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
17. The Problem of Thor Bridge (February – March 1922)
Perhaps the most ingenious of all Doyle’s death methods, The Problem of Thor Bridge is also the only mystery that I can recall offhand in the Holmes canon whose solution is a suicide. The gist of Thor Bridge is that a jealous wife, seeking to punish her husband and to end her own suffering, frames the woman whom her husband has come to love. And the jilted spouse completes her plans in an extraordinarily imaginative fashion. She ties a revolver to a stone that she sinks into a pond on the side of Thor Bridge, blows her own brains out, and, when she dies, she of course releases the pistol, and, thanks to the weight of the stone, the pistol goes slithering off the bridge and sinks into the water, thereby disposing of the murder weapon. Prior to this, the wife had written her unfortunate and innocent rival a note to ask her to commune with her on the bridge. Thus, the rival was to be expected on the bridge and was therefore likely to be blamed for the murder of the wife. It is thanks to a chip on Thor Bridge’s stone and the presence of a pair of revolvers, a duplicate set, that Holmes is able to penetrate through the thick fog of this dense mystery.
A wonderful, wonderful solution. One can only imagine the Eureka moment that Doyle must have had when he thought of this quaint and fantastic suicide device. Perhaps he picked up a pen immediately and began to write. Perhaps he stewed for hours or days over the perfect narrative elixir with which to blend his sinking-revolver plot device. One would like to know the author’s process behind this story, but those details are likely consigned to history’s oblivion. Still, the sinking-revolver idea is a plum, and one of Conan Doyle’s very best—a fine feather in the cap for a man who had more than his fair share of fine feathers.
Aside from the striking pistol-into-the-pond trick, The Problem of Thor Bridge is quintessentially written. It begins classically with a breakfast scene (perhaps the most traditional way to start a Holmes story) on a blustery October day (autumn and winter—with the thick fogs, brisk winds, deep snows, and early darkness—seem the most poetic seasons for Holmes’ London), then an introductory letter is provided, followed by an appearance from the client.
It feels worth a digression here to remark that perhaps no other formulaic scenario in literature can be subject to such repetition and dinting while becoming ever yet more attractive. It is a fairly cardinal rule that most other literary devices scream for innovation and change at every opportunity, yet the Holmesian breakfast scene, with its air of tradition and conservatism, seems to want nothing more than to be frozen in time, brought out now and again in the same state as before, with very few changes to people and the details of the introductory letters, then returned back to cold storage, where it may wait, unchanged in stasis, till its author brings it back out again. In fact, there is something familiar about the Holmes breakfast scene which makes it representative of, or even a symbol of, the Victorian era. Perhaps what lends the breakfast scenes their weight is the rattling carriages, the gloomy fogs, the glowing lamps, the solitary plane tree in 221B’s back garden, the brick streets, the casted social structure, the gelled formality of invitations and cards, and the relatively carefree hedonism of cigars and revolvers that came before lung cancer and mass shootings so besmirched the pair. Perhaps other things contribute to the sway of the breakfast scenes, such as the stature of the people who appear in Holmes’ drawing room (like Professor Moriarty himself) or the emotional plight of the supplicants who beseech Holmes for help (such as the unhappy John Hector McFarlane from The Norwood Builder). Surely there are other things beyond these details which make the breakfast scenes so welcome and so Victorian and so atmospheric, but they cannot all be listed; it is sufficient to say that their recycled yet looked-for reappearances are an example of the exception in the adage that there is an exception to every rule, when the rule in literature calls for invention.
Beyond the beginning of the story, with its breakfast scene, there is the sense of the dramatic in this Holmes story. He takes out Watson’s revolver while they are in the carriage, empties its cylinders of all but one cartridge, then procures a ball of twine from the village shop. He then goes out to the bridge to test his unspoken theory. Holmes’ test makes policemen look out the corners of their eyes at him, and the test leaves Watson in silent perplexity. With a resounding cry of, “Now for it!” the great detective lifts the pistol to his head, lets it go, watches it whisked off the bridge by the stone, and sees it chip the parapet. “Was there ever a more exact demonstration?” Holmes demands, delighted, vindicated, and relieved by his exercise. The drama shown here is characteristic of the best of Holmes’ stories, for it shows that our cold, aloof detective is indeed emotionally invested in the welfare of his clients and in finding the truth. Here he has found truth once again, and he may rest in easy satisfaction knowing that he has solved the abstruse Problem of Thor Bridge.
