I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
We’ll start with the book’s preface!
Wherever Fact May Lead Me
Preface
One might think that—with the state of politics, war, and culture—society has enough conflict to divide itself upon, and that nothing contentious should additionally be introduced. One would be right in the first, yet wrong in the second. For the Sherlock Holmes stories (having been ranked many times before) nevertheless stand in ever-ready want of re-ranking, an act which obliges some contention. That no one can agree upon the best and the worst of the Holmes stories testifies not only to the diverse tastes of Conan Doyle’s readership, but also to the high number of quality tales from which to choose.
Now, having read—time and again, over the course of many years—the Sherlock Holmes stories, I feel capable of ranking them (and, indeed, ‘tiering’ them) with a view to little more than occupying my own time for my own pleasure. More likely than not, my rankings reflect the priority with which I would choose to read the stories. And I shall qualify my tier by saying that there’s nothing inherently more meaningful in my hierarchy as compared to any other reader’s.
My sole criterion: I valuate the Holmes stories based upon what I believe to be their aesthetic quality. While recognizing that “aesthetics” is a rather subjective valuation, I can only say that these are the stories that give me the greatest pleasure to read—a measuring system which is not, surely, easily explicable—but one which I hope gives readers a reference for when they judge these stories for themselves. That said, I believe that my aesthetic taste is most predisposed toward: original plots, expressive language, evocative settings, strong characterization, and emotional resonance.
While ranking these stories, I have added illustrations by Sidney Paget for those stories which he illustrated, and, for those stories which were illustrated by others, I have not included any illustrations. This is because the only Holmes illustrator whose work consistently resonates with me is Paget. The illustrations that I’ve chosen from his oeuvre are those that I find most memorable. Also while ranking the stories, I have stuck to the original fifty-six of the canon, and I have excluded the four novels, as well as the two so-called special occasion stories: The Field Bazaar and How Watson Learned the Trick. This is because the two special occasion stories are quite short and were never, in my opinion, intended by Doyle to be of the same quality as those canonical fifty-six. I have not delved into the novels because they do not fit the same class as a short story for a variety of reasons. Thanks to their length, novels have greater purchase for character and plot development; they have also, again thanks to their length, more opportunities to stall and go wrong; novels can digress in ways that stories cannot, and so on and so forth. Suffice it to say, this will be a ranking of the fifty-six stories of the canon with illustrations, where possible, by Paget.
I’d also like to note here that—while I understand that it is conventional for stories to receive quotes around their titles, and for longer works to be either underlined or italicized—I am going to italicize story and novel titles alike. This decision is being made out of courtesy for the reader. I am a writer who expresses himself most easily through long, syntactically complicated sentences. I feel that, once the various grammatical marks that I am fond of—parentheses, commas, semicolons, and M-dashes—are placed into my sentences, the application of additional quotation marks (particularly when I am already quoting a piece of text) will foul the reading experience. So while I shall quote text, and, thus, include quotation marks in my document, I shall reserve italics only for titles. And, since the only title in this document that recurs as both a short story title and as a collection title is The Last Bow, there is little chance for readers to conflate a short story’s title with a novel’s title. Bearing this context in mind, the decision of foregoing grammatical convention for the sake of grammatical lucidity seems to me to be the appropriate one here.
Key: (month and year of first publication, collection)
Collections
(Adventures) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892.
(Memoirs) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894.
(Return) The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905.
(Last Bow) His Last Bow, 1917.
(Case-Book) The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927.
I want to also state, here at the outset, that there are spoilers in my little commentaries. Now, without further ado.
