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
13. The Final Problem (December 1893, Memoirs)
Sorely am I tempted to place The Final Problem within the top ten, though the story itself is not as gripping as some others that are better ranked. For indeed, The Final Problem introduces us to Professor James Moriarty, whose name has become the apotheosis for Machiavellian evil. Moriarty has achieved such popular notoriety that—since the long-ago beginning of his meteoric rise—he’s now either equaled or displaced such mononymical worthies as Iago, Faust, and Fagin. Moriarty has become the symbol of the sinister spider at the center of the web, he who but plucks a thread and thereby sets in motion a finely made and necessary part of a precise master plan. He is the beating heart of the body that capillaries, veins, and arteries flow through. Or, it can also be said, he is the brain that works the body. If for no other reason than this colossal professor, The Final Problem deserves consideration of a high place in any Holmes-ranking’s list.
And in The Final Problem, not only do we meet Moriarty, but Doyle kills off Holmes. For eight years, Holmes lies at the stony bottom of Reichenbach Falls, less transparent than the ghost of Hamlet’s father, less present than the skull of poor Yorick. We have not a word, not a whisper, not a hope for Holmes; like all those faithfully departed whom we care deeply about, he becomes gone but not forgotten.
Following his death, a distraught, yelping readership cancelled, en masse, subscriptions with Strand Magazine to express their displeasure. Only if JK Rowling had killed off Harry Potter halfway before book four ended could such a seismic result have been registered today on the literary Richter scale. For the demigods of modern literature have never ruled the literary universe like Potter, Holmes, Voldemort, and Moriarty have. Lisbeth Salander, Pennywise, Paul Atreides, and Daenerys Targaryen are contemporary literary icons whose roles have translated well upon the silver screen, but none possess the cachet of Potter and Holmes. We can only thank Heaven that, in killing off Holmes, there was not the whiff of treachery by faithful Watson, otherwise, when Doyle brought him back, we would have had no end of resurrection story parallels.
Still, despite the rippling ramifications of The Final Problem, it has always waffled at The Rest Test: the story that, on a cold, winter’s night—when I am relaxing, and I want something homey, pleasant, and familiar to read—I will pick up and turn to. And there are multiple stories in the Holmes canon that strongly pass that test for me. Partly I am dissuaded by The Final Problem’s incomplete ending, for I know that Holmes returns in The Empty House as a poor bibliophile carrying The Origin of Tree Worship. (And The Empty House feels, in some ways, like the second half of The Final Problem.) Partly I am dissuaded by the lack of mystery; this chronicle feels more deserving of its title of Adventure than most other Holmes stories do. And, finally, despite all the harm that Moriarty is reputed to do, we, as the audience, never actually see him succeed at anything. Killer Evans in The Three Garridebs actually wounds Watson. Irene Adler stays a step ahead of Holmes. Baron Gruner’s men smash Holmes’ head. Dr. Grimesby Roylott bends a poker with his bare hands. But Moriarty cannot kill Holmes, though he does send him packing to the Continent. There is much for and much against this weighty story, so, at last, we see that proper placing on a list of Holmesian stories is a challenge with regard to The Final Problem.
