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 Fourth Tier: The Greats
These nine titles are each great in their own way. Well-written with strokes of genius, they consist of works that are traditionally thought of as great and others which are not often as well known. Stories like The Musgrave Ritual with Brunton the butler certainly belong to the former category while others, such as The Case-Book’s Lion’s Mane may belong to the latter. There are a great many writers whose literary careers could have been made based upon any story in this tier, and there are a great many writers who achieved literary fame who never wrote a story as good as any of these: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Greats.
27. The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (January 1925, Case-Book)
One of the best stories from The Case-Book. Though The Three Garridebs drafts off The Red-Headed League, Killer Evans is a more violent villain than John Clay, aka Vincent Spaulding, and Evans nearly succeeds in offing Watson. Our constant scribe is saved only by Evans’ faulty aim, for the American killer draws suddenly and unexpectedly, and Watson gets shot for the second time, though now in a third place. (In The Sign of Four, Doyle states that Watson was shot in the leg. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson was said to have been shot in the shoulder.)
The Three Garridebs also benefits from the brief tour that Doyle gives us of Nathan Garrideb’s eclectic, museumesque home. A collector of relics, the reclusive Mr. Garrideb’s unusual interests serve two purposes for the plot. They provide a red herring to the reader, permitting us to wonder whether Mr. Garrideb has some exotic and valuable piece among his collection of whose worth he is ignorant. The collection also serves to occupy all of Mr. Garrideb’s interest and time, thus keeping him at home, and necessitating Killer Evans’ brilliant but outré solution of inventing the Three Garridebs inheritance scheme. Perfectly extraordinary in its conception, Doyle stokes the Victorian mania for viewing extremophiles and the habitats that they dwell in while also providing readers with locomotion for the mystery’s plot. The end product is a success, one bolstered by the dash of brutishness that Evans provides and by the glimpses of Holmes’ asexual love for his friend, Dr. Watson, when Watson is injured.
There are times when I wonder whether certain stories have been overlooked in the public eye thanks to the stories’ inclusion in later story collections, and I have wondered how the fame of some stories would have fared had they been published (in their exact same form) at different times in Conan Doyle’s career. What if, for example, The Lion’s Mane and The Three Garridebs had been included in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s first collection, and better known stories such as The Engineer’s Thumb, The Red-Headed League, and A Case of Identity had been published in The Case-Book? At least in the case of The Lion’s Mane, I think that critical regard for it would have been higher. In the case of The Three Garridebs, if it had been published when The Red-Headed League was published (and if The Red-Headed League was published when The Three Garridebs was published), I wonder whether The Three Garridebs would have become the more famous of the two, rather than the other way around. Perhaps some of The League’s fame is due to the relative novelty of its story. In The Red-Headed League, the plot was new, original, and inventive. In The Three Garridebs, the plot, as stated before, was derivative. Still, in keeping with this train of thought, if a late story with entirely original aspects, such as The Problem of Thor Bridge, had been published in place of, say The Five Orange Pips, I think that Thor Bridge might have been anthologized many times over, instead of being consigned to a place frequented primarily by Holmesiophiles. The point is that I think that the worth of some Holmes stories is undervalued for no other reasons than the time of the story’s publication and the collection that the work was compiled in. So while a slight lack of novelty may be partly to blame for this story’s relative obscurity, nevertheless there is a strong attractiveness to The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.
