The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
A governess takes a strange post requiring her to cut her hair and sit by a window. Holmes senses menace behind the country-house charm of the Copper Beeches.
Violet Hunter is the best client Doyle ever wrote: she takes a job that frightens her because the money is good, reports back like a professional, and is braver than the men around her. The story is mostly her account of a house where she is asked to cut her hair, wear a particular blue dress and sit in a window laughing at a joke she has not been told. Hearing it in her own voice rather than relayed through Watson changes where the fear sits — the details are unsettling because she notices they are unsettling and takes the post anyway.
The voices that carry it
Jephro Rucastle is all warmth and jollity on the surface, which is far more effective than menace and is how the part is cast: pleasant, loud, and wrong.
Chapter one plays without an account. Start listening to The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
Voice cast
6 characters plus the narrator, each with their own voice. All the voices of The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
- Sherlock Holmes — The world's only consulting detective. Razor-sharp analytical mind, cold precision, theatrical wit. Alternates between lethargy and explosive energy. Speaks in crisp, certain pronouncements.
- Dr. Watson — Holmes's loyal friend and biographer. A former army surgeon, warm, practical, earnest. Speaks with admiration for Holmes and genuine concern for clients.
- Violet Hunter — The resourceful governess-client in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. Self-possessed, intelligent, and unafraid to investigate a suspicious household.
- Jephro Rucastle — The jovial, large, and deeply sinister employer in The Copper Beeches. Presents a laughing, hospitable exterior that masks a controlling and dangerous nature.
- Miss Stoper — Superintendent of the governess employment agency, brisk and a little sharp when Violet Hunter initially refuses a post.
- Mrs. Toller — The Rucastles' housekeeper, secretly sympathetic to Violet Hunter and Alice Rucastle, who gives a lengthy confession near the story's climax.
Chapters
- Chapter XII: The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
About this recording
Is The Copper Beeches a scary story?
It is one of the more unsettling Holmes cases without being horror: a young woman alone in a country house being asked to do things she does not understand. The threat stays implied until very near the end.
Who is the main character?
Violet Hunter does most of the talking and most of the investigating. Holmes arrives late and confirms what she has already worked out, which is unusual in the canon.