Stories / The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes · 1893
The Resident Patient
A doctor's benefactor is found hanged in a staged suicide; cigar ends and footprints count the executioners on the stair.
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⚠️ Spoilers below. The analysis discusses the solution, including who did it and how it's found out.
Summary & analysis
Dr Trevelyan's practice was bought for him by a stranger, Blessington, who lives above and takes three-quarters of the earnings; now the patron is found hanged in his room after days of terror over a burglary report — an inquest says suicide.
Holmes counts cigars and reads footprints on the stair: four men were in that room; the screw-marks and cigar ends give their wait its duration, and a fainting 'cataleptic' patient and his son resolve into a delegation that came twice.
Blessington was Sutton, informer of the Worthingdon bank gang; his old partners, out of prison, held a trial at his bedside and executed the sentence with a rope. The murderers are lost at sea before arrest — the canon again lets the ocean carry the verdict.
Deeper reading
A staged suicide, counted in cigars
The Resident Patient turns on Holmes reading a room: cigar-ends, footprints, and the physics of a hanging reveal that four men, not one, were present, and that the "suicide" was an execution. Doyle builds the solution from patient physical inventory, the unglamorous heart of the method. The frightened benefactor\'s secret — an informer\'s past — is the familiar buried crime surfacing.
Justice by shipwreck
As in The Five Orange Pips, the murderers escape human justice only to be lost at sea, the canon\'s recurring device for punishing those the law cannot reach. It leaves a faintly uneasy sense that Holmes\'s reconstruction, however brilliant, changed nothing about the outcome — detection as understanding rather than prevention.
Play this story
Free, built on this case's own facts — no sign-up, nothing to install.
The Hanging of Mr Blessington
A man found hanged in a locked house, with more theories than mourners. Clear them until judgment stands.
Play the game →The Resident Patient Deal
Blessington bought a doctor: house, brass plate, and three-quarters of the takings. Audit the arrangement.
Open the tool →Techniques on display
Observation
Reading occupation, history, and character from visible detail.
In this story: Cigar ends tell attendance and duration: holders, cut ends, bitten ends — three smokers plus the victim, and how long the 'suicide' deliberated.
Elimination
Striking out the impossible until the truth remains.
In this story: Suicide fails the physical audit (the ceiling hook's screws, the stair traffic); once hanging is staged, the question is only how many stagers, and the evidence counts them.
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.