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
16. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet (May 1892, Adventures)
One of those stories in the canon that, to be properly appreciated, ought to be annotated with modern day monetary values, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet is a classic illustration of Holmes’ understanding of how “circumstantial evidence may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.” To begin with, the amounts of money in the story seem trifling since the story was published in May of 1892, and inflation hadn’t yet wrecked our collective understanding of what money means. Here I’ll convert the financial figures in the story from 19th century British pounds to 21st century U.S. dollars so that we can better understand the staggering sums that are at stake. I’ll round the numbers off.
Mr. Holder’s client’s request for a loan: £50,000 ≈ $10,130,000.
Lowest estimated value of the beryl coronet: £100,000 ≈ $20,250,000.
Arthur’s request for money: £200 ≈ $40,500.
Mr. Holder’s reward for the coronet: £1,000 ≈ $200,000.
Holmes’ reward for recovering the beryls: £4,000 ≈ $810,000 (3/4ths of which are spent in recovery of the stones).
I think that normally financially situated mortals such as myself will agree that Holmes has done himself well by earning roughly $200,000 (modern day dollars) for a day’s brilliant work on the Beryl case. Consideration of this payment, along with his later million dollar check (again, year 2025 USD) from The Priory School’s Duke of Holdernesse, casts a somewhat cynical light upon Holmes’ remark to the duke that he is “a poor man.” Perhaps Holmes is truly poor, and he speaks the untainted truth, but the sleuthing game is profitable. More likely, Holmes spoke to the duke with human embellishment, for it seems reasonable, with the sums mentioned here, that Holmes can afford to take a case pro bono now and again. Indeed, it seems likely that Holmes must have been an extremely wealthy man, one of the world’s so-called one-percenters. That is not to say that he hasn’t earned his money; it is to say that his “I’m a poor man” statements, which seem to cast him as a humble commoner, may be a trifle disingenuous, or at least such statements pretermit the whole state of his financial affairs. So the figures in this case are helpful not only for examining Holmes’ wealth (this reader wonders why, after many years, he hasn’t bought his Baker Street apartment, but continues to rent), but are also useful for contemporizing the exalted circles in which Holmes sometimes works.
Beyond the jaw-dropping amounts of money mentioned in this story, there is the artful way that Conan Doyle frames the case. Suspicion is cast at once on the degenerate son, Arthur, who ultimately turns out to have acted in a most chivalrous manner. Arthur’s father—a man who would have acted wisely if he’d have but left the beryl coronet in the bank’s safe, and to have told no one about it—turns out to be at fault for blaming his son and failing to detect that his niece had fallen madly in love with a scoundrel, thief, and cad: the dishonorable Sir George Burnwell. Holmes must extend himself to the maximum to clear up the case, and he must do so quickly—for we learn, at the end of the mystery, that, fast though Holmes acted, the stones had already been fenced once.
To solve the case, Holmes goes hounding through the snow, and he tracks footprints down an alleyway. He examines windowsills to see where prints have gone. He forms a tenable theory which leads him to Burnwell. He dons a disguise. He purchases the stones back on behalf of their rightful owner. Nothing more can be expected from our brilliant detective. As to Mr. Holder, one can only wonder how, and with what degree of horror, the banker’s illustrious client will react on receiving his precious security back, whose injury, he said, “would be almost as serious as its complete loss.” Yet there’s nothing to be done for Mr. Holder here, except to silently chastise him for not using the bank safe, and to hope that some skilled jeweler can repair the coronet. His troubles lie beyond our compass, and we may satisfy ourselves with the virtuoso performance of Holmes in the magnificent Adventure of the Beryl Coronet.
