The Golden Pince-Nez

Golden? Okay, so why is the pince-nez golden? Well, Holmes tells us that it’s because its owner is no slatternly type but a lady, though she turns out also to be a revolutionary, a Nihilist, another foreigner. The stories lately seem interested in foreigners. Of course, we don’t know that she and Professor Coram are foreign, Russians, till the very end. At first it seems we’re being all very British and academic, buried in the past. Holmes even begins the story by looking at a palimpsest from the fifteenth century …

A palimpsest? Something whose original peeps through from underneath, which could be a symbolic statement of what these stories are all about: finding the hidden, the secret that lurks underneath. And what is the secret here?

It is a very palimpsest of a story, isn’t…