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
Tier Seven: The Lambs
Not all Holmes stories have a villain, nor do they all need one. In these stories, the darkness of crime fades away as investigative illumination shines upon them, and we see that, where we might expect a criminal, none exists.
73. Animals in The Speckled Band, The Veiled Lodger, The Lion’s Mane, & Silver Blaze
In the Holmes canon, those animals that kill people shall not be held accountable by this reader for their actions because they are animals. Animals have no human code of ethics. I consider these animals, in each case, to be guiltless victims of extenuating circumstance rather than malevolent perpetrators.
72. Dr. Leslie Armstrong, The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
Shadows lie over Dr. Leslie Armstrong till truth’s lambency shows us he’s an ally of the missing three-quarter. Some argument may here be made that the “noble miser” Lord Mount-James is a villain, but, to this reader, Mount-James seems just to be a pitiful rich man.
71. Colonel Emsworth, The Blanched Soldier
Suspicion is cast on Colonel Emsworth in regards to the disappearance of his son, Godfrey, but Holmes shows us that the colonel is merely harboring his son. Once Godfrey is found in his safe haven, readers learn that nothing serious is amiss.
70. Henry Wood, The Crooked Man
As Henry Wood says, providence killed the duplicitous colonel who stole fair Nancy’s hand. One look at Wood, and Colonel Barclay’s guilty conscience brought him up, cold and stiff, in his tracks, and (one may imagine) that it was with a heinous and strangled cry upon his lips, and with his hand grasping at his own heart or head, that he went down like a stout wooden plank, never again to rise. Such a fate may be the harvest when one sows one’s conscience with such contemptible acts.
69. Professor Presbury, The Creeping Man
Professor Presbury falls into much the same preserve as the aforementioned animals, for he is not entirely human when he acts as he does. After partaking of a strange serum, the professor is partially transformed into a langur-like creature, and he goes crawling about on the lawn, out of his senses. The professor is a victim of his own experimentation.
68. Miss Hatty Doran, The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
As Holmes says with regard to Miss Hatty Doran, “I fail to see that anyone is to blame.” Here we have a lack of communication which leads to mystery. And Lord St. Simon, who thought he was to be married, finds his fiancée unexpectedly married to someone else. While one cannot blame St. Simon for feeling chafed, there is no true villain to this story, and we ought not think too unkindly of the jilted nobleman for not sharing a meal with Hatty and her new husband.
67. Neville St. Clair, aka Hugh Boone, The Man with the Twisted Lip
Hugh Boone, in a sense, has indeed done away with Neville St. Clair, but a bath is all that is needed to resurrect the genteel Englishman. Donning a disguise, Neville St. Clair vanishes daily and emerges as Hugh Boone, but, as the inspector says, he can’t be charged with a crime for the act. Here we have, as Holmes says, the commission of “a very grave error” and indeed Holmes is right—Neville should have trusted his wife with his secret.
66. Effie, The Adventure of the Yellow Face
Effie (who calls her husband “Jack” though his name is Grant) is the closest approximation to a villain that we have in this story. Certainly Effie behaves badly. She leaves her daughter in the United States in care of another woman while she travels to England. She masks her daughter. She lies to her husband. She keeps a locket of her ex-husband around her neck while she’s married to Grant/Jack Munro. However, Effie is not a criminal in the eyes of the law, and no Western court would so much as bring her to trial.
