The Five Orange Pips
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In The Five Orange Pips, a young Sussex gentleman named John Openshaw tells the strange story of his uncle Elias Openshaw, who came back to England after living in the United States as a planter in Florida and serving as a colonel in the Confederate Army. His uncle begins receiving threatening letters inscribed KKK and including five orange pips. He is killed shortly thereafter. The job of unraveling this sordid transatlantic mystery falls to Holmes and his trusty companion Dr. Watson. The fifth of the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, this is also one of only two Sherlock Holmes short stories where Holmes' client dies after seeking his help.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a writer and physician most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Before becoming a writer, he attended the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician, and it was from his teacher, Joseph Bell, that he learned much of what would inspire Holmes's skills of deduction. He also wrote science fiction stories, historical novels, plays, romances, poetry, and nonfiction. After his son Kingsley died in the first World War, he became a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.
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