🐎 Jefferson Hope
The American cabman who hunted two men across two continents for twenty years, offering each a choice of pills as judgement. Captured at 221B, he dies smiling, his work complete — the canon's first tragic avenger.
“You may consider me to be a murderer; but I hold that I am just as much an officer of justice.”
Twenty years of pursuit
Jefferson Hope hunted Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson from the Utah mountains across America and Europe for two decades, taking work wherever they fled and closing in whenever they rested. In London he drove a hansom cab — the one occupation that lets a man follow anyone, anywhere, unremarked. The canon's first villain is thus also its first demonstration of patient, methodical tradecraft.
Judgement by ordeal
Hope did not simply kill his men: he offered each a box of two pills, one harmless and one poison, and took the remaining pill himself — staking his own life on the justice of his cause. It is vengeance dressed as trial by ordeal, and it tells the reader everything about how completely he had fused his grief with providence. The word RACHE on the wall — 'revenge' in German — was his one theatrical flourish, planted to mislead.
The first sympathetic murderer
Captured at 221B by a pair of handcuffs and a half-dozen hands, Hope asks only to tell his story, and A Study in Scarlet gives its entire second half to it: the Mormon valley, the murdered father, the lost Lucy Ferrier. He dies of his aneurysm before trial, 'with a placid smile upon his face.' The canon would return again and again to this shape — the criminal whose crime is an old injustice collecting its debt — but never more starkly than the first time.