Deceptive Appearances

The title of the story refers to the central deception which provides Holmes with his point of entry into the case. However, the deceptive appearance of the Red-Headed League, an apparently harmless piece of eccentricity masking a serious criminal endeavor, is one of several instances of this theme. Holmes himself presents a deceptive appearance at the concert when he appears to be a dreamy, mild, and harmless music-lover. Watson comments that this languid aspect presages “an evil time” for his opponents, since it precedes a relentless pursuit. Watson also remarks of Holmes that “those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals” due to his brilliant reasoning power. It is only when Holmes explains his processes of thought that what appears to be magic is revealed as logic.

The two criminals in the story both work under false names. In the case of Duncan Ross/William Morris, it is quite likely that both the names he uses are false. When he interviews Jabez Wilson, he pulls his hair violently to assure himself that it is genuine, an ironic gesture given that he is the one acting fraudulently. John Clay’s appearance when disguised as Vincent Spaulding is even more deceptive. The haughty, aristocratic master criminal presents himself as an obliging shop assistant, so eager to learn a trade and to be helpful that he is willing to work for half the usual wages. His apparent lack of interest in money is in direct contrast to the real motive for his actions.

The Attraction of the Bizarre

When he invites Watson to listen to Mr. Wilson’s story, Holmes notes that his friend shares his own “love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life.” At the end of the story, as he relapses into boredom again, Holmes points out that the ruse of the Red-Headed League was a strange way of achieving Clay and Ross’s simple objective, but it would be difficult to think of a better one. Jabez Wilson, Holmes, Watson, and the reader are all intrigued by the piling up of strange details, which serve as distractions from what is essentially a straightforward bank robbery.

Even the prosaic and solemn Mr. Wilson is carried away by the sheer oddity of the proceedings. His description of the scene that greeted him when he applied to the offices of the league is vibrant and even lyrical:

Fleet Street was choked with red-headed folk, and Pope’s Court looked like a coster’s orange barrow. I should not have thought there were so many in the whole country as were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of colour they were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-coloured tint.

Both scene and description are literally as well as figuratively colorful, with a poetic litany of colors and the vivid simile of the coster’s barrow. When Wilson enters the office, the bizarre nature of the interview is more comic than poetic. Ross pulls his hair and, when tears come to his eyes, remarks:

I perceive that all is as it should be. But we have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once by paint. I could tell you tales of cobbler’s wax which would disgust you with human nature.

The author has made his criminals creative artists and comedians in their own right. Their ruse attracted a plethora of red-headed men, forming a unique and curious composition in the streets of London and attracting both detective and reader with its oddity and beauty.

Genius and Mediocrity

Both Holmes and Watson remark on the mediocrity of Jabez Wilson, the pawnbroker. Watson describes him as “an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow,” while Holmes employs litotes in calling him “not over-bright.” He is an unlikely character to be involved either in the frivolous eccentricity which the Red-Headed League first appears to be or the sensational crime it covers. Peter Jones, the Scotland Yard detective, is an even more mediocre figure. Holmes says that he is brave and tenacious but “an absolute imbecile in his profession,” and Jones’s own comments seem to confirm this view. It is Jones who describes the brilliant master criminal, John Clay:

His brain is as cunning as his fingers, and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the man himself. He’ll crack a crib in Scotland one week, and be raising money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next. I’ve been on his track for years and have never set eyes on him yet.

Holmes himself has already said, with rather more precision, that he considers Clay “the fourth smartest man in London.” The first is presumably Holmes himself. The second and third are not named, but may well be other criminals, perhaps Professor James Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, characters who appear in other Holmes stories. In any case, Clay’s criminal genius comes closer to Holmes’s deductive brilliance than the mediocre minds of the virtuous, law-abiding characters in the story. This is why, having caught his quarry, Holmes is a bored and lonely figure at the end of the story. Even Watson, who is far more intelligent than Wilson or Jones, cannot understand his mind, which is capable of unraveling the plans of a criminal genius because their intellects are on similar levels.