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.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories
54. The Adventure of the Creeping Man (March 1923, Case-Book).
I believe that The Creeping Man needs to be seated properly in historical context. Published in 1923, the story concerns a professor who takes an elixir in hopes that he will become young again. The serum is imperfect because it is derived from the blood of a langur, a kind of monkey, and the drink’s only real effect is that it transforms the professor into a unique sort of low primate for the serum’s life’s short duration. In The Creeping Man, Holmes says, “The real source (of evil) lies, of course, in that untimely love affair which gave our impetuous professor the idea that he could only gain his wish by turning himself into a younger man. When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it.”
The Creeping Man was published around the same time as stories with similar motifs: H.P. Lovecraft’s works, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, and Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy. In addition to these shorter stories, such novels and novellas as The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells in 1896, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne in 1864, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson in 1886, made for a place in literature where scientific experimentation, the question of nature vs nurture, and investigations into anthropology were popular. After all, it was only in 1859 that Darwin’s Origin of the Species was first published, and the public began reckoning with evolution. Well known as a spiritualist, it is not surprising that Doyle (author of such works as The Lost World, a novel where pre-historic animals survive in the unexplored jungles of South America) would pen an occult story like The Creeping Man.
Still, The Creeping Man doesn’t work, and, in my opinion, the main problems with The Creeping Man are twofold. In the first place, the story’s solution is too supernatural for a Holmes story. Holmes is, first and foremost, a naturalist and logician (as evidenced by his unwillingness to attribute the glowing hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles to supernatural origins), so stories such as The Creeping Man—and others found in The Case-Book—suffer most when Doyle allows his fascination with the paranormal to seep into their solutions. In the second place, and perhaps more damningly, The Creeping Man is just poorly written. For example, when Watson describes himself in relation to Sherlock, he writes, “But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence.” These sentences read more like those from a first draft than a work meriting high literary adulation, as many of Doyle’s other stories do, and such prose is enough to further restrain The Creeping Man.
