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
26. The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane (December 1926, Case-Book).
In The Lion’s Mane, Doyle chooses to allow Holmes to narrate the story, and I think that his decision to do so ought to be put into perspective. The Lion’s Mane is the ninth story in the fifth collection of Holmes stories, and the fifty-third out of fifty-six stories that Doyle wrote about Holmes. The Lion’s Mane was published in December of 1926 when Doyle was sixty-seven years old. (He was born 22 May 1859.) He published his final Holmes story less than half a year later, in April of 1927, and, with so many excuses for literary exhaustion available, Conan Doyle could be excused if the legacy of this story, like its antagonist, ended in a watery grave. That this story succeeds is an occurrence that happens against all odds, and it is my belief that The Lion’s Mane is Doyle’s most underrated and overlooked Holmes story; it is a brilliant literary achievement that would be on par with Silver Blaze, if only The Lion’s Mane’s solution weren’t so improbable.
Doyle had lived during the Victorian age, and he did his best writing during those times. (Queen Victoria ruled from 20 June 1837 till 22 January 1901.) After her death came King Edward VII, a man of worldly tastes who still represented The Empire: colonies, the army, and international intrigue. After the Edwardian era, which ended with the king’s death in 1910, George V rose to the British throne, and King George V was faced with a tumultuous world: one influenced by rapidly improving technology, manifestos on socialism and fascism, and the Irish’s strident demand for an independent state of their own.
Then from 1914 to 1918, World War I came and went.
With the war, many Kiplingesque views on the romantic side of war were blown away in drafts of mustard gas. Now poets, like Wilfred Owen, wrote of haunting flares and old lies: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Weapons changed. Firearms designers become household names whose semi-automatic and automatic creations, more than a hundred years later, are still studied, copied, and adapted: Paul Mauser made the Gewehr 98, and Hiram Maxim the Vickers gun; the Lee-Enfield Mk I appeared; and John Moses Browning designed the M1895, the Ma Deuce, and the 1911. For a man born to Victorian crown and country, Sherlock Holmes, like his friend, Dr. Watson, may have felt unnerved and displaced by the world’s abrupt changes. Watson, after all, fought in the Second Anglo-Afghan War which lasted from 1878 to 1880, and his Pashtun enemies used the jezail, a type of matchlock musket. Watson himself, if he were not serving as a surgeon, probably would have carried the Martini-Henry, a breech-loader that took long seconds to reload, and which fired but a single shot at a time. By contrast, the Vickers machine gun could fire up to 600 rounds a minute, a staggering figure that might have flabbergasted and horrified both Holmes and Watson—though, as loyal servants of The Crown, they would likely have been rather glad to have the gun on the British side, instead of the other way around; Doyle might have quietly felt the same.
So, to me, The Adventures of the Lion’s Mane seems to be representative of Doyle’s search for a solid foundation for Holmes to stand upon in this unsettling time of upheavals. And in changing the narrative structure, as well as in providing for a fresh plot—that thing which most makes Sherlock’s pretty little problems such a pleasure to read—Doyle’s search succeeds. Doyle allows The Lion’s Mane to be told by Holmes himself, and our faithful chronicler Watson is excluded from the story. And though Watson is normally to Holmes as roots are to trees, in this case he proves dispensable. The political landscape that Doyle is writing in has changed so much from the early 1890s when Doyle first wrote—and he’s already invented so much for Holmes, and he’s already been taxed so dearly for his creation—that Doyle needs to take radical action to animate Sherlock’s adventures. Here the narrative shift, coupled with the original plot, leave us with a story that is richly deserving of such a regal name as The Lion’s Mane.
