Stories / The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes · 1893
The Stockbroker's Clerk
A too-generous job offer keeps a clerk away from the office where his double is cracking the safe — the Red-Headed League's trick, refined.
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⚠️ Spoilers below. The analysis discusses the solution, including who did it and how it's found out.
Summary & analysis
Hall Pycroft, newly hired at a great brokerage, is intercepted by a stranger who offers triple salary at a Birmingham hardware company that seems to consist of one rented room — provided he never sends the brokerage his written acceptance.
Holmes rides to Birmingham as a fellow job-seeker and inventories the absurdities: the pointless copying work, the identical gold tooth on the 'brother' who hired him in London — one man playing two, and the only thing Pycroft possesses worth stealing is his absence.
The double's brother has spent the week at the brokerage as Hall Pycroft, learning the building to rob its securities; a newspaper tells the room the robbery failed and the imposter is taken — at which their employer quietly tries to hang himself. The scheme is the Red-Headed League inverted: remove the man, wear his name.
Deeper reading
A variation on a proven trick
The Stockbroker\'s Clerk openly reworks The Red-Headed League — a too-good job offer designed to move a man out of the way while a double works his crime — and Doyle knows it, letting Holmes recognise the shape quickly. The interest is in the neat inversion: here the goal is not to empty a room but to borrow an identity. It is competent, minor, and instructive about how the canon reuses its own machinery.
One tell, cleanly played
The whole imposture collapses on a single observed detail — the identical gold-filled tooth on two supposed brothers — a reminder that the method often needs only one incongruity honestly noticed. The story is a workmanlike demonstration rather than a classic, but a clean one.
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Techniques on display
Deduction & inference
Chaining evidence into conclusions on a living board.
In this story: One gold-stuffed tooth on two supposed brothers collapses the cast to a single actor — identity arithmetic from dentistry.
Disguise & misdirection
Seeing through appearances built to deceive.
Practise: 🚨 Lestrade's Lineup Practise: 👁️ The Science of Deduction
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.