I have been watching The Copper Beeches, the Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series episode adaptation of The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. You can read the original story here. Which I have not read yet. But I remember watching the TV episode as a child and it had a lasting impression on me. Not so much the plot, but an observation Sherlock Holmes makes about English countryside. Here it is:''“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. 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.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”''
I usually read and watch crime fiction set in an urban environment. But this reminds me that evil dwells in the most pleasant environment.
Sherlock, as always, was right.
ReplyDelete"I hope that as you listen to this, you are among your loved ones for I believe that murder, like charity, begins at home. After all some of the most exquisite murders have been domestic. Performed with tenderness and originality and in simple homey places like the kitchen table or the bathtub."
ReplyDelete-Alfred Hitchcock