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
14. A Scandal in Bohemia (June 1891, Adventures)
Irene Adler—the Marie Curie, the Joan of Arc, the Judit Polgár of Holmesian fiction—is introduced here in Doyle’s first short Sherlock story. And brazen indeed it is for Doyle to start Holmes off in his short story career with a failure! When one puts him or herself into the author’s shoes, and one imagines setting out with a number of stories, the idea of starting your masterful detective off with a failure feels strongly like a nonstarter. Granted, Holmes has previously succeeded in mysteries that were written in novel-length form (A Study in Scarlet, 1887 and The Sign of the Four, 1890). Still, so daunting—so rife with seemingly unnecessary risk—is the prospect of giving Holmes a goose egg on his first short outing that most authors, nearly all, would shy from it. The fact that Doyle allows Holmes to fail in his first outing shows the reader from the very beginning that here is a writer with stones. Perhaps, readers may suppose, Doyle is supremely confident in his writing, almost arrogantly so. Perhaps Doyle’s disinclined to put much stock in what the reader’s tastes are, or into whether the reader likes his work. Perhaps, the reader may fairly wonder, Doyle has just goofed tremendously; he has, as the saying goes, “gotten in wrong,” and his work shall founder and be lost to the sprawling, mountainous stacks of great but unnoticed writing. So it is reasonable here, at the outset of Doyle’s career, to wonder what influence The Strand Magazine had on Doyle’s success.
In the first place, The Strand Magazine was widely read, with a circulation that was highest in London, one of the most literate places in the world. Furthermore, the magazine’s high rate of publication allowed Holmes to rebound quickly from his initial defeat, and it also allowed Doyle to keep his detective foremost in readers’ minds. Between June of 1891 when A Scandal in Bohemia story was published and August, not a peep was heard of Holmes. But, between August of 1891 and June of 1892, Doyle produced eleven more short stories, one for every month. In June of 1892 came the end of The Adventures, Doyle’s first collection of Holmes stories. Already in December of 1892, Doyle began publishing the stories that would comprise The Memoirs, and he published every month (The Naval Treaty was a two-part story) until December of 1893. From the first words that introduce Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887 to the demise of Holmes in The Final Problem in December of 1893 (presumably a Christmas gift that Doyle wanted more for himself than for his audience), Doyle wrote an almost Dickensian 278,000 words. This is more than a quarter of a million good words, with many dazzling sentences, and with many enviable turns of the English language. The adventures, then, of Holmes hinged greatly upon the rate at which high-quality Holmes stories were produced, and they were produced very, very quickly. One may well wonder how many Holmes stories Doyle had stashed up his sleeve, for it’s not easy to cobble together a good mystery story every month, much less one that (in The Adventures) averages about 8,700 words in length. And while we’re on the subject, here are the average lengths of stories in every Holmes collection.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: 8,744 average words per story
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: 7,971 average words per story
The Return of Sherlock Holmes: 8,656 average words per story
His Last Bow: 8,463 average words per story
The Case-Book: 6,911 average words per story
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the stories shorten in length continually till we reach Doyle’s final collection, The Case-Book. And, since we’re here, and I have never seen the collections ranked, I will rank them, from best to worst.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sparkling from first to last, and a great pleasure to read, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains many of Doyle’s finest literary gems and jewels.
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes – After Conan Doyle gives himself a break, his readers are rewarded. Abbey Grange, Second Stain, Empty House, Norwood Builder, Charles Augustus Milverton, and The Golden Pince-Nez are all wonderful, wonderful stories.
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Best known, perhaps, for The Final Problem, The Memoirs also contains such great tales as Silver Blaze and The Reigate Squire. It seems, on looking back, that Doyle might have been undergoing some fatigue in the middle of this collection, but he did his best by the stories, and they are all very well written.
- His Last Bow – Doyle’s shortest collection may be best remembered for the ingenious means of two disposals: that of Cadogen West’s corpse and (nearly) that of Lady Frances Carfax’s, for the poor woman barely survives her ordeal.
- The Case-Book – A wildly uneven collection which is, unfortunately, tattooed by a few of Doyle’s stories that are so bad that some scholars have questioned whether Doyle actually wrote them, The Case-Book is a collection that ought to have been trimmed of its dead weight. For Doyle, whose august reputation was already established, such stories as The Three Gables, The Mazarin Stone, The Veiled Lodger, The Creeping Man, and The Sussex Vampire would have been better attributed to another author. Still, such stories as Shoscombe Old Place, The Three Garridebs, and Thor Bridge vindicate the collection and make it a worthy volume to add to any personal library.
Returning to Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, she has come to occupy, despite her fleeting appearance, a place in the canon that is equals such secondary characters as Mycroft, Lestrade, and Col. Sebastian Moran. Adler has not the stature of Watson, but her presence seems greater than that of Hopkins, most villains, and every other woman in the canon, including Mary, Watson’s wife. Accordingly, Irene Adler has been frequently adapted on stage and on screen. She has entered the public consciousness, or she is, at the least, on its fringe. She has also not yet been overworked nor lost to the changed mores of our era, as some other characters—James Bond, for instance—seem to have been. There is room for Irene Adler to grow, and she can occupy a role that satisfies more than token feminism. I would love to see her, for instance, engaged in another duel of wits with Holmes (even while both are mostly preoccupied with other things; he with a major case; she with her work)—and, at the outcome, have the outcome be a clean draw. Others may want to see Adler as the titular character in a production, but, if she does play a lead, her role should neither be clearly defined as protagonist or antagonist. Already, audiences have been treated to an Enola Holmes (and, of course, to an Enola sequel), so the space for a female lead that acts as a sleuth is already occupied in the Holmes universe. And because Adler’s character in A Scandal in Bohemia is one that was primarily concerned with her own self defense, Adler doesn’t seem to be a suitable character for an antagonist’s role. Adler would do very poorly, for instance, cast as a Harley Quinn to Moriarty’s Joker—an avenue that I could envision Hollywood executives talking themselves into taking. Irene Adler needs to remain her own character: a freethinking woman, a bittersweet wildcard with a strong moral code, someone who can amicably clash with Sherlock Holmes’ intellect, and someone who can leave a king panting, as she did in A Scandal in Bohemia.
