In Sherlock Holmes’s “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” the missing racehorse is named Silver Blaze.
Silver Blaze is a celebrated racehorse owned by Colonel Ross. The animal disappears from its stable shortly before the Wessex Cup, while its trainer, John Straker, is found dead. Holmes travels to King’s Pyland to investigate both the murder and the horse’s disappearance.
The story is famous for Holmes’s observation about “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The dog’s silence becomes meaningful because it suggests that the intruder was familiar to it. Holmes also identifies the horse by following clues that initially seem to point toward an obvious outside culprit.
The story was first published in 1892 and later collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. “Silver Blaze” is sometimes confused with the gemstone called the Blue Carbuncle, but the two titles concern entirely different cases.