detroit News. (Thirty-eight international publications followed The Strand on 11 June.)
This Sherlock Holmes story has influenced me as an author and haunted me as a woman probably the most of all his sixty stories. I have titled two of my own volumes, THESE SCATTERED HOUSES and FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY, after one speech uttered by Sherlock Holmes. Here, through Holmes, Doyle expressed his thoughts about the evil that could lurk in isolated homesteads. The “scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow” were most likely sounds from his childhood.
As a woman writer, the plight of both Miss Alice Rucastle and Miss Violet Hunter interested me immensely. One was a damsel locked in a tower vulnerable to her villainous father’s greed, and the other a woman forced by poverty and debt to accept Mr Rucastle’s offer of a job that Mr Sherlock Holmes considered dangerous. Miss Hunter undertook this position as she faced with all 19th-Century women, extremely limited choices for education or work.
A wonderfully gothic mystery astutely envisioned by Conan Doyle. Where we witness an agitated Sherlock Holmes softened by the plight of an exceptional woman. He meets her following my other favorite Holmes speech where he expresses his chagrin over how his practice is degenerating into giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.
If you are interested in reading Doyle’s story, I recommend my favorite site on the web, The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia. https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/search-fictions/index.php?n=COPP&highlight=art
If you prefer a filmed version, there is only one, the Granada Sherlock Holmes Series with Jeremy Brett. His performance is exceptional in this story, no one else expressed Conan Doyle’s words and intent as Mr Brett did so here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnwOdEu4A6Q&list=PLF43-tHWPFEin51c98lYrtD_CAieYIQy3&index=7
And my Books are found here:
Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.com/~/e/B07XGFV8LQ
Author’s Blog: https://featuresofinterest.com/
MX Author’s Page: https://bit.ly/gretchenaltabef
Gretchen Altabef is an award-winning author of new Sherlock Holmes mysteries, sci-fi, historical novels, and stories. Her books brim with imagination and a news reporter’s excitement for the true history of the day. THESE SCATTERED HOUSES brings Holmes to New York during his ‘great hiatus’. REMARKABLE POWER OF STIMULUS follows in London. During the investigation of a gruesome murder, Holmes is given a second chance with The Woman. The trilogy continues with FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY, where Holmes returns to New York to solve a murder in Thomas Edison’s moving picture studio, and Mrs Irene Adler-Holmes takes on Broadway. THE KEYS OF DEATH is a genesis story of the world’s most famous address, 221B Baker Street, and its landlady, Mrs Hudson.
Features of Interest 