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 Five: The Invisibles
In this tier we have criminals whose crimes are less justifiable than the actions undertaken by the people in the tier above. But because the characters in this tier never directly appear in their story, their ranking as a villain is correspondingly low.
53. Hugo Oberstein, The Bruce-Partington Plans
Oberstein is a foreign agent who kills Cadogen West to obtain the Bruce-Partington plans. In the great game—where a cold war is ever-present; where spies are trained to lie, steal, and (if necessary) kill to complete their objectives; where international intrigue and aristocratic diplomacy are a thin veneer to hide the task of vying for world domination—Oberstein is hardly to be faulted, for he’s playing the game by its rules. That the Navy’s junior clerk, Cadogen West, loses his life to the affair is no more than a gentle setback for the British, for West was a player in our world’s highest-stakes game, one whose ultimate goals are (and always have been) national prosperity and global hegemony.
52. Eduardo Lucas, The Second Stain
Like Oberstein, Lucas is a spy who’s playing the game for his own country. He is killed for his efforts, and so, if his work is properly recognized, he will quietly receive commendation from his country’s intelligence agency. Though a man who lived a double life, Lucas did not get to die but once, so readers are indebted to him for that death, one which spawned a wonderful mystery.
51. Mademoiselle Henri Fournaye, The Second Stain
Mme. Fournaye is, according to the newspapers, insane, and it is she who murders Eduardo Lucas, the spy who has blackmailed Lady Hilda Trelawny Hope. Suspecting Lucas of swanning about with other women, Fournaye is driven into a rage, and she embellishes the promiscuous man’s heart with the ornament of a sharp knife. Thus decorated, Lucas falls. His blood stains the carpet and soaks the floor, thereby setting the stage for the crafty mystery to come.
50. John Straker, Silver Blaze
Born loser John Straker is dead by the time that the story opens, but that doesn’t exonerate him from his crimes. A muck-grubber financially and romantically, both as a profligate spender and as an adulterer, Straker doubles down on bad decision-making by attempting to hamstring a racehorse. Silver Blaze boots the trainer in the head, and, if Straker hadn’t died, one would have hoped the horse’s kick would have knocked some sense into his addled skull. However, the horse cured the man of his worldly woes, and Straker was left at the center of a problem that he created and, as usual for him, was busted by.
49. Colonel Barclay, Crooked Man
Like Straker, Barclay’s already dead at the start of the story. However, unlike Straker, Barclay’s crimes are not limited to hurting an animal. He’s sent off his rival, Henry Wood, to die, and, in so doing, he’s betrayed his country. Karma doesn’t get him till the very end, and by then, it can be argued that Colonel Barclay has gotten away with his crime. Perhaps his soul rotted, but while Wood was being tortured by the enemy, Barclay was bouncing off the boxsprings with Miss Nancy Devoy. Afterwards, Wood lived in poverty, and he was forced to beg for his subsistence while Barclay lived the life of an upper-middle class Englishman—tea and cake and huffing and puffing and Aldershot, wot. One can make an argument that Barclay never did get his just desserts, and that he got away with the crime for all his life. That he was struck down suddenly by “thundering apoplexy” (as Robert Louis Stevenson once called it) and/or by his conscience was a fate better by far than the colonel deserved.
48. Sir Eustace Brackenstall, Abbey Grange
Like Straker and Barclay and the Norwegian Blue, we meet Sir Brackenstall after he has ceased to be. “Bereft of life, he rests in peace.” “He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.” In his life, though, Sir Brackenstall was one very bad man. He set a dog on fire, threw a decanter at the maid, and abused his wife. Like Ronder, the circus master in The Veiled Lodger, we may be glad that Sir Brackenstall has gone the way of the dodo, for he is one of those men whom the world is better off without.
47. Ronder, The Veiled Lodger
We may safely lump Ronder of The Veiled Lodger in with the same family of vermin that Sir Eustace Brackenstall and Colonel Barclay belong to. A man who is dead when the story begins, Ronder the circus master was a domestic abuser, an animal abuser, and an alcoholic bully. He is better off forgotten, and no more words need be spared on this horrible creature.
46. Biddle, Hayward, Moffat, and the Page, The Resident Patient
Having served their time, Biddle, Hayward, and Moffat of the Worthington Bank Gang deliver some vigilante justice to the rat Blessington and leave him hanging by his neck. Like John Calhoun, these three avengers are never seen and are ultimately lost at sea. They can rest in peace, knowing their payback was made. The page (who was Biddle, Hayward, and Moffat’s confederate) is never prosecuted and thus escapes by a whisker.
45. Sir George Burnwell, Beryl Coronet
A rake and a cad (as the Victorians might have called him), as well as a thief, Sir George Burnwell steals the Mary’s heart and convinces her to help him abstract the coronet. That he acts indecently is indisputable. But Sir Burnwell does not stoop so low as to be a traitor to his family, as Mary does.
44. Beddoes and Hudson, The Gloria Scott
The police suspect Hudson of murdering Beddoes and fleeing; Holmes suspects Beddoes of murdering Hudson and fleeing. As relates to our ranking of villains, the truth is neither here nor there. For neither Beddoes nor Hudson are significant characters upon the page, though Hudson is the stronger personality of the two. Just as some Holmes tales have no transgressor, others have more than one. In The Gloria Scott’s case, its main villain is Jack Prendergast.
43. Jack Prendergast, The Gloria Scott
So often when folk are imperious enough to say such things as, “My name is Jack Prendergast, and by God! You’ll learn to bless my name before you’ve done with me,” the exact opposite is true. Here, we have every reason to believe that James Armitage, aka J.P. Trevor, was likely cursing Prendergast’s name by the time the bloodthirsty man’s work was through. It was Prendergast who led the ship’s insurrection, Prendergast who threw sailors (alive or dead) overboard, and it was Prendergast who cut the throat of the ship’s surgeon. If ever a man was born swashbuckling, virile, and delinquent, it was Prendergast, and if ever a man deserved to die in lionhearted rebellion aboard an exploding convict ship, well, that man would as well be Jack Prendergast.
42. Harold Latimer and Wilson Kemp, The Greek Interpreter
These two men imprison, torture, and kill the unfortunate Paul Kratides, brother of Sophy Kratides, who has fallen into the power of Harold Latimer. Our good detective and chronicler are too late to save Mr. Kratides from the charcoal fumes, but they do manage to help Mr. Melas, of the story’s title, survive. Latimer and Kemp are later found dead in the modern-day Hungarian capital, and this reader hopes that Sophy is now living, in as much tranquility as she can muster, upon a beautiful Grecian isle.
41. Giuseppe “Black” Gorgiano, Red Circle
Like Gennaro Lucca, we hear only of Gorgiano through backstory, as told by Emilia Lucca, Gennaro’s wife. A mafia killer who is “red to the elbow” in murder, Gorgiano finally messes with the wrong paisano’s wife, and, for his amorous advances, he gets knifed to death. The Italian mafia code is famous for its prizing of omertà but, less well known (though no less sacrosanct) is the code’s proscription against coveting another man’s wife. Gorgiano did so, and Emilia’s husband did him right by the laws of every society, including the mafia’s.
40. Henderson/Don Juan Murillo/The Tiger of San Pedro and Lucas/Lopez, Wisteria Lodge
The Tiger of San Pedro and his secretary are on the run, and noble Garcia loses his life in attempting to take the Tiger’s. Torturers, abusers, and men who hurt women, Murillo and Lucas are certainly criminals. They flit off to Madrid where, six months later, their avengers catch and kill them in a luxury hotel. We readers see little more than a newspaper clipping of the Tiger and his secretary, though I would have loved to have seen more.
39. James Calhoun, The Five Orange Pips
Calhoun, the leader of the KKK faction that murders John Openshaw, is never seen, and his ship, the Lone Star out of Savannah, is lost at sea. Calhoun is presumed dead, and, bearing in mind his crimes and the clan that he led, we may hope that the sea was a cold one.
