The Red-Headed League

The Red-Headed League is a Sherlock Holmes short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Jabez Wilson runs a small pawnbroking business and hears about the league from his assistant, who is willing to work for low wages partly because he has time on his hands. The arrangement pays well and requires nothing except attendance, and when it ends without warning Wilson brings the strange business to Baker Street. Holmes's interest is in the position of the shop, its neighbours and what could be done in a cellar over a period of months, and the story turns into a bank robbery rather than a tale of harmless eccentricity. Conan Doyle counted it among his own favourites, placing it second in his list of the twelve best Holmes stories.

It is one of the earliest of the short stories, and it established the shape that many of the later ones follow: a client, a curious arrangement, and a quiet crime underneath it all.