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
42. A Case of Identity (September 1891, Adventures)
What a devilish fellow is Mr. Angel! The story of this demon opens with Holmes opining that truth is stranger than fiction, and it finds Watson debating him—an eminently more welcome circumstance than those situations in which Watson is a slave to Holmes’ opinions. In this case, the fiction seems stranger than the truth, for it seems highly improbable to me that a young woman such as Miss Sutherland, even with her short sight, could fail to conceive that Mr. Hosmer Angel—though he has whiskers, glasses, and speaks in a low voice—is not the same man as her stepfather. They meet at a ball; they take walks together; they meet at the church before they are to marry. I suppose that a request for readers to suspend their disbelief is implicit here (of that same species of disbelief suspension that disables Clark Kent’s peers from identifying him as Superman), but this request does make me want to snort with dissatisfaction and roll my eyes. More vexing still is Holmes’ perplexing decision not to inform Miss Sutherland of her stepfather’s duplicity.
The situation is that Miss Sutherland comes to Holmes in a state of anxiety; Holmes solves her case, and he sends her away with the advice that she must forget about Hosmer Angel. The pitiable young woman says that she cannot forget about him, and she leaves. Holmes then confronts Mr. Windibank, aka Mr. Hosmer Angel, with the facts of the deception, and Mr. Windibank confesses. Holmes releases him, and he tells Watson that he shall not tell Miss Sutherland what has happened, because she will not believe him. But this solution is quite unacceptable. It leaves the vulnerable Miss Sutherland as continual prey to Mr. Windibank’s current deception, and, what’s perhaps worse, Holmes’ reticence to speak the truth will allow her unscrupulous stepfather to make further plans against the poor girl and, ultimately, may lead to the ruin of her life.
All this uncertainty, of course, could be avoided in any number of ways. Holmes could have asked Miss Sutherland to remain hidden behind a curtain and to listen while Mr. Windibank confesses his misdeed, and, through such means, she would have heard the truth from her stepfather’s own lips, and she would have believed it (or at least been given a golden opportunity to believe it). Holmes could have shown Mr. Windibank’s letter to Miss Sutherland, a letter which has the same typewritten peculiarities as those that Mr. Hosmer Angel’s letters has, and, in this way, Holmes would have presented her with proof of the stepfather’s chicanery. Holmes could have asked that Miss Sutherland set an elaborate trap for Mr. Hosmer Angel, declaring that, if Mr. Angel would but appear again, she would give all her inheritance to him. Such a trap would likely have drawn the phony character out, and he’d have been liable to exposure by Holmes and Watson. These three outcomes I have thought of offhand, and Conan Doyle—who brilliantly plotted many stories in accordance with a high moral code—certainly had the wits and rectitude to do better by Miss Sutherland in A Case of Identity.
