I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes villains from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the greatest villain. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Villains
The Holmes Villains
When considering the magnitude of Holmes villains, this reader feels that it would be inappropriate to make judgments based solely on the miscreants’ behavior and psychology. The reason for this is that, since the Holmes stories were published, some villains have been referenced and adapted far more than others, with the result that their status in society has grown disproportionately to their crimes. That said, it also feels inappropriate to judge the villains based upon my perception of their popular renown. What, then, is the correct blend of popularity and debasement to scale my rankings upon? I believe that the solution must more heavily weight a character’s deeds and mind, while still taking into account the characters’ fame. Let us compare, for example, Vincent Spaulding and Killer Evans, two villains who are being selected because the circumstances of their crimes are quite similar.
Both Spaulding and Killer Evans seek to gain something by deceiving the owner of an establishment with an elaborate scheme. In Spaulding’s case, he invents The Red-Headed League as a ruse to get to the bank; in Killer Evans’ case, he creates the inheritance scheme of the three Garridebs to retrieve Prescott’s counterfeiting equipment. Both are caught red-handed. One’s story, The Red-Headed League, is widely considered better than the other’s, and certainly the collections that the characters come from (The Adventures for Spaulding and The Case-Book for Killer Evans) are widely thought to be disparate in quality. The Adventures is lauded; The Case-Book is uneven. So thanks to the earlier publication of The Red-Headed League, to the superior quality of The Red-headed League,and to higher quality of The Adventures as compared to The Case-Book, Spaulding has become the more famous of the two villains. Yet it is Killer Evans who shoots Watson, while Spaulding does no harm to his captors. Which of these deserves to be the villain with the higher order of magnitude? Certainly there are arguments for Spaulding, namely his fame and adaptability, but—though Killer Evans is popularly overlooked—in this ranking, he might place more highly as a worse villain than Spaulding, because Evans shot Watson. That said, although Spaulding has never hurt anyone so far as the readers know, he is so renowned, and his story is so widely read, he cannot fall so far down the rankings list as Mr. John Browner, whom we never meet, who acts in jealous rage (rather than with the calculating concern of Vincent Spaulding), and who derives from a more or less mediocre story. So Spaulding will rank higher than Browner, despite the fact that Mr. John Browner’s actions are hideous, nearly beyond the pale. All this is to exemplify how, in ranking the villains, I shall weigh the monstrosity of a villain’s action, but I shall not ignore the quality of the story that the character inhabits nor the renown that the character has won since the time of the story’s publication.
Now, in weighing the actions, I will give greater consideration to characters who are Machiavellian and artful, rather than those who are vulgar and artless. I feel also more predisposed to rank more highly those villains whose work we actually see being done. If the character’s misdeeds are done solely off the page, the characters’ ‘villainousness’ cannot increase as greatly in my mind as compared to the villainy of those characters whose work we see played out before us. And, I intend to consider the villains’ victims. The more vulnerable the victim, the worse the villain, e.g.: children will be considered more vulnerable than a bank, and so villains who put children at risk shall be considered worse.
Finally, this ranking is not meant to have the rigor of science. My own ranking of villains may differ greatly from any other reader’s (although I have never seen another ranking of Holmes villains, and I believe that mine is the first). My rankings have my own preferences and biases built into them, which I believe is perfectly acceptable because we are talking of literature, a form of art, and there is no empirical way to rank Holmes villains. That said, I will try to remain true to what I feel is the spirit of the task, and I shall do my best to avoid (for instance) obvious blunders like ranking Isadora Klein ahead of Professor Moriarty. That said, off we go.
