The Five Orange Pips
Complete textA young man seeks Holmes's help after a sequence of ominous letters and deaths in his family. Each warning contains five orange pips, and the apparent triviality of the objects contrasts with the fear attached to them and the uncertainty of the threat.
Continue readingAbout The Five Orange Pips
Watson's retrospective narration emphasizes the limits as well as the reach of investigation. Letters, dates, and movements across the sea connect a domestic inheritance to a wider history of intimidation. The story's tension comes from discovering the pattern quickly enough for knowledge to become protection, rather than remaining an explanation after the fact.
Reading focus
Trace a sinister correspondence whose small physical tokens connect family fear to a threat operating across distance and time.
This reading edition contains 7,330 words in 1 original section. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and ’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some, too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise…
Contents
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This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 1 section and 7,330 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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