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
7. The Man with the Twisted Lip (December 1891, Adventures)
A fine story of disguise, made better by its believability, The Man with the Twisted Lip is one of the strongest stories in the Holmes canon, and considered, by some, to be Doyle’s best. That Neville St. Clair’s disguise could work, and that its efficacy could fool even such an intimate companion as his wife, ought not be doubted. CIA officers today tell tales of how they will dress up an agent in the morning, then send him down to lunch with his peers. The agent’s task is to complete the lunch with his peers under the bright, shadowless lights of the cafeteria. If his true identity is found out by his classmates, then he fails; if he succeeds in lunching with them without them learning his identity, then he passes. One after another, thanks to the skill of the make-up artists, the CIA agents pass this test.
Some readers may find their credulity stretched when they wonder whether Neville St. Clair might have made his career for so long when, at some point, he must have been seen going in and out of the opium den as a respectable-looking man, but even here, the benefit of the doubt must be given to Doyle’s story and to Neville St. Clair. For the truth of St. Clair’s situation being as bizarre as it is would make it unlikely that any of St. Clair’s peers could have guessed that he would enter the opium den and emerge as Hugh Boone, the man with the twisted lip. Therefore, this reader believes that St. Clair could have, in fact, pulled off such a strange and outré profession for many years, much as a spy remains undercover. So long as Hugh stayed out of the rain, so long as he stayed away from fights, so long as he kept clear of anything that might mar his makeup while he was on the job, he ought to have been successful.
Required reading material in some schools, The Man with the Twisted Lip needs no recap for its plot. But despite this story’s many adaptations and the general public’s familiarity with it, Twisted Lip has not grown stale nor has it been overworked. Scenes within it still stand out and become more dear thanks to their familiarity. I have always liked the scene where Watson finds Holmes in the opium den, and I have also always enjoyed the thinking time where Holmes sits upon the five pillows and consumes an ounce of shag tobacco. Not to be excluded from this pantheon of re-readable and wonderful scenes is the lower profile moment in the story where St. Clair’s wife shocks Holmes by saying that she received a letter from Neville that day, and Holmes leaps from his chair, roaring and galvanized. The image brings a smile to my face.
Neville St. Claire, Hugh Boone, the rascally Lascar, the low opium den, and the ounce of shag tobacco which Holmes smokes make The Man with the Twisted Lip one of the strongest stories that Doyle ever wrote.
