Oaths and Secrets

Abstract

Organised criminality and violence appear frequently in the Holmes stories. A Study in Scarlet imagines Brigham Young’s nascent Mormon state as a tightly knit conspiratorial organisation, exerting uncompromising control over its membership even beyond its notional borders. An ideological conspiracy of a very different kind lies behind the surreal menace of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, in which the Ku Klux Klan enforces its organisational rules through fear-inducing symbols, followed by swift and merciless punishment. The clues in this story reveal the organisation’s global reach: at their home in Horsham, the Openshaws receive letters from the Klan postmarked Pondicherry, Dundee and East London; Holmes discovers that the murderers of John Openshaw are led by the captain of the barque Lone Star, registered in Savannah, Georgia. The Sicilian Mafi a is behind the theft of the Borgia Pearl in ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ (1904), and ‘The Red Circle’ features another Italian crime syndicate.