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
12. The Adventure of the Priory School (February 1904, Return)
An extremely original and arresting Holmes story, The Adventure of the Priory School takes us up north to meet two of Doyle’s more memorable characters—the Duke of Holdernesse and his secretary, James Wilder. With his long red beard and austere character, the duke is at once a victim and a perpetrator, though his social standing makes him mostly invulnerable to prosecution. Wilder—illegitimate son, bypassed heir, vengeful young man, and casualty of his own machinations—is interesting because, though an ostensibly weaker force than the duke, it is Wilder’s scheming that so often drives the duke’s decision making. Throw in the brilliancy that is the horses’ hooves which are shod to look like cattle tracks, and readers are treated to one of Doyle’s prettiest little mysteries.
Heidigger, the German master, has gone missing along with Lord Saltire, and the supposition in the official force is that the young heir has been kidnapped by the morose school teacher. A bit of luck—the road that serves the priory school was watched at one end by a constable and at the other by a party on the lookout for something else—serves to allow Holmes to eliminate both the eastern and western routes from the priory school as directions of Saltire’s egress, and, with the southern route from the priory school inaccessible to bicycles thanks to the presence of numerous stone walls, Holmes may safely focus his attention on the northern territory. In a morass, Holmes and Watson search about for bicycle tracks, looking, in particular, for a Palmer tire, yet finding first a Dunlop with a patch. This tire, they later discover, belongs to Wilder, and, as readers, we are granted profound insights into Holmes’ investigative powers, insights such as we could only hope for in stories like Black Peter, when the first week of Holmes’ investigations are shrouded from us. Here, though, we are able to follow Holmes every step of the way, even as he and Watson follow the tire tracks to Heidigger’s body. It is the grisly discovery of this corpse that sets off terrific consternation in the mind of the scheming secretary, for though he’d planned for the abduction of Lord Saltire, he had not foreseen that such tragedy would be wrought by his uncontrollable minion: the brutish and unsympathetic Mr. Reuben Hayes.
Holmes and Watson, waiting outside the inn, find the boy (whom, thankfully, Doyle assures us is being treated well), and, what’s more, they discover how shamefully the duke acts. Rather than expose Wilder, the duke covers for him at the expense of young Lord Saltire. Holmes, rightfully, takes an opportunity to chide the duke over this, after receiving his check for six thousand pounds (equivalent to 1.1 million USD in 2025!). To satisfy Holmes’ curiosity, the duke then shows Holmes and Watson into a museum room in the hall where the ingenious cloven footed shoes are kept: relics from yesteryear when they were allegedly used by robber-barons, a class of people who seem to have transitioned into a class contemporarily, and perhaps modernly, called: the nobility.
From the sensational entry of Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable (Thorneycroft! What a name! Can you imagine naming your child that? Or even proposing the name to your partner when talking of potential baby names? What kind of a family… But I digress—to each their own; we must live and let live), to the wonderful revelation that the horses’ feet were shod to look like those of cattle, to the unlooked-for and surprising twist that James Wilder is not only the duke’s secretary but his illegitimate son, there is no shortage of intrigue in The Adventure of the Priory School, and this reader, for one, would have been happy to have accompanied Holmes to other cases in the north of England, or even further: up to Scotland and its majestic, fog-wreathed isles.
