Stories / The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes · 1891
The Five Orange Pips
Envelopes of orange pips precede deaths in the Openshaw family; Holmes traces the K.K.K. to a ship's sailing dates — chronology as a weapon.
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⚠️ Spoilers below. The analysis discusses the solution, including who did it and how it's found out.
Summary & analysis
On a storm-lashed night John Openshaw brings a family curse with paperwork: his uncle, then his father, each received five orange pips and the letters K.K.K. — and each died within days, verdicts reading accident.
Holmes works from an armchair with an encyclopaedia and Lloyd's registers: the postmarks (Pondicherry, Dundee, London) against the death dates give travel times; a sailing ship fits the intervals where steam does not, and one barque — the Lone Star — touched every port on cue.
Openshaw is killed the same night by 'accident' at a bridge, the canon's starkest client death. Holmes posts five pips to the Lone Star's captain and names the ship to the authorities — but the Atlantic executes the sentence first, and only a shattered sternpost is ever found.
Deeper reading
The darkest of the early tales
The Five Orange Pips is unusual and bleak: Holmes takes the case, reasons it correctly — and his client is murdered anyway, before anything can be done. The K.K.K. is a real terror society whose reach across the Atlantic is simply larger than one detective, and the Atlantic itself, not Holmes, delivers the final justice. It is the canon at its most sober about the limits of cleverness against organised evil.
Chronology as the whole method
The solution is almost pure timeline work — postmarks against death-dates, matched to a sailing ship\'s ports of call. It is one of the clearest demonstrations in the canon that laying events in strict temporal order can identify a culprit no other method would reach, the principle behind our Reichenbach Timeline tool.
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Techniques on display
Chronology
Laying events end to end until contradictions die.
In this story: The whole solution is chronology: letter postmark to death date, port to port — the interval lengths themselves identify the vessel as sail, then as one ship.
Deduction & inference
Chaining evidence into conclusions on a living board.
Practise what this story preaches: every technique above links to a tool or game built on the same method. The best way to learn the canon is to reason along with it.