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
40. The Adventure of the Gloria Scott (April 1893, Memoirs)
The Adventure of the Gloria Scott is one of those Holmes stories in which backstory replaces mystery. Like A Study in Scarlet and The Five Orange Pips, readers are given a long tour through a history that ties Holmes’ contemporary conundrum to its actors, and, at the end of the account, the Holmes story concludes with a short commentary from Holmes that serves to comprise an ending. Unfortunately, these types of narrative structures, the ones which are so heavily indebted to backstory, are cumbersome and painstaking to read. The reason for this is that the Holmes mystery in these sorts of Doyle stories is mostly solved. The reader is not permitted to puzzle or speculate; instead, the reader is told what is, essentially, a tale to plod through.
One may wonder whether Gloria Scott was written after Holmes read such stories as Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, because Gloria Scott seems to share motifs with both. In Kidnapped, David Balfour and Alan Breck find themselves defending a stronghold aboard a ship against mutineers, much as is the case for the characters in Gloria Scott. Also in Gloria Scott, the character of Jack Prendergast—domineering, intelligent, and murderous—seems, in these ways, to be derivative of Long John Silver. Both Prendergast and Silver secretly controlled a powerful faction of those people aboard the ship, and both Silver and Prendergast were Machiavellian and merciless in implementing their plans’ executions. Neither seemed to regard human life as much more valuable than a grain of rice, and both seemed to value, above all, self-preservation. The books by Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883 and Kidnapped, 1886) were very much popular at the time, and it is not unlikely that Doyle read them over the course of some evenings and then was inspired to write The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.
