Plot
The great detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusted companion Dr. John Watson travel to New York City to investigate a recent threat made by Professor Moriarty.
During their investigation, Holmes and Watson are reunited with their old acquaintance Irene Adler, now a popular music-hall singer, who reveals that Moriarty has kidnapped her son. Moriarty has also left a note for Holmes informing him that he will be approached by the police soon for aid in a crime, and should he not refuse- Moriarty also informing him that he should provide no reason for his refusal- the boy will die.
Holmes is subsequently contacted by the NYPD regarding the recent apparent theft at the New York bank, with the entire vault of gold bars having vanished seemingly overnight. To protect the child, Holmes refuses the case, but he and Watson later manage to track down and rescue the boy, thus removing Moriarty's blackmail card.
Investigating the vaults, and quickly ruling as impossible the actual removal of many tonnes of gold via a narrow tunnel in the time available, Holmes swiftly determines what has taken place; based on the speed of the lift's descent, it should take them 45 seconds to reach the vaults, but they stopped after only 42 seconds. From this, Holmes deduces that Moriarty had an empty, duplicate vault built a few metres above the real one, subsequently planting wooden boards to stop the lift reaching the real vault. While everyone puzzled over how the bars were stolen from the false vault, Moriarty would actually be stealing them from the real one below. In a final confrontation in New York's underground, Moriarty appears to die.
The case is solved. As Holmes and Adler say their goodbyes, Adler comments that her son has a keen intellect and a certain knack for solving puzzles, implying that Holmes may be his father. The two nevertheless part ways with Adler giving Holmes a picture of her son to keep.
Read more about this topic: Sherlock Holmes In New York
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)