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
The Seventh Tier: The Hodge-Podge
For a variety of reasons, some stories in the Holmes canon were relegated to the seventh tier. For instance, in The Three Students, the story’s outcome is so low-stakes as to make it uninteresting; in Five Orange Pips, Holmes’ failure to be more forthcoming costs his client his life, an inexcusable blunder; and in A Case of Identity, it is impossible (for this reader) to believe that Miss Sutherland would not recognize her stepfather. It is likewise impossible, in that story, for this reader to believe that Holmes had no recourse other than to simply let Mr. Windibank go, particularly when he believes that Mr. Windibank will re-offend in continually worse ways. These seventh tier stories feature better writing than those of the eighth tier, but the seventh tier stories are frustrating, in one way or another, for me to read, and I cannot help but think that they could all have been improved if they’d been substantially revised.
46. The Adventure of the Three Students (June 1904, Return)
In The Three Students, Holmes is confronted with a sort of riddle: one of three students is alleged to have copied exam proofs on the day before a test is to be given, and Holmes must identify which student is the cheater. This is one of Holmes’ lowest-stakes mysteries, and it is also the one in which I find some of the greatest fallacies in Doyle’s plots and Holmes’ logic.
The professor states that he receives the proofs from the printer at about 3:00, and that he must read them over carefully. He does so till 4:30, when he goes to take tea, and he states that he is out of the room for “rather more than an hour.” In the time that he’s gone, he suspects a student of entering his office and of copying the proofs. However, anyone who has ever read proofs (or tried to copy a document’s text with a pencil) knows that it takes far longer to copy a text than to read it, even if the reading is done carefully and the copying haphazardly. If the text is so long that it takes an unrushed professor more than an hour and a half to read it, what hope could a passing student have of copying it? A cheater would likely not have tried to copy the text at all, such a task being far too time-consuming and risky. Instead, even the rawest, most unskilled cheater would have likely read through (or, at most, copied) a few lines, then pranced off to the university library to retrieve the passage.
Holmes arrives on scene, and he makes some permeable deductions that he relies upon as if they were watertight. He divines that the papers must first be observed in order to attract someone to enter, and he supposes that only a person with adequate height could see the papers. Holmes singles out Gilchrist (the tallest suspect) as the only student who would have been able to walk past the door, see inside the professor’s office, and notice the papers. Therefore, Gilchrist must be the culprit. But I feel that such height-related deductions are a stretch. There are simply too many other plausible scenarios in which another student might have seen the papers. It seems possible, for instance, that a student who walks to the professor’s office might knock upon the door, and, needing an answer to an urgent question about the exam, might turn the key (with the intention, once within, of returning the presumably forgotten key to the professor), then open the door, see inside, and discover the exam proofs lying on the professor’s desk. It is equally possible that any student taking the professor’s Greek exams could venture over to the professor’s office on the day before the big scholarship test. So, although the three suspected students in the story are “in the habit of using the stair and passing the professor’s door” (so, therefore, they are our only suspects), it seems very possible that, because the test is an important one, other students might break from routine to visit the professor.
Finally, it is stated that the exam cannot be postponed without causing “hideous scandal.” This I find hard to believe. While I have no evidence to back my assertion, it is my belief that, for as long as exams have been given, exams have been postponed. Student complaints, unprepared proctors, unexpected location changes, administrative failures, precipitate weather, and all other sorts of problems can and do crop up. Accordingly, a postponed exam seems unlikely to cause hideous scandal. In the event that a professor finds postponement necessary, the students can be informed that there was an issue (without specifying the nature of the issue), a new exam date can be set, and the students—though grumbling—will have a few extra days to study while new proofs are set by the printer. Such an outcome (rather than hideous scandal) would likely be the result of this unhappy matter. So though there is the postulation of a handsome little riddle, for the most part I feel that we are given a lesson on dubious plotting in The Adventure of the Three Students.
