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
4. The Adventure of the Second Stain (December 1904, The Return)
The last story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and the story which vies with His Last Bow for featuring the best last line in the canon (“‘We also have our diplomatic secrets,’ said he, and picking up his hat he turned to the door.”), The Adventure of the Second Stain ranks highly for a number of reasons. In the first place, the mystery puzzles Holmes tremendously. He strains his capabilities to the utmost, yet midway through the story, he remains flummoxed. In the second place, the solution to the mystery (and Holmes’ handling of the solution) are both brilliantly handled by Doyle. Finally, in this well-written story, the stakes are high. This is a story of international intrigue; the fate of the nation hangs in the balance, and Holmes holds the scales.
The story begins with Doyle (in the guise of Watson, of course) trying again to distance himself from Holmes. Doyle had killed off the famous detective already, and now Doyle says that he intended Abbey Grange to be the last of Holmes’ mysteries, not because of lack of material or waning public interest, but because of the reluctance that Holmes shows to the continued publication of his experiences. Doyle then goes on to say that Holmes has retired and has taken up bee farming in Sussex (one is reminded of le Carré in Tinker when le Carré writes that the detective, Mendel, considered bees from outside Surrey to be ‘exotic,’ and one wonders whether there’s some profound, un-mined relationship between mystery writers, their detectives, and bees). Doyle then notes that Holmes has made a request for privacy from the public, and that Holmes hopes that his “wishes in this matter in this matter should be strictly observed.” The public, of course, will not be satisfied by such requests; Holmes’ wishes are not observed, and Doyle, like Dr. Frankenstein, finds that he cannot escape from his creation.
So we go in to the story, which it seems that Doyle hopes is Holmes’ last, but that time proves isn’t. The Second Stain begins—as other stories do in which valuables go missing—with Doyle using a clever tactic to skirt around the rather technically difficult idea that a safe has been broken into. Doyle’s characters simply refuse to leave a valuable item in a safe: a perfectly functional safe was left unused in Beryl Coronet with disastrous consequences; a working safe is unexploited here as well, and once more the characters are left with a catastrophe. In this case, Mr. Trelawny Hope states without irony that the document “was of such importance that I have never left it in my safe,” and Mr. Hope then leaves the paper unattended in his room for four hours. The Prime Minister then praises Mr. Hope for his sense of public duty, and tells Hope, very kindly, and certainly falsely, that, “No one can blame you. There is no precaution which you have neglected.”
Readers then learn that all the cabinet ministers know of the secret document, as well as departmental officials. Applying the rule from Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for the Red October that “The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who’re in on it,” Holmes must be thinking that dozens of people already know about the potentate’s letter, and he advises the two diplomats accordingly.
“Holmes shook his head mournfully. ‘You think, sir, that unless this document is recovered there will be war?’
‘I think it is very probable.’
‘Then, sir, prepare for war.’
‘That is a hard saying, Mr. Holmes.’”
Holmes is under no illusion with regard to the difficulty of the task ahead of him; he believes that the paper is already gone: “The situation is desperate, but not hopeless. Even now, if we could be sure which of them has taken it, it is just possible that it has not yet passed out of his hands. After all, it is a question of money with these fellows, and I have the British Treasury behind me. If it’s on the market I’ll buy it—if it means another penny on the income-tax.” And so Holmes sets out.
He goes to Godolphin St. where Lucas has just been murdered, a trivial event compared with the loss of the letter, but one which Holmes feels is certainly connected to that letter’s disappearance. But try as Holmes might to find the letter, he finds nothing, and that, he reasons, is cause for hope. Of this inaction, Holmes says, “Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened.” Indeed he is correct, and this is just one example of many artfully written lines in the story. Another wonderful line, for instance, is delivered when Trelawny Hope finds the letter in the despatch box. “‘Mr. Holmes, you are a wizard, a sorcerer!’ he cries. ‘How did you know it was there?’”
‘Because I knew it was nowhere else.’”
The answer from Holmes rings so satisfactorily to our ears because, above all else, his words are decidedly true. He did indeed know that the letter was nowhere else, because he and Lady Hilda had returned the letter to the despatch-box. And the following commentary from the Prime Minister shows Doyle’s readership that (unlike modern day television advertisers, who, for inane, specious, and maddening reasons insist on portraying every average American like he or she is a silly fool) Doyle respects his secondary characters. The Prime Minister is not, even for an instant, fooled by Holmes’ clever tactic, and he knows that “there is more than meets the eye.” Not for the first time do Doyle’s lesser characters receive the benefit of kindly ink. Arthur Holder, Mrs. St. Clair, Miss Violet Hunter, Ronald Adair, Grant Munro, and many others are presented to us by Conan Doyle as everyday citizens with common sense, decency, and reason. The effect of populating his stories with such sympathetic characters is to make readers who share those characters’ traits—common sense, decency, and reason—feel kinship to their fictional brethren. It is quite easy to like those whom we can relate to, and there are many, many characters in the Doyle canon whom we can feel immediately familiar with. In this story whose dialogue and mystery have rarely been surpassed by any other literary work, readers may find that The Adventure of the Second Stain is one of Doyle’s very best.
