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
52. The Adventure of the Dying Detective (December 1913, Last Bow)
Dr. John H. Watson—a medical man, and one who over many years has become familiar with Holmes’ extraordinary acting ability and his penchant for disguise—is purportedly fooled by Holmes’ artifice in The Adventure of the Dying Detective. Holmes is ostensibly wasting away from a rare disease unknown to Watson; Holmes refuses all help, and, when Watson goes to fetch a specialist, Holmes “tiger-springs” from the bed, locks the door, then “staggers” back to bed. Watson, apparently and incredibly, doesn’t suspect a thing. That longtime readers are expected to unquestioningly accept this state of affairs is at once a little insulting and more than a trifle absurd. Written in the year 1913, Holmes has already played a bibliophile, pretended to be Captain Basil, worked undercover in an opium den, acted as a drunken groom, taken falsely ill on numerous occasions, and, most substantively, faked his death. Readers have long since stopped trusting any of Holmes’ disguises and sham maladies, and Watson does know the detective too well to be fooled (particularly after Holmes leaps out of bed). Upon seeing a hopping Holmes, Watson’s professional and personal experience would have led him irrevocably to the conclusion that Sherlock was on a case, and that he was faking his illness. Still, in The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Watson sets aside all his critical thinking, blathers sentimentally, and acts with such blind idiocy as to render him unrecognizable from the competent doctor whose chronicles we have come to trust. In a series of stories in which Conan Doyle relies heavily on verisimilitude, this plot is poorly marketed snake oil that we cannot trust.
Furthermore, the premise that Holmes’ dying-detective-deception will be a successful indictment tactic is very much open to question. Indeed, our villain, one Culverton Smith, confesses to his crime, and Smith’s confession is overheard by Watson. However, one may reasonably wonder whether the British criminal justice system, in prosecuting the case, would not look askance at a confession whose only means of substantiation is via the great detective’s best friend and well-known chronicler. If I were Culverton Smith’s lawyer, I would be screaming about bias and entrapment from the rafters, and Smith (who is flush enough to afford a butler) must be presumed to have sufficient financial means to secure competent, aggressive, and wily legal counsel.
The typical Doyle story is one with the spice of originality and one or two twists that make the story delightful. Here we have a fairly straightforward plot premise: Holmes pretends to be dying and so greatly mistrusts Watson’s ability to dissemble that he must fool even him with the fakery. The purpose of the deception is to entice a confession out of Culverton Smith (who, it must be noted, was not obliged in any way to give one, and who could very easily have thwarted Holmes’ tenuous fasting plan by simply taking the poisoned box and leaving). If Holmes’ frail plan succeeds, then Holmes’ testimony will be supported by little more than the testimony of his nearest and dearest friend. Suffice it to say, Doyle has certainly reached more heavenly heights than the laid-low example produced by The Adventure of the Dying Detective.
