The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1892

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“The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” Summary

In the summer of 1889, Watson receives an unusual patient. A train station worker brings a young man missing his thumb. The injury is recent, and the patient is distraught. After treating him, Watson takes the man to meet Holmes.

The patient, Victor Hatherley, is an orphan, living alone. By profession, he is a hydraulic engineer and is in the process of establishing a private practice. His first client in a long time is a strange man who needs a consultation on a hydraulic machine. The offered payment is extremely generous, but the conditions of the job are extremely peculiar. The young man is required to come at night to a house in the countryside in complete secrecy. The job is suspicious, but the pay is too good to pass, so the young man agrees and does as he is told.

Once at the house, he is taken to a huge press, the size of a room, which is malfunctioning. He is able to quickly discover the problem but realizes that the setup is different from what his client had told him about the machine’s purpose. At that point, his client attempts to kill him by locking him inside the press chamber and activating the machine, but a mysterious German woman, residing at the house, helps him escape through the window. While the engineer is hanging from the ledge, the client cuts off the engineer’s thumb. The young man manages to escape and makes his way to London.

The young man, Holmes, Watson, and a police inspector make their way to the house where the machine is housed. However, the building is burning down and there is no trace of the people the engineer encountered the previous night. Most likely, they are forgers using the press to mint money.

“The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” Analysis

This is the only case that comes from Watson rather than being brought to Holmes by the victim. Through the doctor’s interaction with the young man, readers find out that Watson is a compassionate and competent doctor. This is also a somewhat unusual story as it receives no resolution, similar to Mary Sutherland’s case. Moreover, Holmes’s involvement is quite minimal as his largest contribution is identifying the house’s location. The detective solves the mystery but is unable to apprehend the criminals or exact justice in some other way.

This is also one of the more gruesome stories in the collection. Most other cases do not involve blood and direct physical altercations, and none deal with missing body parts. In this way, the story acquires a slightly sensationalist tone, but without crossing over to true horror. “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” presents one more secondary female character potentially acting as an accomplice to immoral and/or illegal activities. The German woman seems complicit as she stays with the criminals. However, she may have no choice but to follow along if she is married to one of the men. At the time, a married woman was firmly under her husband’s control. The German woman could be trapped in a marriage to a criminal with no legal recourse. Her efforts to save the engineer speak to her bravery and upstanding character.

The engineer himself is presented as a young, likable man. His desire to strike out on his own and earn money would resonate with many readers. The situation he finds himself in is also familiar: this is an early example of a scam. Consequently, there is a real-life lesson to be learned: if something is too good to be true, there may be some issue or problem in the background. This story is unusual both in its use of severed body parts and its departure from typical detective fiction. There is no real case as the engineer has already lost his thumb and no further danger awaits him. Holmes speculates the mysterious people are forgers, but he has no proof and has not witnessed the act of counterfeiting money. There are no wrongly accused suspects, either, and the police are a fringe presence. The story is thus more of a puzzle than a case.