Wednesday, December 18, 2019

"He Caught a Glimpse of an Arm—a Long, Bare, Extraordinarily Crooked and Scraggy Arm—Hurling Something in His Direction"

"The Adventure of the Coffee-Pot."
By Anonymous.
First appearance: Answers, the Amalgamated Press, London, August 7, 1909.

Short story (13 pages as a PDF).
Online at Roy Glashan's Library (RGL; HERE; HTML).

     "They was like brothers."

A negligently flung flying missile fails to rattle the brains of one of England's finest rivals of Sherlock Holmes . . .

The places: Richmond, Chelsea, the South Kensington Museum.
The time: The present.
The characters:

~ Mr. Fordham Baxter, deceased:
  "A certain element of mystery is, however, not absent from the case; for, despite the doctor's assurance that the cause of death was snake-venom, no mark of a bite could 
be found on the dead man's body."
~ Miss Sterling:
  ". . . a nicer young lady never breathed . . ."
~ Sexton Blake:

  ". . . spent half an hour in gathering up, with infinite care, the scattered grains of sodden coffee-dregs that bespattered the bottom of the boat. He refrained with great scrupulous-
ness from touching them with his hands, but gathered them up on the point of his knife, 
and placed them labouriously in an envelope, which he bestowed in a pocket-book."

~ The police inspector:
  "You seem to have had an accident, Mr. Blake."
~ "A grave-faced butler":
  ". . . my hinstructions are to give hevery information."
~ Professor Dudley:
  "I 'eard 'im with my own ears tellin' Mr. Dudley so."


Resources:
- Several years ago in "Sexton Blake Redux" (HERE) we highlighted the Sexton Blake collection at Roy Glashan's Library (RGL), where background info links can be found. 
We're updating the IMDb link to (THIS).
- For more about Blake, see Mark Hodder's The Sexton Blake Resource (HERE; replaces Blakiana links in previous posting).

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