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
49. The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (February-March 1925, Case-Book)
A ho-hum story in The Case-Book. Strong in spots, but a tendency toward stereotyping and hasty prose ultimately undermines The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. This reader feels that the prose’s troubles occur mainly when—in 1925, when this story was published—Doyle recasts his character motifs into a mold from the 1890s, and the result is that the characters in The Illustrious Client become play-acting caricatures of people, rather than appearing to be genuine. The typecasting is so persistent that The Illustrious Client’s characters lose the whiff of authenticity. Here Doyle presents us with the sneering, aristocratic villain and the piteous, misguided maiden, and he writes of them in terms so facile and cliché that his characterizations create (rather than complex individuals) inferior imitations of men and women. Instead of floating the story, the characterizations scuttle it.
That said, there are strengths in The Illustrious Client. It introduces us to the “scorbutic” Shinwell Johnson, a denizen of the underworld, through whose seamy channels he collects scraps of information for Holmes. Johnson, like Toby the dog and Langdale Pike, has potential. Imagine how different The Case-Book might have been if a character like Johnson had been used in one or two other stories in the collection, and if that character were more complexly textured. We might have found someone who transcended to the status of a Mycroft Holmes. I would have been fascinated to read a Case-Book adventure about Holmes and Johnson, artfully disguised and deep undercover, nearing the discovery of a villain’s secret in some sordid London lair. Instead, we have flatness: Baron Adelbert Gruner, a character who is a sort of shallow precursor to a Bond villain, a precursor who inhabits a glassy plot that is told in trite prose.
