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
32. The Adventure of the Resident Patient (August 1893, Memoirs)
One of those mysteries which Holmes can deal with mostly during his client’s visit, The Adventure of the Resident Patient is a tale that is so suffused with the narration of events by Holmes’ client and later by explanatory backstory that we, the readers, have very little opportunity of seeing Holmes employ his most remarkable powers. At present, I cannot recall whether on my first reading of The Resident Patient (which was, I believe, on a holiday to Martha’s Vineyard during my teenage years to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary [although I can recall that I ate five pounds’ worth of Jelly Belly’s sour jelly beans on that trip while reading, for the first time, The Adventures, The Memoirs, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes]) I was able to deduce that Blessington was lying. I only know that now, after many years, and after many re-readings of the story, Blessington’s ruse seems to be a rather transparent one. I can only hope that, as a young man and a first time reader, I felt surprised.
The plot is no more than middling. A deus ex machina benefactor arrives to provide financial backing, in the form of an investment, to a penniless doctor with potential. The benefactor’s real hope is to secure for himself a regular income while also providing himself with a comfortable, discreet retirement, as he is a bank robber whose gains are ill-gotten. This bank robber has ratted out his confederates, one of whom was hung, while the others were jailed. Now that the prisoners have been released, they’ve conceived of the idea of faking catalepsy before the doctor with the hopes of gaining access to Blessington, the rat who is quartered at the doctor’s office. Why the prisoners feel that they must fake catalepsy is a little unclear. In the first place, the idea seems dangerous: men who have just been released from prison would not likely try to fool a specialist at his own field (nor is it likely that the specialist, no matter how infrequently he’s actually seen catalepsy, would be duped by such amateurs). Furthermore, the staging of catalepsy seems unnecessary, for, in the end, the former prisoners simply use their inside man, a young page, to let them into the house at night. Once inside, the ex-convicts judge Blessington, then they hang him. Why, if they needed to identify Blessington or where he lived, would they have placed the page at Dr. Trevelyan’s office? Why, if they needed to see Blessington, would they break into his quarters with only a single man, as they did prior to hanging him? Finally, why would Blessington, who has means and money, stay in London after he knew that his former confederates were out of prison and looking for him? If I had done what Blessington had done, and I knew what Blessington knew, I would gather my assets, sail at once from London to France, travel to Paris, and then go on to Vienna or Geneva or Milan—or even further, to India or to Australia, if I thought that my pursuers could track me to the Continent. At the very least, if I were Blessington, I would take a few days’ holiday to Scotland or Wales. Instead, even after receiving a debilitating fright, Blessington stays in the one place where he knows his enemies can find him, and his inaction enables him to pass into an oblong box as a resident patient.
