by Arthur Conan Doyle
Classic mysteryNo. 1611 hrSherlock Holmes
A pawnbroker with flaming red hair answers a newspaper advertisement and finds himself hired by the mysterious Red-Headed League, paid four pounds a week to copy out the encyclopaedia under one absurd condition — that he never leave the office during working hours — until one morning a card on the door announces the League dissolved and no such society ever known to exist; when Jabez Wilson brings his ridiculous tale to 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes sees what his bewildered client cannot: behind the farce lies one of the most cunning crimes he has ever been asked to prevent, and the answer has been hiding beneath everyone's feet the whole time; ranked by Conan Doyle himself among his finest Holmes stories and a perfect showcase of the detective's method, where the most laughable clue conceals the most serious danger, first printed in The Strand Magazine in August 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
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