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
Fifth Tier: His Last Bow, The Unique Adventure
Exactly halfway through my ranking of the canon lies a tremendously unique story. His Last Bow was published four years after The Dying Detective and four years before The Mazarin Stone, the next two temporally closest tales. Written during the first World War, His Last Bow is not a mystery in the typical Holmesian vein. Rather, His Last Bow elects to represent a zeitgeist of the era through symbolism, confident patriotism, and poetic prose. Fairly well-written and with a plot that panders to John Bull, His Last Bow is a sui generis story, the canon’s platypus: a handsome creature ill-fit with its peers and deserving of a tier all its own.
28. His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes (September 1917, His Last Bow)
An espionage story published during WWI—before the Cambridge Five existed and before Kim Philby ever got his ugly mug printed on a Soviet stamp—, His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes tinged a John le Carré-esque passion for deep-cover-spycraft with nostalgia. This is Doyle’s transition story as he acknowledges the end of an era. The honorable traditions are being attacked, he realizes. Good form and honor, the foundations of the Victorian age, are becoming passé. The staid nation of England is slumbering and naïve, while, without its borders, the Continent shifts ever higher through its gears of war. In the days before such ridiculous phrases as “the military-industrial complex” ever came to exist, before “shell shock” became an acronym, before that awful fiend with the hideous toothbrush mustache did what he did, contemporary readers found themselves immersed in a global war over the death of a faroff Archduke and the byzantine tangle of treaties that bound Western Europe together. The guns changed; the mores changed; the social structures changed. The defragmentation of a seemingly monolithic society into a pluralistic and seething mass of populism happened (despite its forewarnings) seemingly overnight, while the winds of change promised bitter storms. For, as Holmes says, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” Indeed, but one month after the publication of this story, in October of 1917, St. Petersburg was shaken by revolution. This October Revolution marked the beginning of the Russian Civil War, while the Bolshevik known as Vladimir Lenin rose to power: a man who sought to sweep away capitalism and replace it with his own famine-inducing brand of Marxism.
Holmes and Watson stand at the frontier. They mark the verge between the familiar, traditionalist England and the new unknown where seemingly no authority is held sacrosanct and no revered custom is above reproach. They face the new while upholding the old. If they are consigned to obsolescence it will be with their backs straight, their chins up, and with stiff upper lips.
The story itself is a profusion of dialogue. To a larger degree than any other Holmes story, the dialogue feels weighted, didactic, and allegoric. While reading, I cannot help but feel that the German villain is less a human than he is a representation of the enemies’ armies and governments. Nor, in this story, do I particularly mind. That Von Bork stands for the Central Powers is fine; he is a symbol, and symbols nearly always must be stereotyped and flattened to be recognized as such. They can serve a purpose, and here that purpose is to convey a message. In this case, the symbol stands for a coalition of nations that is trying to destroy and subdue England and the other Allied Powers (France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan, and the United States). The message is that England, though apparently somnolent, is awake and has aces of her own up her sleeve; that she will fight; that she will not lay down and die. So while symbolism, allegory, and jingoism are often criticized, in a setting when the two sides are mustard-gassing each other, mowing one another down with automatic rifle fire, and blowing each other to bits in glacially-paced trench warfare, a stereotype such as that of Von Bork is either of de minimis offense or, more appropriately, none at all. When the smoke clears after this war to end all wars, Doyle has only The Case-Book left to write. Three years after the last story in the Case-Book is published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lies dead. Nine years after his death, the rifles cock and fire again, this time for The Second World War, or, as it is often simply called: The War. But before the Waffenamt are stamped—even before the tsar abdicates, and the Bolsheviks take power, and the samovars are tipped and spilled, there stand Holmes and Watson, resilient and intrepid before the oncoming, purging winds.
