Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of His Last Bow, published in 1917. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

After “The Cardboard Box,” we jump eighteen years ahead to “The Red Circle.” Holmes starts right off by being insulting to a landlady, and goes on to mock the agony columns of the newspapers he reads (in what has suddenly become one of my favorite bits of Holmes ranting about something):

“Dear me!” said he, turning over the pages, “what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! […] ‘Every day my heart longs —‘ Bleat, Watson — unmitigated bleat!”

To clarify, the agony columns are not what we think of them today. Nowadays an agony column is an advice column, often given by an anonymous or pseudonymous person. However, the agony columns Holmes is talking about here were a collection of advertisements and personal messages. They were very much like a Victorian Craigslist, which certainly has had its share of bleating. I expect Holmes would find some nuggets of interest (and quite a lot to mock) from Craigslist or Facebook.

There’s also a longer quote that really sums up why Holmes takes some cases for little or no fee, explaining things through his scientific bent.

“Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?”
“What, indeed? It is art for art’s sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?”
“For my education, Holmes.”
“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There is neither money nor credit in it, and yet one would wish to tidy it up.”

As for other character, we see the last appearance of Gregson, and we learn that Watson is starting to develop Holmes’ biases in regards to the local police, claiming that they “may blunder in the matter of intelligence, but never in that of courage.” On the other hand, we find the only other reference to the Pinkertons in the canon here (aside from The Valley of Fear), and the only time that Holmes works directly with them. His respect for them over the local police, however, is striking. Is it because the founder, Allan Pinkerton, was Scottish?

Of more historical interest, though, are the Italian references in this story.  Aside from “The Six Napoleons,” this is the only other canonical story to really go into Italian culture in London of the time. First, the story claims that the fictional secret society mentioned (the titular “Red Circle”) is an offshoot of another group called the Carbonari. The Carbonari were a secret political society active in the early 1800s in southern Italy. They generally believed in Italian unification and some form of constitutional government, and had their own ritual gestures, ceremonies, and other trappings (likely inspired by or stolen from Freemasonry). The Carbonari were sometimes involved in violent uprising and assassination attempts in the early 19^th century, but they weren’t nearly as bloody as is implied in this story. So who were the “Red Circle”?

Most Sherlockian scholarship seems to believe that the “Carbonari” were actually a reference to the Camorra, a criminal organization based around Naples. A gross over-simplification is that the Camorra are to Naples what the Mafia are to Sicily. I tend to agree with this assessment, not only because the organization names are so similar, but because the original manuscript for the story contained a reference to the Black Hand that was crossed out and replaced with Red Circle, and both the Camorra and the Mafia were erroneously called “The Black Hand Society” in the American press of the time.¹

Like many of Doyle’s stories, this one falls more on the side of “adventure story” than “mystery,” but it’s still fun nonetheless.