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
The Second Tier: Artistic Treasures
With stories such as Silver Blaze and The Man with the Twisted Lip, we find in the second tier five stories that show Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the height of his not inconsiderable powers. These stories all share something in common: I loved these stories when I first read them, and I love them still. Each story in this tier I consider to be magnificent.
10. The Adventure of the Empty House (October 1903, Return)
The Adventure of the Empty House, in my mind, shall always be associated with The Final Problem. While some other stories in the canon (such as A Scandal in Bohemia and The Adventure of the Naval Treaty) have multiple parts, they nevertheless feel like cohesive stories. Empty House is the opposite. It is a single story that feels as though it is the continuation of The Final Problem.
Now, it may be immoral of me to say so, but—as a person who believes that evil has existed for as long as humanity, and that evil will be a permanent fixture of humanity’s future—The Empty House makes me pine for reasonable crime. Hear me out. So often, one hears of senseless violence, e.g.: the husband, hopped up on a cocktail of drugs, beats and kills his wife. Terrible, awful, needless! This is the human at its basest, a vulgar display of our worst aspect. In The Empty House, however, we have an aesthetic murder, of the sort that is rarest. A man, with meticulous planning and a silent gun, who has been hunting—with a strong motive and extraordinary patience—his equal adversary, finally has the chance to pull the trigger. He does pull that trigger, and, at the very moment when he believes his quest is a success, Holmes leaps upon him like a tiger, and torpedoes the villain’s greatest hopes. Here we have crime with a cause and, what’s more, crime with artistic merit. If only such crimes were the norm, and the ugly crimes of the commoner were forever blasted from existence, the world would indeed be a better place.
The gun used in The Adventure of the Empty House is nearly as fine a detail as any in the Holmes canon. At the time, the idea of a silenced weapon (a far more novel idea then than it is today) must have been wonderfully inspiring and intriguing to the average Londoner, whose day—in a year of banalities such as trudging through the London slush, taking out trash, washing clothes, paying rent, blundering through thick fog, and spending many tedious hours as a tailor, or a cart-driver, or a hotel clerk, or what have you—would very rarely be filled with thoughts of exotic, noiseless rifles. Even today, the silent rifle is a specialist’s tool, and, though far more common than at any time before in history, it is an artifact whose preserve is almost exclusively American, western European, and Russian, and whose utilization still piques curiosity and interest. Now, there being multiple subsonic rounds that pair well with silencers—in pistols, the 147 grain 9mm and .45 ACP; in rifles, the .300 Blackout and 8.6 Blackout—the prospect of silent murder is more common, yet still very unique in practice. And, when such murders are carried out with silent weapons (such as by the cowardly murderer Luigi Mangione who shot an unarmed man in the back), the results are often sensational, though the adversaries are rarely on equal footing. How cunning and subtle it is for Colonel Moran to hunt Holmes with an air rifle! The stealth, the stalking, and the precise planning produced one of the greatest plots and one of the greatest villains in the Holmes canon. That they did so was marvelous, that they did so at a moment when, perhaps more than any other, Doyle needed the sum of the parts to be greater than the whole, was superlative. With accurate aim, Doyle resurrects Holmes and hits the bullseye in The Adventure of the Empty House.
