The Sherlock Holmes Stories Ranked From Worst to Best

A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories by David Murphy

The Rankings

The Eighth Tier: Artistic Enervation in an Inconstant Age

As with Agatha Christie’s relationship with Hercule Poirot, the shine of Sherlock Holmes reputedly wore off with his author.  On the 1^st of July, 1930, Doyle spoke with The Daily Mail about Holmes, and he had this to say of his famous creation: “No, I have done with him.  To tell the truth, I am rather tired of hearing myself described as the author of Sherlock Holmes.  One would think I had written nothing but detective stories.”

One can empathize.  After penning hundreds of thousands of words about the detective, after spending countless hours thinking of plots for him, after giving streams of answers to a thirsty audience about the sleuth’s next exploits, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may be forgiven if he secretly wondered, at times, whether his life might have been better had he never invented Sherlock at all.  The strain of continually creating pretty new problems for Sherlock, coupled with the general public’s insistence on ignoring Doyle’s other works—many of which he put his heart and soul into writing—would likely have fatigued even the hardiest author.  These eighth tier stories were hopefully, at least, financially profitable for Conan Doyle, for they seem to want the gains of artistic merit.  

56. The Adventure of the Three Gables (October 1926, Case-Book)

While many reviewers find nothing redeeming in The Three Gables, I find a little something.  Its premise is strong and arresting.  The Three Gables’ premise is that a woman finds herself compromised by letters that she wrote, and she offers to buy the house where those letters are kept—provided that the owner leave everything in the house.  When the owner, unnerved by the unusual proviso, declines to sell the house, the woman sends ruffians to forcibly abstract the letters.  She is successful in this attempt, and Holmes must correctly interpret the robbery’s significance.  I believe that Doyle could have successfully used this plot.

However, The Three Gables is most notable for the unsympathetic and vexing treatment of its characters.  Doyle put particular emphasis on creating an unflattering depiction of Steve Dixie, a boxer, and time has seen the portrayal age poorly.  And, when not objectional, the dialogue in The Three Gables is stilted and wooden, e.g., “You have the feelings of a gentleman. How quick a woman’s instinct is to find it out. I will treat you as a friend.”

Furthermore, the integration of Doyle’s characters in The Three Gables feels hamfisted and slapdash, and the villain’s confession to the crime is absurd.  To elicit The Three Gable’s villain’s confession, Holmes travels to the home of one Isadora Klein, a woman of whom Watson writes, “So roguish and exquisite did she look as she stood before us with a challenging smile that I felt of all Holmes’ criminals this was the one whom he would find it hardest to face.”  Though Holmes has not a shred of evidence, and though he’s not even troubled to explain his theory, this supposedly intelligent and willful woman simply confesses—in preposterous, contrived language—the whole of her crime. 

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had but paused in his writing to reflect, he would have readily seen that most people—and especially any person imbued with such strong qualities as those that Isadora Klein is alleged to possess—would be incapable of such an admission.  So, rather than being an arch-criminal, or even another Irene Adler, Isadora Klein earns an undesirable place on the lowest floor of Holmes’ house of villains. 

Ineffectual plotting and uncharitable character treatment make The Three Gables along with The Mazarin Stone, The Creeping Man, and The Sussex Vampire the four worst stories in the Holmes canon.  Nearly earning a tier unto themselves, these four are perhaps most representative of the lack of originality, the powerless writing, and the disaffected spirit which suffuse so many stories in The Case-Book. 

Now, with this eviscerating critique made, I feel that it’s incumbent on me to say that some empathy and sensitivity toward the circumstances which induced Doyle to publish these stories are warranted, for, in my opinion, it is rarely either just or right for the public to read an author’s story (even a bad one), and to condemn it perfunctorily.  Even hastily written stories take time to write, and stories which are written to satiate demand ought to be given extra sympathy, since the author may be presumed to be trying, with his or her works, to placate and to satisfy (sometimes out of no more than a sense of obligation, politeness, or goodwill) a ravenous marketplace.  In such instances, an author’s intent and situation ought to be taken into account.

55. The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (October 1921, Case Book)

Perhaps the most difficult, poorly written, and tedious story in the canon to slog through, The Mazarin Stone is 5,600 words long, and it reads as if it was feverishly scribbled down in half a day then was sent—without the inconvenience of revision or editing—straight to the printer’s press.  Like The Empty House, Mazarin features as its plot a wax bust of Holmes and an assassination attempt on his life.  Also like The Empty House, The Mazarin Stone appears as the first story in a volume.  Such reiteration leads this reader to wonder whether, when Doyle was reluctantly returning to his Holmes stories, he might have morosely perused over those earlier tales which he used to begin his story collections, settled upon The Empty House as a model, and proceeded from there.  If so, he might have been using the method as a way to awaken his creative spirit, in hopes of channeling the inspiration that empowered him to write groundbreaking stories thirty years before.  Having started The Case-Book with The Mazarin Stone, Doyle would have had no idea that six years and twelve stories later, the collection would come to be regarded as a rather mixed bag.  If he had, he might have taken a different route through the writing process.  One can only imagine the direction that The Case-Book could have gone had Doyle managed, in every story, to linger over his word choices and to introduce us to vivified, fascinating characters in the cast of such worthies as Colonel Sebastian Moran, Jabez Wilson, and The Musgrave Ritual’s clever butler, Brunton.  Had Doyle been able to do so, such stories as The Mazarin Stone could have had its facets better cut, its polish brightened, and its aspect improved to that of a sovereign treasure.

54. The Adventure of the Creeping Man (March 1923, Case-Book)

I believe that The Creeping Man needs to be seated properly in historical context.  Published in 1923, the story concerns a professor who takes an elixir in hopes that he will become young again.  The serum is imperfect because it is derived from the blood of a langur, a kind of monkey, and the drink’s only real effect is that it transforms the professor into a unique sort of low primate for the serum’s life’s short duration.  In The Creeping Man, Holmes says, “The real source (of evil) lies, of course, in that untimely love affair which gave our impetuous professor the idea that he could only gain his wish by turning himself into a younger man. When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it.”

The Creeping Man was published around the same time as stories with similar motifs: H.P. Lovecraft’s works, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, and Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy.  In addition to these shorter stories, such novels and novellas as The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells in 1896, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne in 1864, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson in 1886, made for a place in literature where scientific experimentation, the question of nature vs nurture, and investigations into anthropology were popular.  After all, it was only in 1859 that Darwin’s Origin of the Species was first published, and the public began reckoning with evolution.  Well known as a spiritualist, it is not surprising that Doyle (author of such works as The Lost World, a novel where pre-historic animals survive in the unexplored jungles of South America) would pen an occult story like The Creeping Man. 

Still, The Creeping Man doesn’t work, and, in my opinion, the main problems with The Creeping Man are twofold.  In the first place, the story’s solution is too supernatural for a Holmes story.  Holmes is, first and foremost, a naturalist and logician (as evidenced by his unwillingness to attribute the glowing hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles to supernatural origins), so stories such as The Creeping Man—and others found in The Case-Book—suffer most when Doyle allows his fascination with the paranormal to seep into their solutions.  In the second place, and perhaps more damningly, The Creeping Man is just poorly written.  For example, when Watson describes himself in relation to Sherlock, he writes, “But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind.  I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence.”  These sentences read more like those from a first draft than a work meriting high literary adulation, as many of Doyle’s other stories do, and such prose is enough to further restrain The Creeping Man.

53. The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (January 1924, Case-Book)

Exsanguinated dialogue, atrophied prose, and scarcely credible assumptions suck the life from this moribund story.  The premise is that of a South American mother who sucks blood from her baby’s neck, and, in so doing, is mistakenly thought by her husband to be a vampire.  In actuality, it is the baby’s elder brother who is poisoning the baby with darts, and the mother is saving her baby’s life by sucking the dart’s poison from the wound.  As Holmes himself might have said, we readers are alternately being given credit for having too much imagination and too little, for the plot’s coherence seems bafflingly equivocal.  The narration tells us that Mrs. Ferguson has twice previously beaten the elder child (the child who sought to poison the baby) as punishment for his having tried to kill the baby.  Readers’ credulity is stretched when we are asked to believe that a husband could be so morbidly fanciful as to arrive at the conclusion that—after two beatings of one child, and neck-suckings on the other—his wife is a vampire.  However, if the husband is the sort to believe this, then it seems even more unlikely that he is also the sort to apply to a detective known for logic and rationality, as Holmes is, for a solution to the problems.

In The Sussex Vampire readers see what is perhaps the most dysfunctional household that Holmes visits in his long tour of them (surpassing even the Copper Beeches, Black Peter’s cabin, and the home of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran).  Yet among these unhealthy mare’s nests, this Sussex home may be the one that is dealt with most lightly.  The narration seems to skim over the gravity of domestic abuse in this story, which even in Victorian times (with their values of “spare the rod and spoil the child”: values that now ring disharmoniously to the modern ear) must have caused conscientious readers to feel disquiet.  At story’s end, Holmes recommends sending the boy away for awhile, which one may suppose was a tolerable remedy for the upper crust.  In an era before therapy, perhaps this was a solution that might have passed muster, but the tone that the narration gives to the incident seems to gloss over anything serious, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Holmes’ rather cavalier recommendation was strong enough to improve the gravely dismal home in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. 

52. The Adventure of the Dying Detective (December 1913, Last Bow)

Dr. John H. Watson—a medical man, and one who over many years has become familiar with Holmes’ extraordinary acting ability and his penchant for disguise—is purportedly fooled by Holmes’ artifice in The Adventure of the Dying Detective.  Holmes is ostensibly wasting away from a rare disease unknown to Watson; Holmes refuses all help, and, when Watson goes to fetch a specialist, Holmes “tiger-springs” from the bed, locks the door, then “staggers” back to bed.  Watson, apparently and incredibly, doesn’t suspect a thing.  That longtime readers are expected to unquestioningly accept this state of affairs is at once a little insulting and more than a trifle absurd.  Written in the year 1913, Holmes has already played a bibliophile, pretended to be Captain Basil, worked undercover in an opium den, acted as a drunken groom, taken falsely ill on numerous occasions, and, most substantively, faked his death.  Readers have long since stopped trusting any of Holmes’ disguises and sham maladies, and Watson does know the detective too well to be fooled (particularly after Holmes leaps out of bed).  Upon seeing a hopping Holmes, Watson’s professional and personal experience would have led him irrevocably to the conclusion that Sherlock was on a case, and that he was faking his illness.  Still, in The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Watson sets aside all his critical thinking, blathers sentimentally, and acts with such blind idiocy as to render him unrecognizable from the competent doctor whose chronicles we have come to trust.  In a series of stories in which Conan Doyle relies heavily on verisimilitude, this plot is poorly marketed snake oil that we cannot trust.

Furthermore, the premise that Holmes’ dying-detective-deception will be a successful indictment tactic is very much open to question.  Indeed, our villain, one Culverton Smith, confesses to his crime, and Smith’s confession is overheard by Watson.  However, one may reasonably wonder whether the British criminal justice system, in prosecuting the case, would not look askance at a confession whose only means of substantiation is via the great detective’s best friend and well-known chronicler.  If I were Culverton Smith’s lawyer, I would be screaming about bias and entrapment from the rafters, and Smith (who is flush enough to afford a butler) must be presumed to have sufficient financial means to secure competent, aggressive, and wily legal counsel.

The typical Doyle story is one with the spice of originality and one or two twists that make the story delightful.  Here we have a fairly straightforward plot premise: Holmes pretends to be dying and so greatly mistrusts Watson’s ability to dissemble that he must fool even him with the fakery.  The purpose of the deception is to entice a confession out of Culverton Smith (who, it must be noted, was not obliged in any way to give one, and who could very easily have thwarted Holmes’ tenuous fasting plan by simply taking the poisoned box and leaving).  If Holmes’ frail plan succeeds, then Holmes’ testimony will be supported by little more than the testimony of his nearest and dearest friend.  Suffice it to say, Doyle has certainly reached more heavenly heights than the laid-low example produced by The Adventure of the Dying Detective.

51. The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger (February 1927, Case-Book)

A story in the Holmes canon that is unique only in that Holmes does nothing in the way to solve it.  Holmes does no theorizing, nor any detective work, so he cannot be held accountable for interpreting, correctly or not, the answer to the riddle of how the circus master’s death came to pass, or how the circus master’s wife was so grievously injured.  Watson hazards a guess (a reasonable one), and then they apply to the lady herself for the matter’s elucidation.  She explains everything, and the rather unlively story comes to a end.  Holmes’ contribution is that he dissuades the poor sufferer from committing suicide with prussic acid, and thus he saves another life. 

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of The Veiled Lodger is in the particulars of its opening statements: Conan Doyle reaffirms his commitment to confidentiality.  Here we can see how the medical life of Conan Doyle communes with his literary life.  The Hippocratic Oath—a cardinal rule, an almost sacred law amongst ethical physicians—was in place during Victorian times, and Holmes’ and Watson’s adherence to it is admirable.  They promise strict confidentiality to their clients, as doctors ought, and this promise is not breached when prised upon even by statesmen, whose influence perhaps carried greater weight in stratified Victorian society than it does in modern times.  Only, Watson and Holmes assure us, when affected parties are lost to the grave (and their relatives lie free from possible injury), or when clients’ consent is given, may secretive and potentially damaging affairs be made public.  At the beginning of The Veiled Lodger, Watson writes to those parties who are writing “agonized letters.”  Watson declares that “no confidence will be abused” and that these parties “have nothing to fear.”  Indeed, he is quite sincere in this pledge, and Doyle’s stories are, subtly but markedly, much better for it.

50.  The Adventure of the Red Circle (March – April 1911, Last Bow)

It’s worth noting what makes Doyle’s writing so powerful, and what makes even pedestrian Holmes stories, such as The Red Circle, eminently readable.  Doyle shares with Charles Dickens an ability to paint the atmosphere of his scene’s settings in an Impressionist way, almost as if he were a literary Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro.  Just as Charles Dickens described the graveyard at the beginning of Great Expectations with broad, blurry language (e.g.: “At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and… that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.”), so does Doyle render his settings’ atmospheres with a very effective smudginess.  To wit, “When we returned to Mrs. Warren’s rooms, the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into one grey curtain, a dead monotone of colour, broken only by the sharp yellow squares of the windows and the blurred haloes of the gas-lamps.”  In the painting world, the Impressionist period ran from about the 1860s to the late 1880s, a run of a little more than twenty years, and the French painters’ influence would have extended to England by Doyle’s time.  Dickens died in 1870, and other Victorian authors (such as Tennyson, Stoker, and the Brontë sisters) had published major works by, or during, the time that Doyle was writing.  The works of these painters and authors must have permeated the literary scene, thereby reaching a Londoner like Doyle.  Doyle’s Impressionistic approaches to atmosphere—in The Red Circle, and throughout his best writing—vivify the weather, the city, and the country.  Sometimes, Doyle gives the weather a personality trait; we read that the weather is “bitterly cold” in Milverton; that there is “fierce weather” in The Five Orange Pips, and there’s “a dull, foggy November day” in Sussex Vampire.  Doyle strikes a fine balance in describing his places: there’s not too much setting, not too little, and what’s there is put in adroitly.

That said, due to its structure, The Red Circle cannot grade out better than mediocre.  Among the strongest Holmes stories are those with a Eureka moment.  And, in my opinion, those adventures that are less adequate are the ones in which Holmes quickly solves the mystery while the reader is left thumbing through pages of backstory.  This is the situation that the reader finds himself in in stories like The Red Circle.  After Black Gorgiano’s hideous and sensational death, Watson spends the majority of Part II providing the reader with Emilia Lucca’s story.  So though the mystery was solved by Holmes almost at once, and though the drama has unfolded, still the story continues on as a two part exercise.  And because we only meet the monstrous Black Gorgiano after he is dead, we are deprived from seeing this burly and iniquitous villain skirmish with Holmes.  Thus, though Doyle’s Impressionistic writing impresses, we cannot help but wonder how much better this story would have been if only the plot had been recast in a way that permitted Holmes and the authorities to ring the black leader of the Red Circle while he was still alive.

49. The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (February-March 1925, Case-Book)

A ho-hum story in The Case-Book.  Strong in spots, but a tendency toward stereotyping and hasty prose ultimately undermines The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.  This reader feels that the prose’s troubles occur mainly when—in 1925, when this story was published—Doyle recasts his character motifs into a mold from the 1890s, and the result is that the characters in The Illustrious Client become play-acting caricatures of people, rather than appearing to be genuine.  The typecasting is so persistent that The Illustrious Client’s characters lose the whiff of authenticity.  Here Doyle presents us with the sneering, aristocratic villain and the piteous, misguided maiden, and he writes of them in terms so facile and cliché that his characterizations create (rather than complex individuals) inferior imitations of men and women.  Instead of floating the story, the characterizations scuttle it.

That said, there are strengths in The Illustrious Client.  It introduces us to the “scorbutic” Shinwell Johnson, a denizen of the underworld, through whose seamy channels he collects scraps of information for Holmes.  Johnson, like Toby the dog and Langdale Pike, has potential.  Imagine how different The Case-Book might have been if a character like Johnson had been used in one or two other stories in the collection, and if that character were more complexly textured.  We might have found someone who transcended to the status of a Mycroft Holmes.  I would have been fascinated to read a Case-Book adventure about Holmes and Johnson, artfully disguised and deep undercover, nearing the discovery of a villain’s secret in some sordid London lair.  Instead, we have flatness: Baron Adelbert Gruner, a character who is a sort of shallow precursor to a Bond villain, a precursor who inhabits a glassy plot that is told in trite prose.

48. The Adventure of the Retired Colourman (January 1927, Case-Book)

A rather transparent revenge story in the style of The Norwood Builder, The Retired Colourman suffers from the same issue that The Red Circle and Wisteria Lodge do, viz.: that of putting the cart before the horse and explaining how Sherlock solved the mystery without showing us what happened.  How fascinating it would have been to actually see Josiah Amberley’s house!  Many macabre readers would have loved to see the Lewisham estate with its air of overgrown dilapidation, its sense of mismanaged grandeur, and, most of all, its hermetically sealed vault that doubled as a murderous gas chamber!  Many of us would have cheerfully followed Holmes and Watson into this place, if only Holmes would have accompanied Watson on Watson’s first visit, and we might have felt intrigued by Holmes’ rising suspicions as he cast his eye over the unsavory place.  Instead, there is little doubt, even from the beginning, what has happened.  It is the old story: A jilted, miserly husband—Josiah Amberley: whose name, character, and crime echo that of Jonas Oldacre of the Norwood Builder—has been ostensibly left by the lady of the house, along with her putative lover, and she has allegedly stolen Amberley’s things.  Really, there being no other suspects and few other hinges on which the plot may turn, the interpretation of events is fairly straightforward, and the reader can easily guess the mystery’s solution.  Amberley has killed his wife; he’s killed her lover; and he’s hidden his own valuables to make it appear as though he’s the victim.  We may chalk up this gauzy attempt at ambiguity to Conan Doyle’s waning, strained interest in Holmes, as this is the third-to-last of his Holmes stories, and he has already utilized many of his most unique plots.

47. The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier (November 1926, Case-Book)

Like The Retired Colourman, The Blanched Soldier features a mystery whose outcome is easily guessed.  Although unoriginal, The Blanched Soldier is saved from a lower placement by Doyle’s characteristically masterful writing.  Still, it cannot rank more highly due to the fact that Holmes has no need to exert his strongest powers in arriving at the solution.  Indeed, Holmes is so sure of his result that, before he makes any inquiries into the case, he brings with him a leprosy specialist to treat poor Godfrey.  So many times before (in The Yellow Face, The Missing Three-Quarter, and Copper Beeches) has Doyle used the concept of shunting an individual away, that the discerning reader cannot help but arrive at this result as the story’s most probable conclusion.  Perhaps the tale’s greatest twist lies in the specialist’s diagnosis.  Godfrey’s disease is not leprosy but ichthyosis.  Although this is a happy discovery, it does not substantively alter the etiolated character of The Blanched Soldier.

The Seventh Tier: THe Hodge-Podge

For a variety of reasons, some stories in the Holmes canon were relegated to the seventh tier.  For instance, in The Three Students, the story’s outcome is so low-stakes as to make it uninteresting; in Five Orange Pips, Holmes’ failure to be more forthcoming costs his client his life, an inexcusable blunder; and in A Case of Identity, it is impossible (for this reader) to believe that Miss Sutherland would not recognize her stepfather.  It is likewise impossible, in that story, for this reader to believe that Holmes had no recourse other than to simply let Mr. Windibank go, particularly when he believes that Mr. Windibank will re-offend in continually worse ways.  These seventh tier stories feature better writing than those of the eighth tier, but the seventh tier stories are frustrating, in one way or another, for me to read, and I cannot help but think that they could all have been improved if they’d been substantially revised.

46. The Adventure of the Three Students (June 1904, Return)

In The Three Students, Holmes is confronted with a sort of riddle: one of three students is alleged to have copied exam proofs on the day before a test is to be given, and Holmes must identify which student is the cheater.  This is one of Holmes’ lowest-stakes mysteries, and it is also the one in which I find some of the greatest fallacies in Doyle’s plots and Holmes’ logic. 

The professor states that he receives the proofs from the printer at about 3:00, and that he must read them over carefully.  He does so till 4:30, when he goes to take tea, and he states that he is out of the room for “rather more than an hour.”  In the time that he’s gone, he suspects a student of entering his office and of copying the proofs.  However, anyone who has ever read proofs (or tried to copy a document’s text with a pencil) knows that it takes far longer to copy a text than to read it, even if the reading is done carefully and the copying haphazardly.  If the text is so long that it takes an unrushed professor more than an hour and a half to read it, what hope could a passing student have of copying it?  A cheater would likely not have tried to copy the text at all, such a task being far too time-consuming and risky.  Instead, even the rawest, most unskilled cheater would have likely read through (or, at most, copied) a few lines, then pranced off to the university library to retrieve the passage.

Holmes arrives on scene, and he makes some permeable deductions that he relies upon as if they were watertight.  He divines that the papers must first be observed in order to attract someone to enter, and he supposes that only a person with adequate height could see the papers.  Holmes singles out Gilchrist (the tallest suspect) as the only student who would have been able to walk past the door, see inside the professor’s office, and notice the papers.  Therefore, Gilchrist must be the culprit.  But I feel that such height-related deductions are a stretch.  There are simply too many other plausible scenarios in which another student might have seen the papers.  It seems possible, for instance, that a student who walks to the professor’s office might knock upon the door, and, needing an answer to an urgent question about the exam, might turn the key (with the intention, once within, of returning the presumably forgotten key to the professor), then open the door, see inside, and discover the exam proofs lying on the professor’s desk.  It is equally possible that any student taking the professor’s Greek exams could venture over to the professor’s office on the day before the big scholarship test.  So, although the three suspected students in the story are “in the habit of using the stair and passing the professor’s door” (so, therefore, they are our only suspects), it seems very possible that, because the test is an important one, other students might break from routine to visit the professor.

Finally, it is stated that the exam cannot be postponed without causing “hideous scandal.”  This I find hard to believe.  While I have no evidence to back my assertion, it is my belief that, for as long as exams have been given, exams have been postponed.  Student complaints, unprepared proctors, unexpected location changes, administrative failures, precipitate weather, and all other sorts of problems can and do crop up.  Accordingly, a postponed exam seems unlikely to cause hideous scandal.  In the event that a professor finds postponement necessary, the students can be informed that there was an issue (without specifying the nature of the issue), a new exam date can be set, and the students—though grumbling—will have a few extra days to study while new proofs are set by the printer.  Such an outcome (rather than hideous scandal) would likely be the result of this unhappy matter.  So though there is the postulation of a handsome little riddle, for the most part I feel that we are given a lesson on dubious plotting in The Adventure of the Three Students.

45. The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist (January 1904, Return)

The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist is one of those stories, like The Five Orange Pips and The Dancing Men, in which more ought to have been done to prevent the client’s unhappy ending.  Where The Solitary Cyclist differs from those others is in Watson’s culpability, for in this story, Watson ought to have been more proactive than he was.  Sent to the scene of the mystery by Holmes, who is working another case, Watson performs in remarkably substandard fashion.  He does, as Holmes notes, nothing of use, and Watson’s greatest strengths—his tenacity and bravery—are left by the wayside.  Watson, if he were but performing up to his own standards, ought to have rented a bicycle of his own, waited in the shrubbery, and confronted the man who was following Violet Smith.  At the very least, Watson ought to have positioned himself in such a fashion as to be able to follow Carruthers (the South African desperado whose heart was melted by the beautiful lady) and so been able to better identify him.  As it stands, Holmes’ indignation with Watson’s efforts is not misplaced.  Watson does little more than to verify the story that Smith put forth, though her story was never in doubt.  Holmes does little better, though he does succeed in satisfactorily sending, with a straight left, the “slogging ruffian” Woodley home in a cart.  (That Holmes later chides Carruthers for not keeping his pistol holstered seems absurd to me; Carruthers seemed to have honor on his side, and I, for one, was as displeased as Carruthers that that hound Woodley survived the gunshot.) 

All in all, Violet Smith has every right to give Holmes and Watson a one star rating for their support.  She engaged Holmes’ services, and she sent him regular updates.  He did very little himself, and he blundered (his own word for his own action) in arriving too late to the scene of the crime.  She was mauled, illegally married off to a brute, and her concerns—though articulately and appropriately expressed—did not stimulate Holmes’ anxiety sufficiently.  He suggests that all will be well once she calls up her new boyfriend and has a change of scenery, and, perhaps, he is right.  But, in reality, she has already undertaken significant, preventable damage, and Heaven only knows what the lingering results of it might be.  Violet might find it hard to trust her next employer, and she might feel skittish in the company of strangers for years to come.  Who is to say what deleterious effects such a sensational event can have upon a person’s life?  At the very least, she will likely be disinclined to recommend Holmes’ practice to her friends, while being inclined to ride bicycles with her partner, Cyril, so that she will never again be a solitary cyclist.

44.  The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (January 1893, Memoirs)

Along with The Engineer’s Thumb, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box is one of the two goriest stories in the Holmes canon.  The Cardboard Box is also, perhaps, one of its emotional: jealousy, lust, and rage dominate this story like no other that Holmes investigates.  The primal urges of man are on full display here, and they lead to senseless, murderous tragedy. 

When a docile, retiring, elderly lady receives a box with a pair of severed ears, Inspector Lestrade suspects a revolting prank that was pulled by some medical students whom the lady had turned out of her premises a few years before.  Holmes, after some scrutiny, understands that a hideous crime has been committed: a double murder, in fact, and one perpetrated by a sailor with poor spelling, an ability to tie knots, and access to tarred string.  The conclusions that Holmes draw are, for him, relatively trivial, and he soon deduces that the cardboard box was received by the wrong sister in the family.  As he interviews the elderly lady, he gains an accounting of her personal history, and he is left with a tenable theory and a second, less tenable one, which he immediately discards.  He takes a carriage to the sister’s house (the sister for whom the package was meant), discovers that she lies prostrate in the throes of brain fever, then lunches with Watson while waiting for the response to a telegram that he’s sent.  The telegram confirms his hunch, and Holmes communicates with Lestrade that the man for whom they are looking for, the prime and only suspect in the case, is the husband of the third sister—Mary, a woman who is now, presumably, deceased.  Indeed, Mary and her lover, Alec, were murdered by Mary’s husband, a man who beat them to death, cut off their ears, and sank them at sea.  Jim Browner, the culpable husband, is arrested by Lestrade at Browner’s next port of call.  This penitent man confesses everything, and he finds himself awaiting punishment in the dock.  Holmes and Watson are left to speculate on what purpose such senseless violence can serve, and they discover, like the rest of us, that they have no good answers. 

Because most of the particulars in this severed ears story are supplied by the confession that Jim Browning gives, and because the story is one of such hopelessness, I find little redeeming merit in The Cardboard Box.  The story is well written, but not spectacularly so; it does not contain the sparkling precepts that readers can find in such stories as Boscombe Valley, nor does it possess the admirable and likeable breakfast scenes of such gems as The Blue Carbuncle.  The content of this story is much more visceral than is usual within a Doyle story.  While there’s no description of blood and guts, there nevertheless exists a gruesomeness to the very notion of an innocent old woman receiving a cardboard box filled with preservative salt and lopped off human ears.  With so many other deserving stories in the Holmes canon to choose from, it’s hard to find reasons to read and re-read a tale like The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.

43.  The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor (April 1892, Adventures)

This is one of Doyle’s stories which displays to the reader those endearing qualities of organization and care that so often the movies about Holmes (to their discredit and to their disservice) frequently ignore.  The Noble Bachelor opens with Holmes returning from an afternoon stroll to find a letter from Lord St. Simon waiting for him, and, to learn more about his client, the famous detective consults his reference books.  Screen adaptations about Holmes (especially those aimed at a popular audience, such as those starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch) very often conflate Holmes’ wild and ecstatic moments of genius with a chaotic and disorganized environment, but Conan Doyle is careful not to permit this.  Holmes may have his oddities (he keeps his tobacco in a Persian slipper and decorates the wall by punching “V.R.” with bullets [a pastime that I also would thoroughly enjoy, albeit shooting out a bald eagle design rather than a Victoria Regina]), but he is, on the whole, methodical and organized. 

Holmes’ reference books must have taken many days to compile and to maintain.  His chemical pursuits are studies in precision.  And the hours which he devotes to the study and writing of his many monograms (some, for instance, on the differences between one hundred and forty types of tobacco, as outlined in Boscombe) are long.  While it may seem to Hollywood as though a sensational individual who absorbs the intricacies of the world as if by magic is most attractive, the opposite is in fact true.  Like The Rocky film series which is improved by its training scenes, the sedulous study, meticulous organization, and almost paralyzing exactitude of Holmes’ regimen make the man more human, more relatable, and more empathetic.  When Holmes is laissez-faire in his treatment toward others, indifferent toward humanity, and careless in his method, then he is less endearing than when he shows his emotion for Watson, his empathy, and his painstaking organization.  When adaptations, especially popular ones, replace his mindful nature with the purported frenzy of genius, these adaptations weaken Holmes’ character—although they may think they are strengthening it.  Better to show, as in The Noble Bachelor, how willingly Holmes listens to Watson’s brief and how his hard-won knowledge is actually won.  The driest, most solitary aspects of Holmes’ study are captivating.

Bearing this in mind, in The Noble Bachelor, the case that Lord St. Simon brings to Holmes is a trivial one for our detective, thanks to his rigorous study of crime.  Holmes has solved the problem before St. Simon has even left the room, and Holmes confides to Watson how he reached the solution so quickly.  Holmes says that he has, “knowledge of pre-existing cases which serve me so well.  There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War.”  Again, this apparently sorcerous ability to solve cases at the drop of a hat comes from Holmes’ preparation.  He never misses the agony or crime columns in the paper.  He tracks cases from around the world.  He is deeply immersed in his field, more so than any official policeman or any other amateur detective.  The work that he does behind the scenes is what makes him appear so extraordinary, though, as he explains time and again, there is no real wizardry behind the results that he conjures; any perceived magic is an illusion; his only resources are logic, deduction, and hard work.  In The Noble Bachelor, Holmes has only to locate the bride, and, with the aid of a few well-informed guesses and some legwork, he speedily finds her.  Once reunited with Lord St. Simon, Hatty explains herself and her position, and she goes off with the man whom she truly loved, while Lord St. Simon remains unmarried, the deflated but still noble bachelor.

42.  A Case of Identity (September 1891, Adventures)

What a devilish fellow is Mr. Angel!  The story of this demon opens with Holmes opining that truth is stranger than fiction, and it finds Watson debating him—an eminently more welcome circumstance than those situations in which Watson is a slave to Holmes’ opinions.  In this case, the fiction seems stranger than the truth, for it seems highly improbable to me that a young woman such as Miss Sutherland, even with her short sight, could fail to conceive that Mr. Hosmer Angel—though he has whiskers, glasses, and speaks in a low voice—is not the same man as her stepfather.  They meet at a ball; they take walks together; they meet at the church before they are to marry.  I suppose that a request for readers to suspend their disbelief is implicit here (of that same species of disbelief suspension that disables Clark Kent’s peers from identifying him as Superman), but this request does make me want to snort with dissatisfaction and roll my eyes.  More vexing still is Holmes’ perplexing decision not to inform Miss Sutherland of her stepfather’s duplicity.

The situation is that Miss Sutherland comes to Holmes in a state of anxiety; Holmes solves her case, and he sends her away with the advice that she must forget about Hosmer Angel.  The pitiable young woman says that she cannot forget about him, and she leaves.  Holmes then confronts Mr. Windibank, aka Mr. Hosmer Angel, with the facts of the deception, and Mr. Windibank confesses.  Holmes releases him, and he tells Watson that he shall not tell Miss Sutherland what has happened, because she will not believe him.  But this solution is quite unacceptable.  It leaves the vulnerable Miss Sutherland as continual prey to Mr. Windibank’s current deception, and, what’s perhaps worse, Holmes’ reticence to speak the truth will allow her unscrupulous stepfather to make further plans against the poor girl and, ultimately, may lead to the ruin of her life. 

All this uncertainty, of course, could be avoided in any number of ways.  Holmes could have asked Miss Sutherland to remain hidden behind a curtain and to listen while Mr. Windibank confesses his misdeed, and, through such means, she would have heard the truth from her stepfather’s own lips, and she would have believed it (or at least been given a golden opportunity to believe it).  Holmes could have shown Mr. Windibank’s letter to Miss Sutherland, a letter which has the same typewritten peculiarities as those that Mr. Hosmer Angel’s letters has, and, in this way, Holmes would have presented her with proof of the stepfather’s chicanery.  Holmes could have asked that Miss Sutherland set an elaborate trap for Mr. Hosmer Angel, declaring that, if Mr. Angel would but appear again, she would give all her inheritance to him.  Such a trap would likely have drawn the phony character out, and he’d have been liable to exposure by Holmes and Watson.  These three outcomes I have thought of offhand, and Conan Doyle—who brilliantly plotted many stories in accordance with a high moral code—certainly had the wits and rectitude to do better by Miss Sutherland in A Case of Identity.

41.  The Five Orange Pips (November 1891, Adventures)

A well-written but unconscionable story, The Five Orange Pips is the Holmes tale that leaves me most at odds with Conan Doyle.  Conan Doyle ranked it as one of his best twelve stories, saying that it has a “certain dramatic quality of its own.”  And indeed, the story is dramatic in its own way.  The descriptions of weather when John Openshaw enters 221B Baker Street, the picturesque madness with which Openshaw describes his uncle tearing around the garden with a revolver, and the petite menace of the dried orange pips themselves are all dramatic.  However, Holmes’ advice is remarkably opaque, and that opacity probably costs Openshaw his life. 

After hearing Openshaw’s account, Holmes advises Openshaw to return home and to place the pips in the box at the sun dial.  This advice, if not for the omission of Holmes’ conjectures, would be sound.  But because Holmes leaves so many of his deductions unarticulated and unelucidated, a fair-minded reader cannot help but wonder whether Holmes was inexcusably unforthcoming.  Holmes understood that there was immediate peril for Openshaw, because he remonstrated Openshaw (who’d only received the pips the day before) for the delay in consulting him.  Nevertheless, Holmes sends Openshaw away, then, after sitting “for some time in silence” with his pipe, deduces that there is “deadly urgency” and proceeds to outline to Watson nearly the entirety of the circumstances which surround this lethal matter.  He begins to play the violin, and one cannot help but think of the quote that paraphrases 17^th century playwright George Daniel: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” 

Had Holmes, who felt a great measure of the pips’ gravity, instead asked Openshaw to remain a little longer while he mulled over the case’s features (and not sent Openshaw out into the storm), then Holmes would have been able to detail to Openshaw the same conclusions that he shared with Watson.  Such information could have saved Openshaw’s life, and there is every reason to suppose that Holmes ought to have requested that his visitor stay awhile, and to allow him to fully cogitate on the mystery of the pips. 

This is an instance where I believe that Conan Doyle would have been better served by making Openshaw into a character who, like his father, was rash and headstrong.  If Openshaw were reckless, then Holmes could have advised Openshaw to wait awhile, but Openshaw would have refused, saying that he would not be intimidated.  Openshaw would have gone into the storm against Holmes’ advice, and so met his death.  Such an ending for Openshaw would have cast Holmes in a blameless light.  As it stands, Holmes’ undue reticence and failure to urge greater restraint are reprehensible, and they leave me far from agreement with Conan Doyle in regard to the sentiment that The Five Orange Pips is one of his best.

40.  The Adventure of the Gloria Scott (April 1893, Memoirs)

The Adventure of the Gloria Scott is one of those Holmes stories in which backstory replaces mystery.  Like A Study in Scarlet and The Five Orange Pips, readers are given a long tour through a history that ties Holmes’ contemporary conundrum to its actors, and, at the end of the account, the Holmes story concludes with a short commentary from Holmes that serves to comprise an ending.  Unfortunately, these types of narrative structures, the ones which are so heavily indebted to backstory, are cumbersome and painstaking to read.  The reason for this is that the Holmes mystery in these sorts of Doyle stories is mostly solved.  The reader is not permitted to puzzle or speculate; instead, the reader is told what is, essentially, a tale to plod through.

One may wonder whether Gloria Scott was written after Holmes read such stories as Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, because Gloria Scott seems to share motifs with both.  In Kidnapped, David Balfour and Alan Breck find themselves defending a stronghold aboard a ship against mutineers, much as is the case for the characters in Gloria Scott.  Also in Gloria Scott, the character of Jack Prendergast—domineering, intelligent, and murderous—seems, in these ways, to be derivative of Long John Silver.  Both Prendergast and Silver secretly controlled a powerful faction of those people aboard the ship, and both Silver and Prendergast were Machiavellian and merciless in implementing their plans’ executions.  Neither seemed to regard human life as much more valuable than a grain of rice, and both seemed to value, above all, self-preservation.  The books by Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883 and Kidnapped, 1886) were very much popular at the time, and it is not unlikely that Doyle read them over the course of some evenings and then was inspired to write The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.

The Sixth Tier: The Enjoyables

While some satisfaction may be gleaned from reading the stories in the seventh tier, the overall effect of each story is vexing.  Beginning here, with The Enjoyables, each story has places of satisfaction, and each is ultimately redeeming.  From Wisteria Lodge with its sensational premise of a man waking up to find the occupants of the country house all vanished, to The Yellow Face with its optimistic ending, these eleven imperfect Holmes stories leave me feeling more or less contented.

39.  The Adventure of the Wisteria Lodge (September – October 1908, Last Bow)

While perhaps one of the most middling stories in the canon, Wisteria Lodge has an extraordinarily sensational premise: a creditable Englishman is invited for an overnight stay in a country mansion for the purpose of providing an alibi for vengeful Central Americans who wish to murder a tyrannical former dictator.  Our Englishman, Eccles, does stay the night, yet when he wakes in the morning, the house is abandoned.  Eccles seeks out Holmes, and, in the course of ascertaining Holmes’ advice, Eccles and Holmes learn that Eccles’ host, one Garcia, was murdered in the night.  We are introduced to Inspector Baynes of the Surrey Constabulary, far and away the greatest of any of the policemen with whom Holmes works.

Wisteria Lodge is well-written, and its mystery is fairly unique.  And though we are afflicted with the burden of reading through the backstory of the deposed tyrant, and though we never see The Tiger of San Pedro (or even his equally fascinating underling Henderson), the story is redeemed by Baynes and the presentation of voodoo.  Baynes succeeds in mystifying Holmes with his misleading and intentional arrest of the wrong man.  Baynes matches Holmes’ sleuthing skills every step of the way, and, in fact, learns the true identity of the villain before Holmes does.  His success is brilliant.  It is no wonder that Doyle does not employ Baynes again in any other Holmes story.  To have a second star who shines as brightly as Holmes would bedazzle the reader so greatly that they would not know which protagonist to focus upon.  Baynes’ luminosity might prove confusing. 

With regard to the plot, the slaughtered chicken, the zinc bucket of blood, and the burnt animal bones constitute a diverting red herring.  I remember, during the first time that I ever read Wisteria Lodge, that I pondered deeply over the significance of these things as I sought to work out the mystery’s solution.  On reaching the story’s end, I felt pleasantly surprised that the chicken, blood-bucket, and burnt bones were merely red herrings, for I felt their inclusion was artful.  The voodoo element is neither overdone, nor is it unnecessary.  It serves its purpose—that of misdirection—perfectly.  Still, as with the case of Black Gorgiano, I would have liked to meet The Tiger of San Pedro, and, if Conan Doyle had sent Watson and Holmes to Madrid to capture him there, I would have been delighted to read many pages more about the pursuit in the bizarre adventure of The Wisteria Lodge.    

38. The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place (April 1927, Case-Book)

A rather macabre and fascinating story, partly cloudy in its resolution, and novel in some respects, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place is the last story that Doyle ever published for Holmes, and it ends the canon on a good note.  Originally titled The Adventure of the Black Spaniel, its name was changed before publication.  But the title might have been better in its unpublished form, for Shoscombe Old Place sounds much like Boscombe Valley, and the lady’s beloved Spaniel plays an important (though not conclusive) role in this story.

More than once has Doyle used the idea of dogs in his stories to useful effect, and the most famous of these, Silver Blaze, like Shoscombe, also involves horse-racing, gambling, and a desperate need for money.  Here in Shoscombe, the dog’s sense of smell confirms that Holmes is on the right scent.  Still, Holmes must take further measures, and his hunt leads him to a creepy crypt.  Like in The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, in Shoscombe, a pair of the dead will be concealed by a single grave.  But though there’s some evocation of old plots, Doyle’s storytelling is nevertheless impelling enough to carry readers on.  The description of Sir Robert Norberton appearing at the entrance to the crypt is powerful, and the prose shows that good writers—even in the twilit, less motivated stages of their careers—can still write well. 

For instance, John Mason’s account of the Shoscombe matter, when he brings it before Holmes, is really exemplary.  Mason starts off upon the subject of madness, wondering whether his irascible employer has gone out of his mind.  Mason’s recital becomes ever more intriguing as it goes on, for not once but twice does Mason succeed in making Holmes start with surprise.  First, Mason introduces us to the crypt: a weird and attractive place.  Once we are entranced by this locale, Mason tells us of the presence of ancient bones from an unknown human skeleton, remains that have appeared in the crypt without explanation.  Certainly the case is fantastic enough for Holmes to investigate at once; it is just the thing he lives for. 

And though the reader can quickly approximate the story’s final resolution, there are some points that need Holmes’ help in clearing up.  It seems apparent, for instance, that the dog is aware that its mistress has vanished; still it is not clear what has caused her demise—perhaps, as Holmes suggests, Sir Robert Norberton has murdered her.  Perhaps, as it turns out, she has died of natural causes.  Holmes establishes the truth, refers the matter to the police, and Norberton’s story ends well.  Sir Robert is guilty only of a “delay in registering the deceased,” and, like the modern story of Hans Kristian Rausing (the real-life Swedish billionaire who lived with his wife’s corpse in their Belgravian apartment, and whose sister owns Granta magazine), Norberton was let off with a slap on the wrist by the British authorities.  Thus, in imitating life, even some of Doyle’s farthest-fetched stories, like The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, chime with truth.

37.  The Adventure of the Crooked Man (July 1893, Memoirs)

“You may talk o’ gin and beer  
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,  
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter  
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.”

So writes, of Aldershot, Rudyard Kipling, and, many years later, George MacDonald Fraser—who was one hell of a good writer—used with well-intentioned irony Kipling’s line as the title of his book, Quartered Safe Out Here.  Conan Doyle’s story is set in Aldershot: place of gin, beer, and safe quarter, where dirty, underhanded Colonel Barclay lives with the wife whose hand he so treacherously took. 

This is one of those Holmes stories where Watson and the readers are brought in too late.  How much better would it have been to be with Holmes throughout his two day investigation?  As it stands, Holmes appears, just before midnight, at Watson’s home, where he outlines the case, and the pair travel to Aldershot where they interview Henry Wood who explains everything.  We do not actually see any of Holmes’ detecting.  Imagine if we (with Watson) had been brought in at the beginning of the case.  Holmes could have appeared at Watson’s home, as before, at midnight, and we could have visited Aldershot in the morning.  We could have seen the curious collection of weapons in Colonel Barclay’s home, and we could have followed along as Holmes became ever more puzzled by the mystery before finally making headway after his interview with Miss Morrison.  In this scenario, Holmes would not have had to return to London to fetch Watson, and they could have gone straight to Mr. Henry Wood, late of India.  (In fact, the idea of Holmes’ returning to London from Aldershot is preposterously weak; Holmes declares that he returned in order to get Watson as a witness.  But any witness would do; Holmes need not return to London for Watson, and, in the unlikely eventuality in which only Watson would suffice as a witness, Holmes could have remained in Aldershot and wired for Watson to come.)  Had we started with Holmes from the outset, readers would have been treated to a far better version of The Adventure of the Crooked Man, a story which is most interesting for the mongoose, the Biblical reference to David, for the horrible way that Colonel Barclay dies, and for the sensational and double-crossing story that Henry Wood relates.

36.  The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk (March 1893, Memoirs)

They say that when it rains, it pours, and this maxim applies not only to salt but to Mr. Hall Pycroft, the down-on-his-luck clerk who, after glimpsing a ray of professional hope, finds his name besmirched, his clerkship taken by a criminal, and his prospects muddied in The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk.  As in The Red-Headed League, Holmes’ client is kept from his workplace while completing a mundane task, although, in The Clerk’s case, Mr. Pycroft is clever enough to begin to peer through the veil of deception to determine that something’s seriously awry.  Since it is the distinctive gold tooth that ultimately gives the brothers away, one wonders why the two brothers (who are the villains in this mystery) did not, in fact, appear separately to Mr. Pycroft.  If the first brother were to “hire” Pycroft, then the second could appear in Birmingham, ostensibly as the office manager, while the first went ahead to Pycroft’s new station at Mawson’s.  One also wonders how, exactly, the two brothers learned of Pycroft’s appointment, but there could be a ready explanation for this that is simply never provided by Doyle.  One of the criminal brothers might, for example, have a friend within Mawson’s who apprised the criminals, unwittingly or otherwise, of Pycroft’s hiring.

These little peccadillos notwithstanding, the story remains enjoyable, even if its solution is mostly foreseeable.  There is nothing foreseeable, however, about the attempted suicide at the tail end of the story; the Beddington brother who has escaped the clutches of the police excuses himself into the next room, and he makes the grave decision to hang himself.  With his feet kicking on the walls, and the rubber of his noose digging into his neck, Holmes, Watson, and Pycroft are only just in time to save him, even if they are only saving him for the hangman’s noose. 

The case is one of those that Holmes solves instantly, and, in fact, he and Watson spend only moments in Birmingham before springing into action.  Holmes, we may gather, has solved the case either nearly or completely while upon the train, and he is only missing the details that the newspaper article, which tells of Beddington’s brother’s capture, supplies.  As regards this solidly written tale, readers can hope for better days for come for Mr. Hall Pycroft whose hopes were dashed by the misfortune visited upon him in The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk.

35.  The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter (September 1893, Memoirs)

Though definitely made eminent by its introduction of Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft, readers should not forget that it is also The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter that provides us with Holmes’ timeless precept: “‘My dear Watson,’ said he, ‘I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.  To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.’”  The wisdom of this precept is as relevant now as it was then, and the precept shall retain its relevance a hundred years from now, without its shine ever succumbing to so much as a blemish.  One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s hallmarks is that he often graces his pages with sagacity, expressed tightly in easily memorable mots justes.  Some phrases have become, perhaps unjustly, more famous than others over the years.  For instance, “The curious incident” quote, which arises from Silver Blaze in reference to the dog in the nighttime, seems to me to have become vogueish in pop culture for reasons that I cannot quite fathom.  (That said, I have no strong emotion either for or against such popularity, and, if pressed on the matter, would admit to being slightly in favor of Holmesian expressions achieving popularity, even ones that, to me, seem to achieve that popularity without substantive cause.)  Simultaneously, other quotes in the Holmes canon seem not to have achieved the popularity that they seem due.  For instance, I have long thought that the above remark on the proper estimation of one’s powers ought to be more famous than such a remark as, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” (which fails even to appear in the canon), yet fame is fickle and mercurial, seemingly bestowed more often like a lottery prize than as a merit.  Well, well, well: One cannot right all the wrongs of the world, and one must take them in, more or less, happy stride if one wishes to live in pleasant harmony with the chaos of life.

Back to the story.  In The Greek Interpreter, we are also introduced to The Diogenes Club, which has spawned imitations, and understandably so.  No other club in literature seems to me to be so attractive.  Having unintentionally simulated the Diogenes Club myself in the course of spending many long nights in university libraries reading coursework, I can attest that there is something breathtaking marvelous about the act of reading while surrounded by one’s silent peers.  One is left to one’s thoughts and to literature, while retaining the pleasure of remaining in society.  (It often helps, in increasingly noisy university libraries, to study deep into the night, so that the more raucous and less dedicated/less desperate students go to bed or to party.)

With respect to the story, it is very lucky for Holmes (and for the unfortunate Greek interpreter, Melas) that there is an answer to the advertisement.  If no one had answered the advertisement, Holmes would not have had the slightest clue of where to find Sophy and Paul Kratides, and the case would have taken on an entirely different aspect.  As it stands, the criminals get away, only to be found stabbed to death in Budapest (“Two cities: Buda and Pesht”— an inside joke that at least one reader may find humorous), and the supposition by Holmes is that Sophy Kratides has had her revenge.  The plot is no more than fair, and Doyle’s inclusion of Mycroft and the Diogenes Club are perhaps the most distinguishing features of The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.

34.  The Adventure of the Yellow Face (February 1893, Memoirs)

“All’s well that ends well,” goes the Shakespearean title and dictum, and with, the child in his arms, and on his lips the words, “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being,” Mr. Grant Munro saves this ultimately heartwarming story from any number of tragic endings.  Lucy Hebron finds a home, one with a mother who will presumably never leave her again, and with a father who cares so much for the mother that he’s willing to adopt a child and face head-on whatever stormy social stigma may come.  As readers, we may hope with some basis that little Lucy grows up to live a fulfilling, healthy, happy, and productive life—the sort of life we may well desire for all our children. 

That Holmes is mistaken in his earliest theory is no mark against him; his theory is a theory only, and he must travel to Norbury to prove it, one way or another.  Such is the purpose of theories and of tests: The scientific thinker must postulate, then check that postulation against the facts.  That Holmes’ initial theory covered the facts was sufficient to make it tenable, and, in checking it, he did what every empirical observer ought.  Any criticism that he might make of himself ought not be too stringent, for he was doing his job to the best of anyone’s ability: crafting a surmise that covered the available information, then setting out to verify the actuality of that surmise.

Whether or not Grant Munro actually needed Holmes’ services is immaterial.  People who feel desperate sometimes take action based upon their emotion, and that’s what Munro does here.  The fact that he’s applied to someone respectable, and that someone has listened to his tale, affirmed his concerns, and sent him home with a promise to visit, at the latest, the next day, is sufficient.  Munro actually does all the work himself, while Holmes and Watson serve as no more than spectators, but there are so many other stories in which Holmes plays the most active part in reaching the mystery’s solution that here, when circumstances dictate that Munro takes the lead role, the lack of productivity by Holmes and Watson is perfectly reasonable. 

While Effie makes deplorable choices that leave her open to criticism—specifically her decisions to leave her child in the South (where the Emancipation Proclamation [1863], American Civil War [1861-’65], and Reconstruction Era [c. 1865 – c. 1877] were none-too-distant memories, and where the Jim Crow Laws [c. 1880s –  c. 1960s] were still very much in effect) while she began a new life in England, and to mask the child—the actions of her strong-willed, faithful, and honorable husband, Grant Munro, promise a better, more secure future for the child and save from ignominy The Adventure of the Yellow Face.

33.  The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter (August 1904, Return)

A moving and melancholy mystery, The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter is one that is saved from utter cheerlessness by the mischievous, amusing way in which Holmes handles Lord Mount-James, as well as by the appearance of the handsome dog, Pompey, whose faultless tracking of an aniseed scent leads Holmes and Watson to an isolated cabin amid wildflower laden fields.  The story is one that is rife with pathos, yet it refrains from being mawkish or overly sentimental, while the good doctor, Leslie Armstrong, is the character in the canon who retreats most quickly from the shadows of suspicion into the brilliant beams of loyalty and honesty.  The Missing Three-Quarter begins with a rather enigmatic message that emphasizes how Sherlock’s powers of study are not all-encompassing; he is completely clueless as to the fame of one of England’s most famous amateur athletes, for sport does not fall into Holmes’ bailiwick.  The story progresses rather quickly, leading readers first to the Bentley Hotel (constructed in 1880, eight years before the famed automotive engineer, Walter Owen Bentley, was born), then off to Cambridge where we meet Dr. Armstrong. 

The case turns out to be one of those in which no crime is committed, and, to The Missing Three-Quarter’s credit, it shows that not every mystery needs a murder, or—more extreme yet—a serial killer.  Rather, what makes mystery literature work is the same as what makes all literature work: quality characterization, atmospheric setting, believable and invigorating dialogue, and an enthralling plot.  That the tone of the Holmes stories is so often polite, in accordance with the Victorian standards of the day, is more helpful than otherwise; and that the entirety of the Holmes canon can thrive for more than a hundred years without relying on the gratuitous use of curse words to flimsily indicate strong emotion, is a feather in the cap of those who inhabit polite society.  Thus some things, such as the elements that make up good storytelling, never truly seem to change.  We see these elements predominate the Holmes canon, and we find them present here in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.

32.  The Adventure of the Resident Patient (August 1893, Memoirs)

One of those mysteries which Holmes can deal with mostly during his client’s visit, The Adventure of the Resident Patient is a tale that is so suffused with the narration of events by Holmes’ client and later by explanatory backstory that we, the readers, have very little opportunity of seeing Holmes employ his most remarkable powers.  At present, I cannot recall whether on my first reading of The Resident Patient (which was, I believe, on a holiday to Martha’s Vineyard during my teenage years to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary [although I can recall that I ate five pounds’ worth of Jelly Belly’s sour jelly beans on that trip while reading, for the first time, The Adventures, The Memoirs, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes]) I was able to deduce that Blessington was lying.  I only know that now, after many years, and after many re-readings of the story, Blessington’s ruse seems to be a rather transparent one.  I can only hope that, as a young man and a first time reader, I felt surprised. 

The plot is no more than middling.  A deus ex machina benefactor arrives to provide financial backing, in the form of an investment, to a penniless doctor with potential.  The benefactor’s real hope is to secure for himself a regular income while also providing himself with a comfortable, discreet retirement, as he is a bank robber whose gains are ill-gotten.  This bank robber has ratted out his confederates, one of whom was hung, while the others were jailed.  Now that the prisoners have been released, they’ve conceived of the idea of faking catalepsy before the doctor with the hopes of gaining access to Blessington, the rat who is quartered at the doctor’s office.  Why the prisoners feel that they must fake catalepsy is a little unclear.  In the first place, the idea seems dangerous: men who have just been released from prison would not likely try to fool a specialist at his own field (nor is it likely that the specialist, no matter how infrequently he’s actually seen catalepsy, would be duped by such amateurs).  Furthermore, the staging of catalepsy seems unnecessary, for, in the end, the former prisoners simply use their inside man, a young page, to let them into the house at night.  Once inside, the ex-convicts judge Blessington, then they hang him.  Why, if they needed to identify Blessington or where he lived, would they have placed the page at Dr. Trevelyan’s office?  Why, if they needed to see Blessington, would they break into his quarters with only a single man, as they did prior to hanging him?  Finally, why would Blessington, who has means and money, stay in London after he knew that his former confederates were out of prison and looking for him?  If I had done what Blessington had done, and I knew what Blessington knew, I would gather my assets, sail at once from London to France, travel to Paris, and then go on to Vienna or Geneva or Milan—or even further, to India or to Australia, if I thought that my pursuers could track me to the Continent.  At the very least, if I were Blessington, I would take a few days’ holiday to Scotland or Wales.  Instead, even after receiving a debilitating fright, Blessington stays in the one place where he knows his enemies can find him, and his inaction enables him to pass into an oblong box as a resident patient.

31.  The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax (December 1911, Last Bow)

A story with a good deal of inventiveness, and one that depends more heavily than most on its outcome, The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax is one of those exceedingly lovable stories, like The Abbey Grange and The Man with the Twisted Lip, where Holmes is temporarily flummoxed.  Holmes sends Watson to Switzerland to track down the wealthy and vulnerable Lady Frances Carfax, and Watson does yeoman’s work, which Holmes, upon his sudden arrival, immediately outclasses.  The situation is nearly singular, however, for rarely is Watson sent to do his master’s bidding (Watson is also sent as a proxy in The Solitary Cyclist, but he bungles the assignment so badly that it’s worth disregarding), and the reader is treated to a scenario in which the seemingly most reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is in fact drawn by the good doctor, viz.: that a tropically tanned, densely bearded fellow, one Honorable Philip Green, is on the trail of a fleeing Lady Carfax.  Holmes, of course, suspects something different, and we readers may recollect the sagacity of Holmes’ advice in Boscombe when he counsels us on how circumstantial evidence can seemingly point very clearly in one direction, but, when looked at it from a slightly different angle, may just as certainly seem to point in another.  In this case, the fact that a fraudulent missionary’s ear was torn tells Holmes that he’s on the trail of a degenerate Australian, a country which, despite its youth, “has turned out some very finished types.”  Thus the first part of this idiosyncratic story transitions to the second, and readers, as we transition along, find that the tale changes from a Whodunnit (for now we know who the miscreants are that have abducted Lady Frances Carfax), to a Howdunnit (we are treated to the pleasure of following Holmes as he discovers what has become of the poor wealthy woman). 

And, at first (and not for the last time in this story), Holmes is stumped.  He feels strongly that Carfax is in London in the captivity of her malefactors.  However, he can’t find her, and all his fishing expeditions into her whereabouts lead to empty-handed returns.  Not till Peters, or Dr. Shlessinger, or whatever the con man is calling himself at the moment, pawns some of Carfax’s jewelry does Holmes get a lead.  Holmes sends Green to wait at the same pawn shop, and the second time that a piece of jewelry is pawned, it’s done so by Peters’ partner in crime, who then toodles off to the undertaker’s where the clue to Carfax’s fate is left.  Holmes and Watson, in hot pursuit of the lead, fly to Peters’ house, where they force admittance, and they search the coffin, only to discover that the corpse is not Carfax.  Stymied but unbeaten, Holmes returns to Baker Street to lick his wounds and mull the case over, feeling that he’s missed some significant detail.  Indeed he has, and, early next morning, just before the funeral, he and Watson rush to the funeral and are just in time to save the Lady Frances Carfax from a horrendous burial alive. 

Lady Frances’ story is remarkable for its clinically professional narration, its employment of Watson as an irregular, and its double mystery (whodunnit and howdunnit).  The wily cunning of Peters fools Holmes, and, not only that, when Peters is first confronted by Holmes, Peters plays his role as suavely as can be, insisting not only that he’s clueless as to the whereabouts of Carfax, but going so far as to have the gall to insist that she owes him money, and that she’s paid him a fraction of what she owes him with her nearly worthless jewels.  The likeness of Peters to some of society’s most unrepentant fraudsters is admirable.  One has only to think of the snake-brained, selfish, and odious behavior of such fiends as H.H. Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes, Naasón Joaquín García, Peter Popoff, and Keith Raniere to know that Doyle’s Dr. Shlessinger is less a figment of Doyle’s imagination than a representative of our environment.  Yet, despite all the narrative grace that blesses the story, it is Holmes’ role as savior of Carfax’s life that gives this story the miracle treatment that it needs to ultimately succeed.  If Holmes had arrived too late, the entire story would have fallen down, for this tale was never set up to be a tragedy.  However, Holmes does arrive in time to save the diamonded damsel, and all’s well that ends well in The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax.

30.  The Adventure of the Six Napoleons (May 1904, Return)

I feel like I must begin my remarks about The Six Napoleons by first calling attention to the ostensibly commendable state of Victorian bookkeeping.  In the story, the Napoleonic busts were sold for fifteen shillings, the modern equivalent of about one hundred and forty-five U.S. dollars.  Accordingly, the Napoleonic busts are not items of extreme value, but neither are they worthless.  Throughout the tale, Holmes and Beppo use sales records of these busts to locate where they are.  Now, I do not believe that it is impossible that records were kept so well that Holmes and Beppo were able to track, from receipts and ledgers, the tortuous paths of all these busts, but I do say that it is highly, highly improbable, and if the Victorian Londoners were truly that careful with their record-keeping, then I confess myself ruefully shocked, yet I applaud them. 

Setting aside the suspiciously flawless paperwork trail, we get to the business of hiding the pearls in Napoleonic busts.  The idea is a brilliant one, and one can imagine how such a scenario could actually occur in real life.  It is more than doubtful, however, that Beppo, when seeking to regain the first Napoleonic bust after being released from prison, would steal it.  Probably, he would purchase it, thereby avoiding attracting attention to himself and risking getting sent, at once, back to the slammer.  

But, by story’s end Beppo must indeed return prison, and this time with likely a far more intense feeling of frustration than when he left it such a short time before.  After waiting a year to be released—presumably gnashing his teeth in impatience all the while—the Italian finally is set free, only to be hounded by some scourge of his own underworld, whom Beppo inadvertently kills.  In killing this man, Beppo raises his own profile, the very thing that he does not want to do.  Furthermore, Beppo must feel dashedly unlucky in that he does not actually ever find the pearl.  The pearl—fortunately for Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade—is in the sixth (and final) Napoleonic bust.  If Beppo had but found the pearl in the first bust, the one which he should have purchased, then he would have gotten away with the treasure, presumably fenced it for a princely sum, and likely lived out the rest of his life sleeping on silken sheets, riding in carriages drawn by magnificent horses, and being waited on hand and foot.  That circumstances turn out otherwise is quite fortuitous for Holmes, whom we last see bafflingly securing the black pearl in his own safe, rather than handing the pearl over to Lestrade the Scotland Yard representative in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.

29.  The Adventure of Black Peter (March 1904, Return)

A sensational story that would have benefited from involving our faithful chronicler Watson earlier in the case, The Adventure of Black Peter is a harpooning story with a whale of space for improvement.  As the story is written, Watson is aware that his friend, Sherlock, is on a case, for Watson is able to see the ripplings of one of Sherlock’s alter-egos, Captain Basil.  (Basil, by the way, was the name of the lead character in The Great Mouse Detective, a Disney story about Holmes, where Holmes and Watson, or facsimiles of them, are mice.)  Watson is introduced into the case only a week after the murder happens, but, by then, a great deal of the most interesting sleuthing has already been completed.  How much more captivating this case would have been if we, as readers, were summoned to the scene of the crime!  How much more fascinated would we be, if we had seen the bluebottles buzzing “like a harmonium,” and if we (along with Watson) were able to see Holmes in disguise as the persuasive and believable Captain Basil in the sailors’ smoky and treacherous dens!  We would have liked also, I believe, to see Holmes at the butcher’s, attempting (with minimal explanation to Watson) to thrust the harpoon through the pig.  (Though, it must be said, it was also very pleasant to see him returning to Baker Street, harpoon in hand, and to hear Watson’s ejaculation of disbelief, and his astounded demand to know whether Holmes had actually been carrying that monstrous weapon through the civilized streets of London.)  Other points of the story, such as the discovery of the notebook, could have been accounted for in other fashions.  For instance, the notebook could have been found by the ill-used wife or daughter, who kept it (for a time), fearing that it would incriminate the man who killed their hated father, then the notebook could have been turned over to Holmes and Hopkins a week later, with repentant apologies.  However, as the case stands, we have only the whiff of Holmes as he spirits in and out of Baker Street after the case has begun, and we have, furthermore, some fairly confusing timelines. 

For instance, Holmes, who is in fact investigating the case, nevertheless chides Hopkins for not inviting him to review it earlier.  Why Holmes needs this invitation, and when, exactly, he became involved in the case (if not from the very beginning) is a bit confusing.  The reader is meant to assume that Holmes becomes intimately involved in the case, I suppose, when Hopkins appears at Baker Street, but the reader must also assume that Holmes has been investigating it seriously since the murder happened (after all, Holmes has been dressing up as Basil and throwing a harpoon into a pig with every intention of clearing the matter up).  

Still, the case does not fail to pierce and pin our interest.  The horror stories of Black Peter’s domestic life are morbidly magnetic; the grim tale of the securities “borrower” and his ill-fated luck in the seas off the frozen Norwegian coast supply necessary backstory; the fantastic way in which Peter Carey meets his death is thrilling; and the apprehension of Patrick Cairns is gripping.  That said, if Conan Doyle had but embarked with Watson a little earlier, readers might have had an even more exhilarating voyage in The Adventure of Black Peter.

Fifth Tier: His Last Bow, The Unique Adventure

Exactly halfway through my ranking of the canon lies a tremendously unique story.  His Last Bow was published four years after The Dying Detective and four years before The Mazarin Stone, the next two temporally closest tales.  Written during the first World War, His Last Bow is not a mystery in the typical Holmesian vein.  Rather, His Last Bow elects to represent a zeitgeist of the era through symbolism, confident patriotism, and poetic prose.  Fairly well-written and with a plot that panders to John Bull, His Last Bow is a sui generis story, the canon’s platypus: a handsome creature ill-fit with its peers and deserving of a tier all its own.     

28.  His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes (September 1917, His Last Bow)

An espionage story published during WWI—before the Cambridge Five existed and before Kim Philby ever got his ugly mug printed on a Soviet stamp—, His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes tinged a John le Carré-esque passion for deep-cover-spycraft with nostalgia.  This is Doyle’s transition story as he acknowledges the end of an era.  The honorable traditions are being attacked, he realizes.  Good form and honor, the foundations of the Victorian age, are becoming passé.  The staid nation of England is slumbering and naïve, while, without its borders, the Continent shifts ever higher through its gears of war.  In the days before such ridiculous phrases as “the military-industrial complex” ever came to exist, before “shell shock” became an acronym, before that awful fiend with the hideous toothbrush mustache did what he did, contemporary readers found themselves immersed in a global war over the death of a faroff Archduke and the byzantine tangle of treaties that bound Western Europe together.  The guns changed; the mores changed; the social structures changed.  The defragmentation of a seemingly monolithic society into a pluralistic and seething mass of populism happened (despite its forewarnings) seemingly overnight, while the winds of change promised bitter storms.  For, as Holmes says, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”  Indeed, but one month after the publication of this story, in October of 1917, St. Petersburg was shaken by revolution.  This October Revolution marked the beginning of the Russian Civil War, while the Bolshevik known as Vladimir Lenin rose to power: a man who sought to sweep away capitalism and replace it with his own famine-inducing brand of Marxism.

Holmes and Watson stand at the frontier.  They mark the verge between the familiar, traditionalist England and the new unknown where seemingly no authority is held sacrosanct and no revered custom is above reproach.  They face the new while upholding the old.  If they are consigned to obsolescence it will be with their backs straight, their chins up, and with stiff upper lips.

The story itself is a profusion of dialogue.  To a larger degree than any other Holmes story, the dialogue feels weighted, didactic, and allegoric.  While reading, I cannot help but feel that the German villain is less a human than he is a representation of the enemies’ armies and governments.  Nor, in this story, do I particularly mind.  That Von Bork stands for the Central Powers is fine; he is a symbol, and symbols nearly always must be stereotyped and flattened to be recognized as such.  They can serve a purpose, and here that purpose is to convey a message.  In this case, the symbol stands for a coalition of nations that is trying to destroy and subdue England and the other Allied Powers (France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan, and the United States).  The message is that England, though apparently somnolent, is awake and has aces of her own up her sleeve; that she will fight; that she will not lay down and die.  So while symbolism, allegory, and jingoism are often criticized, in a setting when the two sides are mustard-gassing each other, mowing one another down with automatic rifle fire, and blowing each other to bits in glacially-paced trench warfare, a stereotype such as that of Von Bork is either of de minimis offense or, more appropriately, none at all.

When the smoke clears after this war to end all wars, Doyle has only The Case-Book left to write.  Three years after the last story in the Case-Book is published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lies dead.  Nine years after his death, the rifles cock and fire again, this time for The Second World War, or, as it is often simply called: The War.  But before the Waffenamt are stamped—even before the tsar abdicates, and the Bolsheviks take power, and the samovars are tipped and spilled, there stand Holmes and Watson, resilient and intrepid before the oncoming, purging winds. 

The Fourth Tier: The Greats

These nine titles are each great in their own way.  Well-written with strokes of genius, they consist of works that are traditionally thought of as great and others which are not often as well known.  Stories like The Musgrave Ritual with Brunton the butler certainly belong to the former category while others, such as The Case-Book’s Lion’s Mane may belong to the latter.  There are a great many writers whose literary careers could have been made based upon any story in this tier, and there are a great many writers who achieved literary fame who never wrote a story as good as any of these: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Greats.

27.  The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (January 1925, Case-Book)

One of the best stories from The Case-Book.  Though The Three Garridebs drafts off The Red-Headed League, Killer Evans is a more violent villain than John Clay, aka Vincent Spaulding, and Evans nearly succeeds in offing Watson.  Our constant scribe is saved only by Evans’ faulty aim, for the American killer draws suddenly and unexpectedly, and Watson gets shot for the second time, though now in a third place.  (In The Sign of Four, Doyle states that Watson was shot in the leg.  In A Study in Scarlet, Watson was said to have been shot in the shoulder.)  

The Three Garridebs also benefits from the brief tour that Doyle gives us of Nathan Garrideb’s eclectic, museumesque home.  A collector of relics, the reclusive Mr. Garrideb’s unusual interests serve two purposes for the plot.  They provide a red herring to the reader, permitting us to wonder whether Mr. Garrideb has some exotic and valuable piece among his collection of whose worth he is ignorant.  The collection also serves to occupy all of Mr. Garrideb’s interest and time, thus keeping him at home, and necessitating Killer Evans’ brilliant but outré solution of inventing the Three Garridebs inheritance scheme.  Perfectly extraordinary in its conception, Doyle stokes the Victorian mania for viewing extremophiles and the habitats that they dwell in while also providing readers with locomotion for the mystery’s plot.  The end product is a success, one bolstered by the dash of brutishness that Evans provides and by the glimpses of Holmes’ asexual love for his friend, Dr. Watson, when Watson is injured. 

There are times when I wonder whether certain stories have been overlooked in the public eye thanks to the stories’ inclusion in later story collections, and I have wondered how the fame of some stories would have fared had they been published (in their exact same form) at different times in Conan Doyle’s career.  What if, for example, The Lion’s Mane and The Three Garridebs had been included in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s first collection, and better known stories such as The Engineer’s Thumb, The Red-Headed League, and A Case of Identity had been published in The Case-Book?  At least in the case of The Lion’s Mane, I think that critical regard for it would have been higher.  In the case of The Three Garridebs, if it had been published when The Red-Headed League was published (and if The Red-Headed League was published when The Three Garridebs was published), I wonder whether The Three Garridebs would have become the more famous of the two, rather than the other way around.  Perhaps some of The League’s fame is due to the relative novelty of its story.  In The Red-Headed League, the plot was new, original, and inventive.  In The Three Garridebs, the plot, as stated before, was derivative.  Still, in keeping with this train of thought, if a late story with entirely original aspects, such as The Problem of Thor Bridge, had been published in place of, say The Five Orange Pips, I think that Thor Bridge might have been anthologized many times over, instead of being consigned to a place frequented primarily by Holmesiophiles.  The point is that I think that the worth of some Holmes stories is undervalued for no other reasons than the time of the story’s publication and the collection that the work was compiled in.  So while a slight lack of novelty may be partly to blame for this story’s relative obscurity, nevertheless there is a strong attractiveness to The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.

26.  The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane (December 1926, Case-Book).

In The Lion’s Mane, Doyle chooses to allow Holmes to narrate the story, and I think that his decision to do so ought to be put into perspective.  The Lion’s Mane is the ninth story in the fifth collection of Holmes stories, and the fifty-third out of fifty-six stories that Doyle wrote about Holmes.  The Lion’s Mane was published in December of 1926 when Doyle was sixty-seven years old.  (He was born 22 May 1859.)  He published his final Holmes story less than half a year later, in April of 1927, and, with so many excuses for literary exhaustion available, Conan Doyle could be excused if the legacy of this story, like its antagonist, ended in a watery grave.  That this story succeeds is an occurrence that happens against all odds, and it is my belief that The Lion’s Mane is Doyle’s most underrated and overlooked Holmes story; it is a brilliant literary achievement that would be on par with Silver Blaze, if only The Lion’s Mane’s solution weren’t so improbable.

Doyle had lived during the Victorian age, and he did his best writing during those times.  (Queen Victoria ruled from 20 June 1837 till 22 January 1901.)  After her death came King Edward VII, a man of worldly tastes who still represented The Empire: colonies, the army, and international intrigue.  After the Edwardian era, which ended with the king’s death in 1910, George V rose to the British throne, and King George V was faced with a tumultuous world: one influenced by rapidly improving technology, manifestos on socialism and fascism, and the Irish’s strident demand for an independent state of their own. 

Then from 1914 to 1918, World War I came and went. 

With the war, many Kiplingesque views on the romantic side of war were blown away in drafts of mustard gas.  Now poets, like Wilfred Owen, wrote of haunting flares and old lies: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.  Weapons changed.  Firearms designers become household names whose semi-automatic and automatic creations, more than a hundred years later, are still studied, copied, and adapted: Paul Mauser made the Gewehr 98, and Hiram Maxim the Vickers gun; the Lee-Enfield Mk I appeared; and John Moses Browning designed the M1895, the Ma Deuce, and the 1911.  For a man born to Victorian crown and country, Sherlock Holmes, like his friend, Dr. Watson, may have felt unnerved and displaced by the world’s abrupt changes.  Watson, after all, fought in the Second Anglo-Afghan War which lasted from 1878 to 1880, and his Pashtun enemies used the jezail, a type of matchlock musket.  Watson himself, if he were not serving as a surgeon, probably would have carried the Martini-Henry, a breech-loader that took long seconds to reload, and which fired but a single shot at a time.  By contrast, the Vickers machine gun could fire up to 600 rounds a minute, a staggering figure that might have flabbergasted and horrified both Holmes and Watson—though, as loyal servants of The Crown, they would likely have been rather glad to have the gun on the British side, instead of the other way around; Doyle might have quietly felt the same.

So, to me, The Adventures of the Lion’s Mane seems to be representative of Doyle’s search for a solid foundation for Holmes to stand upon in this unsettling time of upheavals.  And in changing the narrative structure, as well as in providing for a fresh plot—that thing which most makes Sherlock’s pretty little problems such a pleasure to read—Doyle’s search succeeds.  Doyle allows The Lion’s Mane to be told by Holmes himself, and our faithful chronicler Watson is excluded from the story.  And though Watson is normally to Holmes as roots are to trees, in this case he proves dispensable.  The political landscape that Doyle is writing in has changed so much from the early 1890s when Doyle first wrote—and he’s already invented so much for Holmes, and he’s already been taxed so dearly for his creation—that Doyle needs to take radical action to animate Sherlock’s adventures.  Here the narrative shift, coupled with the original plot, leave us with a story that is richly deserving of such a regal name as The Lion’s Mane.

25.  The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb (March 1892, Adventures)

Poor Mr. Hatherly, the engineer who makes his dreary start on Victoria Street, is subject to the most Gothic and grotesque tale of the Holmes collection.  Hatherly’s grim narrative is reminiscent to stories of Edgar Allan Poe and of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, though without the latter’s surrealism.  Invited to a country house by Colonel Lysander Stark—a thin, powerful, murderous German, one who could be an early template for the Nazi mold—ostensibly to fix a hydraulic press made for smashing bricks of Fuller’s earth, our ill-fated engineer proceeds into this hellhouse against his better sense.  His forebodings strengthen; he receives fair warning of danger; still he goes on.  We take a taciturn witching hour coach ride, enter a decrepit and sinister house, find the pale-faced maiden with warning signals writ clearly across her face (and later expressed fairly and clearly), and finally we enter into the colossal machine itself.  For the huge hydraulic machine’s press is a chamber large enough to fit three men, and, when Mr. Hatherly begins to understand the scope of the miscreant’s occupation, his taut host snaps.  Hatherly is shut into this chamber, and the machine is turned on.  Its vise-like walls begin to close upon him, and he is so close to death that he begins to wonder, in his fervency, how best to face it: upon his back, facing the closing ceiling?  Balled up, that he might be crushed like a grape?  The unfortunate man saves his own life at the last moment when he sees that, across the way, there is a second door that leads from the deadly chamber.  Hatherly slips through it, only just in time, and the machine crushes his lamp, which later sets the whole building on fire, and brings down the rogues’ operation.  In effecting his escape, Hatherly loiters long enough to ensure that the lady is not badly treated by Colonel Stark.  Stark pushes past the girl, and Hatherly, who is now (and once again) attempting to escape, finds himself hanging by his fingers from the window-ledge, whereupon Colonel Stark brings down a massive cleaver upon the engineer’s thumb.  Mr. Hatherly falls, makes his way across the moonlit garden, and faints.  He’s spirited away by the girl and a morose Englishman, the one whose stout frame so wholly fills his waistcoat.  Hatherly makes his way to London, is treated by Watson, then leads Holmes and Co. back to the scene of the extraordinary affair.  The house’s occupants have bolted, and the house itself is halfway to ashes.

The Engineer’s Thumb must be one of the most divisive in the canon, thanks to its gory nature.  No other story, save The Cardboard Box, which features the discovery of a pair of human ears salted in a box, is so grisly.  As a result, The Engineer’s Thumb revolts some of Doyle’s readership.  One needs a bit of a taste for horror and the Gothic to appreciate this tale, but, if one has those things, then readers can sometimes find the right moment and mood to read The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.

24. The Devil’s Foot (December 1910, Last Bow)

While The Devil’s Foot has elements of originality, it also features familiar tropes.  As in The Reigate Squire, Holmes has been ordered to take a vacation for the sake of his own health.  He heads out to the Cornish cliffs.  When called to a vicarage, Holmes and Watson find two men in the throes of madness and a woman dead, an expression of horror upon her face.  Enigmatic though it is, Holmes soon solves the crime.  A toxic west-African herb, mostly unknown to Western medicine and called The Devil’s Foot, has killed Mortimer Tregennis’ sister, Brenda, and driven their two brothers insane.  The Devil’s Foot will, shortly after, kill Mortimer as well. 

As in The Abbey Grange, a hearty, manly, and virtuous Englishman takes revenge, while Holmes and Watson act as judge and jury.  In both cases, they declare the vengeful perpetrator, “Not guilty,” since he killed for the sake of protecting or avenging loved ones.  In both cases (in The Devil’s Foot and The Abbey Grange), Holmes and Watson release the culprit, and, again in both cases, I believe that they acted properly.  Underrated and overlooked like The Lion’s Mane, The Devil’s Foot is both deserving of greater critical attention and a good choice for a pleasure-reader’s bedtime story.

23.  The Boscombe Valley Mystery (October 1891, Adventures)

A supremely well written story, The Boscombe Valley Mystery is remarkable for its shrewdness.  While notable for being the story which features Watson’s best quote (a compliment to his wife, Mary: “I should be ungrateful if I were not, seeing what I gained through one of them.”  The remark is an understated and delightful reference to his meeting of his wife in The Sign of the Four.), The Boscombe Valley Mystery’s particulars are more interesting than Holmes’ case.  For instance, the story gives insight into Watson’s philosophy as an old campaigner, “My experience of camp life in Afghanistan had at least had the effect of making me a prompt and ready traveller,” and the story provides a striking and memorable description of Holmes as a “tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap.”  As a mystery, Boscombe’s form is one that later stories, such as Gloria Scott, draw upon: seemingly respectable and aging Englishmen whose pasts, when these Englishmen made their bones, return to haunt them.  This story, however, comes before many of the others, and, again, in its particulars, it shines more brightly. 

For instance, it is in Boscombe that Holmes states his solidly logical, simple, and (for those reasons) all the more remarkable quote: that it is the simplest cases which are the most difficult.  “Singularity,” says Holmes, “is almost invariably a clue.  The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.”  The maxim is true today; the more outré and extraordinary a crime is, the more clues a detective will have to latch onto.  Holmes also proposes that, “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing.  It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”  Indeed, this incisive remark about circumstantial evidence is still very true today, and a good deal of society—of whose members I of course include myself—would be wiser if the counsel was remembered and applied more often.  It is in Boscombe that Holmes also provides the quote, “Don’t you see that you alternately give him credit for having too much imagination and too little?”  This quote exemplifies sharp-witted acumen, acumen that I have often recalled ever since reading that passage as a young man, and which I have, from time to time, put into practice when thinking things over. 

The strong writing, however, does not end with these remarks, but continues on with Holmes’ driest jibe at the ferret-faced Lestrade (who, it should be noted, seems to be a rather amorphous figure with regard to his physical appearance, but is here described as a very foxlike and suspicious figure).  Lestrade makes a stab at Holmes, saying that he (Lestrade) finds it hard enough to tackle facts without flying off about deductions and inferences, and Holmes ripostes, “‘You are right,’ said Holmes demurely; ‘you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.’”  The nettlesome remark strikes home, and Lestrade surely feels it, for he replies, Conan Doyle writes, “with some warmth.”  Perhaps the rivalry between the official police and the private detective has never been so obviously on display, for, time and again, the police in Doyles’ stories seem to be more than satisfied with Holmes’ ingenious but unlikely methods, and Holmes, for his part, is often more than willing to give credit to the official force.  Finally, the description of Holmes as a hound upon the scent, when he arrives to Hatherly Farm, is exquisite prose.  The writing shows Doyle at his peak, and, at this lofty pinnacle, I believe Doyle is equal to nearly any other great prose-writer.  Doyle’s exposition, here in the places where Holmes looks for footprints in Boscombe, is equal to that of John le Carré, to Robert Louis Stevenson, to Harper Lee, and to Ursula Le Guin: men and women who conjure scenes with such fantastic lucidity as to galvanize the reader’s interest. 

Finally, Boscombe ends with Holmes and Watson in judgment, and it is one of their better moments as self-appointed deciders.  They hear out the old diabetic’s story, make him sign papers which shall be used to acquit the young accused if necessary, and then let old Black Jack follow his natural course.  All turns out well, and the young lovers live in prospects of happily ever after.  The ending is apposite, one well suited to a story well told, as is The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

22.  The Adventure of the Dancing Men (December 1903, Return)

Perhaps the occultist and spiritualist Doyle had been reading about Egyptian hieroglyphics when he wrote The Adventure of the Dancing Men, or perhaps he’d been reading of the Orient’s written languages, for the childlike little figures, which each stand for letters, seem more related to pictoral writing than to alphabets.  Or, perhaps he’d been perusing Edgar Allan Poe’s cryptographic tale “The Gold Bug.”  Regardless of where Doyle drew his inspiration from, the glyphs of dancing men is a genius idea, and Doyle deserves commendation for it.  On a different note, this modern reader wonders how long it took Doyle to write this story, considering that he had to craft a unique dancing man for each letter in his code, then transcribe that letter into a form that The Strand Magazine could publish.  Though we may never know the answer to that question, we may feel certain that The Dancing Men was not the Holmes story that Doyle wrote most quickly. 

The Dancing Men, at its heart, is a tragedy, and one that is to my mind most similar to The Five Orange Pips.  Both stories concern characters with unspeakable American pasts, both stories contain references to abstract messages left upon sun dials, and both end in ignominy for Holmes.  In both cases, Pips and Dancing Men, Holmes probably would have been better served to have been more forthcoming with his clients.  In the case of The Dancing Men, one wonders whether he might have advised his client, Mr. Hilton Cubitt, to heed his wife’s pleas (she wished to travel out of Norfolk and thus avoid exposure to danger).  In such a scenario, Holmes and Watson could have remained at Cubitt’s Norfolk estate, laid a trap for the villain Abe Slaney, and so saved their client’s life. 

As it stands, Holmes deciphers the cryptogram and catches the villain, but the victory is Pyrrhic; Mr. Hilton Cubitt is slain by Abe Slaney, and Cubitt’s wife shoots herself in the head in an attempt at suicide.  The final paragraph, which reads like an epilogue, states that Abe Slaney was originally condemned to death, but that his sentence was changed to prison time thanks to the “mitigating” certainty that Cubitt fired first.  Perhaps I’m overly bloodthirsty, but I think Slaney should have gotten the noose for instigating the affair with Cubitt’s wife, for widowing the blameless woman, and for suffusing the remainder of her life with overtones of sorrow.  Justice is not the way of the world, however, as we know from real life and from such fictitious, whirling events as in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

21.  The Adventure of the Naval Treaty (October-November 1893, Memoirs)

The Adventure of the Naval Treaty finds Holmes at his most confident—nearly swanning, it seems—as Conan Doyle appears to try to meet his audience’s expectations that his detective’s genius be accompanied by eccentricity.  Holmes takes a rose, declares how lovely it is, then implies that the certainty of God may be found in the aesthetic pleasure of such beautiful things as flowers, one of His many creations.  Holmes’ almost forced oddity extends to the tobacco in the Persian slipper, and to a rather bizarre and irrelevant comment about boarding schools which he and Watson view from the perspective of an elevated train.  While Holmes undertakes this devil-may-care and prideful attitude, Conan Doyle somehow permits Sherlock to have made independent inquiries about the family history of Miss Harrison and Mr. Joseph Harrison without affording Holmes the opportunity to make such inquiries.  For, when and how Holmes asks about the Harrison family are matters that are not addressed; accordingly, it seems as though, in Doyle’s penning of The Naval Treaty, he is more concerned with crafting an idiosyncratic Holmes than attending to the details of plot coherence. 

Personally, I prefer it when any detective story’s plots are ironclad; I rank coherence and believability as two of the most important traits that any plot can have.  Also—if my detective is a cold, empirical logician like Holmes is purported to be—then I have but a milquetoast feeling toward the injection of much whimsy into his character, and I find it repugnant when Holmes is made out to be silly (unless the Holmes story is one of those rare adaptations that is primarily intended to be comedy).  Character deficiencies—such as unmanly silliness, and idiosyncrasy that borders on lunacy—are, I find, becoming more prevalent in modern-day adaptations, and this reader, for one, often finds them exhausting and puerile.  Give me a cunning, watertight plot with a polite, pragmatic, dry detective, and leave the jackassery to Johnny Knoxville’s crew, if you please.

Still, the problem in this story is a nice one.  A pile of papers have been taken from a place with but a single exit that leads into a passageway that forks.  The thief escapes down one path, while the poor clerk and the janitor scramble back up the other to find that the papers are gone.  It is thanks to the fact that the papers cannot be gotten to for nine weeks, and these papers’ subsequent inability to appear on the international market, that Holmes deduces that the papers cannot have been sold.  He focuses his suspicions on the other person who was intended to meet Percy that fateful day, Joseph Harrison, and Holmes allows Harrison to lead him to the papers’ hiding place.  Harrison turns out to be an aggressive devil, and he slashes Holmes with a knife before Holmes subdues him, swelling one of Harrison’s eyes shut in the process.  Holmes restores the naval treaty to rightful hands; Percy rejoices; his career is salvaged, and the nation is saved from a grievous wound in The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.

20.  The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual (May 1893, Memoirs)

An extremely arcane and complex problem that Holmes solves in less than a day, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual is the canonical story that reminds me most of Edgar Allan Poe’s A Cask of Amontillado.  Both feature immurements of a living being, and both feature great distress, as manifested in unhinged laughter, among the characters.  It may also be worth noting that the maid Rachel Howells immured the butler Brunton after he (like Fortunato in A Cask of Amontillado) added insult to injury.  Both tales share these dark elements, and both end with freedom for the perpetrators: neither Howells nor Montresor are persecuted for their breathtakingly horrible crimes. 

The Musgrave Ritual is a fairly unique one in that it is narrated by Holmes while he is drawing on his old letters.  It is also singular for being, at its core, a treasure hunt with a mystery.  The story has, to drive it, the cryptic Musgrave ritual and the character of the butler, Brunton, who is one of the strongest in the canon.  Intelligent and handsome, a Jeeves who is fit for a station far greater than that which stratified England could permit him to take, Brunton recognizes a clue that ten generations of Musgraves have failed to detect.  The understanding that the old property is the burial ground of some of the Kingdom’s most priceless artifacts impels Brunton to risk his career at the Musgrave household, but his infidelity to Howells costs him, for she—whether by intent or accident we never learn—buries him alive.  Poor Brunton was Doyle’s Icarus, one who flew too close to the sun, and so was burned and crashed.  Holmes traces Brunton’s flight toward the gold, and he deduces, with remarkable rapidity, that the Musgrave ritual is, in fact, a treasure map. 

That the mystery’s solution is arrived at so quickly, in such a compressed frame of time, is perhaps the most jarring part of this story.  Holmes meets Musgrave, who tells his story, and who brings with him a copy of the ritual.  Their meeting is in the morning.  That afternoon, Musgrave and Holmes are in Hurlstone, where Reginald Musgrave’s estate is located.  In but a single afternoon, Holmes finds the appropriate trees, whittles out a stake for his geometric calculations, follows the ritual to Brunton’s body, summons the police, and recovers the jewels.  That such rapid work is possible is technically feasible.  However, Sussex, where Hurlstone is located, is some fifty degrees north latitude, and at that latitude, the sun would cast its shadow in very different ways in different seasons, so it is hard to know how accurate Holmes’ calculations would be with relation to the ritual.  He would need to make his calculations at the correct time of the correct season, and the oak and the elm trees’ measurements would need to be roughly the same size as they were when the ritual was first made.  Still, the slim possibility exists that Holmes’ calculations could be made, and, made quickly.  Therefore, though this reader is skeptical of the likelihood of Holmes’ quick triumph in the face of such diverse variables and external factors, I have no firm evidence to say that Holmes could not accomplish what he says he did, so I shall believe him and say that Holmes proves himself to be quite the genius in The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.

19.  The Adventure of the Copper Beeches (June 1892, Adventures)

A tale devoted almost entirely to its telling by Miss Violet Hunter, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches is one of those stories where Holmes does very little.  I doubt there is a story in the Holmes canon in which a single character is as responsible for as much expostulation as Miss Violet Hunter, but, since her character is a pleasant and reasonable one, she’s as easy to follow along with as Watson is.  Doyle doesn’t give us much time to linger over mystery here.  Hunter tells her story, and, for a fortnight, Watson and Holmes wait for developments.  Hunter’s wire appears, asking them to visit the Copper Beeches on the outskirts of Winchester.  Watson and Holmes travel to meet Miss Hunter, and, once there, she apprises them of the happenings at the Copper Beeches estate.  After hearing her narrative, Holmes guesses at the state of the affairs, and his supposition is very near to the actual truth.  The three investigate the mysterious tower that evening, where they find that Mr. Rucastle’s daughter has been spirited away by her young lover.  (The two lovers subsequently flee to the far side of the world, to Mauritius, which was British from 1810 to 1968.)

My memories of reading this story for the first time many years ago are still clear.  I was favorably impressed by Miss Hunter, and I was fascinated by the description of an “electric blue” dress.  Doyle describes Hunter quite adroitly as, “plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.”  The description is one of his better ones, and, over the years, I have had cause, when encountering certain women, to apply this thought to them: She has the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.  It’s a description that suits some bright and confident and savvy women very admirably, I think, and these sorts of women are always, in my opinion, good conversationalists from whom I may learn something.  The description of the dress’ color as “electric blue” also caught my attention, for Doyle’s colors are usually more muted—though there are, of course, exceptions—but this, to me, seems to be the strongest color description in the Holmes canon.  Occasionally there are examples of flashy individuals (Hugh Boone and Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein spring to mind), but typically Doyle’s England is populated by people with a more muted sense of fashion.  The apparel of such folk as Black Peter, the inhabitants of the Abbey Grange, Mr. Jonas Oldacre, Dr. Leslie Armstrong, Miss Violet Smith, and others seems subdued and nearly de rigueur. 

Despite this story’s high ranking, I have wished for a scene in which Holmes does some sleuthing, and perhaps a scene in which the imprisoned daughter is able to confront (and get the better of) her terrible father.  (Frankly, it would not have bothered me greatly if Watson’s shot had gone amiss, and he’d have blown the brains out of Jephro Rucastle, rather than the abused dog.  Imagine if Carlo the dog were saved!  Holmes and Watson could have adopted and healed the dog throughout the stories, and Carlo would have made for an interesting companion who, more often than not, lay sprawled in front of the Baker Street hearth fire but, when necessary, provided a bit of teeth-baring, growling menace any time that an unruly individual threatened Holmes or Watson.  Carlo could also have become a begrudging favorite of Mrs. Hudson, who would slip him treats on the sly.)  Overall, in this solidly written story, but one which has opportunities for improvement, readers may be glad that Rucastle’s daughter, Alice, escaped, and that Miss Violet Hunter went on to better things after The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.

The Third Tier: Classics

Truth be told, when I reach for a Holmes story at bedtime, I do not usually seriously consider the entire canon.  More often than not, my interest is limited to about twenty stories.  These are the stories that I derive the greatest pleasure in reading.  A good tone, scintillating prose, excellent dialogue, and ingenuity of plot characterize the stories of the first, second, and third tiers.  The stories in this third tier, such as The Golden Pince-Nez and A Scandal in Bohemia attract me, but not quite as strongly as those in the next two.

18.  The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez (July 1904, Return)

A clever yet lugubrious little case that opens in such tempestuous weather that it makes one want to stay inside and get cozy while the elements do their worst without, The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez is one which sees Holmes use his faculties of deduction and manipulation at considerably high rates.  He begins with an analysis of the Russian woman’s glasses, deducing, among other things, that her eyes are set closely together, that she’s been recently to the optometrist, and that she’s well dressed.  Holmes’ deductions seem reasonable, and his remark that few objects provide such a wide field for introspection as glasses is astute.  Thanks to the squally weather and the need for an early start, Hopkins stays at Holmes and Watson’s Baker Street address, and the three depart for Professor Coram’s house first thing the next day.  When they arrive, Holmes puts his insightfulness to use again, determining that, for such a far-sighted woman, her nimbleness in effecting an outdoor escape would have been nigh-on impossible, and that, therefore, there was a likelihood that she’d remained in the house.  Indeed, on finding that coconut carpeting ran both to and from the chamber where Willoughby Smith was murdered, Holmes discovers that the perpetrator likely, with her imperfect vision, took the wrong route and ended in the professor’s room.  After smoking a number of fine Alexandrian cigarettes, Holmes, Watson, and Hopkins leave the professor’s room, and they make good use of their time in the garden, where Holmes subtly solicits essential information to the effect that the professor’s appetite has increased.  On returning to the professor’s study, Holmes “inadvertently” knocks the cigarettes to the floor, and, after bending down to pick them up, makes the startling declaration that he’s solved the mystery at that very moment, in that very room—a declaration made possible by the fact that he’s seen that the cigarette ash (which resulted from all the cigarettes that he smoked) has been disturbed by the woman hiding in the book case.  She exits on her own accord, relates her Russian revolutionary story, and dies of a poison that she’s intentionally ingested.  The professor, aged and tobacco-sodden as he is, will likely never have to face such strict punishment as he’s condemned Alexis, of the Siberian salt mines, to, and Holmes and Watson make a trip to the consulate with the liberating papers in hopes of freeing the condemned revolutionary. 

It seems that Doyle squeezes as much juice as possible out of the fruits of this particular story, and it’s easy to congratulate him on all the ways in which he went right.  The stormy weather at the beginning of the story not only serves for atmosphere, but it plays a part in the plot.  The pince-nez speculations made by Holmes are proven correct fewer than twenty-four hours later when the Russian woman appears from behind the book case.  Even Professor Coram’s handicap and immobility prove essential to the plot, for Holmes’ demonstration (that the ash has been disturbed) rely on the fact that an ambulant person was in the professor’s room during lunch time.  Holmes’ great skill makes this case seem to be a simple one, but, like good sleight-of-hand, the appearance is deceiving.  The mystery, as Hopkins shows, was in fact a tremendously tricky one, and Holmes is at his most casually impressive when he solves, with misleading ease, a case as fraught with complexity as The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.

17.  The Problem of Thor Bridge (February – March 1922, Case-Book)

Perhaps the most ingenious of all Doyle’s death methods, The Problem of Thor Bridge is also the only mystery that I can recall offhand in the Holmes canon whose solution is a suicide.  The gist of Thor Bridge is that a jealous wife, seeking to punish her husband and to end her own suffering, frames the woman whom her husband has come to love.  And the jilted spouse completes her plans in an extraordinarily imaginative fashion.  She ties a revolver to a stone that she sinks into a pond on the side of Thor Bridge, blows her own brains out, and, when she dies, she of course releases the pistol, and, thanks to the weight of the stone, the pistol goes slithering off the bridge and sinks into the water, thereby disposing of the murder weapon.  Prior to this, the wife had written her unfortunate and innocent rival a note to ask her to commune with her on the bridge.  Thus, the rival was to be expected on the bridge and was therefore likely to be blamed for the murder of the wife.  It is thanks to a chip on Thor Bridge’s stone and the presence of a pair of revolvers, a duplicate set, that Holmes is able to penetrate through the thick fog of this dense mystery. 

A wonderful, wonderful solution.  One can only imagine the Eureka moment that Doyle must have had when he thought of this quaint and fantastic suicide device.  Perhaps he picked up a pen immediately and began to write.  Perhaps he stewed for hours or days over the perfect narrative elixir with which to blend his sinking-revolver plot device.  One would like to know the author’s process behind this story, but those details are likely consigned to history’s oblivion.  Still, the sinking-revolver idea is a plum, and one of Conan Doyle’s very best—a fine feather in the cap for a man who had more than his fair share of fine feathers. 

Aside from the striking pistol-into-the-pond trick, The Problem of Thor Bridge is quintessentially written.  It begins classically with a breakfast scene (perhaps the most traditional way to start a Holmes story) on a blustery October day (autumn and winter—with the thick fogs, brisk winds, deep snows, and early darkness—seem the most poetic seasons for Holmes’ London), then an introductory letter is provided, followed by an appearance from the client. 

It feels worth a digression here to remark that perhaps no other formulaic scenario in literature can be subject to such repetition and dinting while becoming ever yet more attractive.  It is a fairly cardinal rule that most other literary devices scream for innovation and change at every opportunity, yet the Holmesian breakfast scene, with its air of tradition and conservatism, seems to want nothing more than to be frozen in time, brought out now and again in the same state as before, with very few changes to people and the details of the introductory letters, then returned back to cold storage, where it may wait, unchanged in stasis, till its author brings it back out again.  In fact, there is something familiar about the Holmes breakfast scene which makes it representative of, or even a symbol of, the Victorian era.  Perhaps what lends the breakfast scenes their weight is the rattling carriages, the gloomy fogs, the glowing lamps, the solitary plane tree in 221B’s back garden, the brick streets, the casted social structure, the gelled formality of invitations and cards, and the relatively carefree hedonism of cigars and revolvers that came before lung cancer and mass shootings so besmirched the pair.  Perhaps other things contribute to the sway of the breakfast scenes, such as the stature of the people who appear in Holmes’ drawing room (like Professor Moriarty himself) or the emotional plight of the supplicants who beseech Holmes for help (such as the unhappy John Hector McFarlane from The Norwood Builder).  Surely there are other things beyond these details which make the breakfast scenes so welcome and so Victorian and so atmospheric, but they cannot all be listed; it is sufficient to say that their recycled yet looked-for reappearances are an example of the exception in the adage that there is an exception to every rule, when the rule in literature calls for invention.

Beyond the beginning of the story, with its breakfast scene, there is the sense of the dramatic in this Holmes story.  He takes out Watson’s revolver while they are in the carriage, empties its cylinders of all but one cartridge, then procures a ball of twine from the village shop.  He then goes out to the bridge to test his unspoken theory.  Holmes’ test makes policemen look out the corners of their eyes at him, and the test leaves Watson in silent perplexity.  With a resounding cry of, “Now for it!” the great detective lifts the pistol to his head, lets it go, watches it whisked off the bridge by the stone, and sees it chip the parapet.  “Was there ever a more exact demonstration?” Holmes demands, delighted, vindicated, and relieved by his exercise.  The drama shown here is characteristic of the best of Holmes’ stories, for it shows that our cold, aloof detective is indeed emotionally invested in the welfare of his clients and in finding the truth.  Here he has found truth once again, and he may rest in easy satisfaction knowing that he has solved the abstruse Problem of Thor Bridge.

16.  The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet (May 1892, Adventures)

One of those stories in the canon that, to be properly appreciated, ought to be annotated with modern day monetary values, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet is a classic illustration of Holmes’ understanding of how “circumstantial evidence may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”  To begin with, the amounts of money in the story seem trifling since the story was published in May of 1892, and inflation hadn’t yet wrecked our collective understanding of what money means.  Here I’ll convert the financial figures in the story from 19^th century British pounds to 21^st century U.S. dollars so that we can better understand the staggering sums that are at stake.  I’ll round the numbers off.

Mr. Holder’s client’s request for a loan: £50,000 ≈ $10,130,000.

Lowest estimated value of the beryl coronet: £100,000 ≈ $20,250,000.

Arthur’s request for money: £200 ≈ $40,500.

Mr. Holder’s reward for the coronet: £1,000 ≈ $200,000.

Holmes’ reward for recovering the beryls: £4,000 ≈ $810,000 (3/4^ths of which are spent in recovery of the stones).

I think that normally financially situated mortals such as myself will agree that Holmes has done himself well by earning roughly $200,000 (modern day dollars) for a day’s brilliant work on the Beryl case.  Consideration of this payment, along with his later million dollar check (again, year 2025 USD) from The Priory School’s Duke of Holdernesse, casts a somewhat cynical light upon Holmes’ remark to the duke that he is “a poor man.”  Perhaps Holmes is truly poor, and he speaks the untainted truth, but the sleuthing game is profitable.  More likely, Holmes spoke to the duke with human embellishment, for it seems reasonable, with the sums mentioned here, that Holmes can afford to take a case pro bono now and again.  Indeed, it seems likely that Holmes must have been an extremely wealthy man, one of the world’s so-called one-percenters.  That is not to say that he hasn’t earned his money; it is to say that his “I’m a poor man” statements, which seem to cast him as a humble commoner, may be a trifle disingenuous, or at least such statements pretermit the whole state of his financial affairs.  So the figures in this case are helpful not only for examining Holmes’ wealth (this reader wonders why, after many years, he hasn’t bought his Baker Street apartment, but continues to rent), but are also useful for contemporizing the exalted circles in which Holmes sometimes works.

Beyond the jaw-dropping amounts of money mentioned in this story, there is the artful way that Conan Doyle frames the case.  Suspicion is cast at once on the degenerate son, Arthur, who ultimately turns out to have acted in a most chivalrous manner.  Arthur’s father—a man who would have acted wisely if he’d have but left the beryl coronet in the bank’s safe, and to have told no one about it—turns out to be at fault for blaming his son and failing to detect that his niece had fallen madly in love with a scoundrel, thief, and cad: the dishonorable Sir George Burnwell.  Holmes must extend himself to the maximum to clear up the case, and he must do so quickly—for we learn, at the end of the mystery, that, fast though Holmes acted, the stones had already been fenced once. 

To solve the case, Holmes goes hounding through the snow, and he tracks footprints down an alleyway.  He examines windowsills to see where prints have gone.  He forms a tenable theory which leads him to Burnwell.  He dons a disguise.  He purchases the stones back on behalf of their rightful owner.  Nothing more can be expected from our brilliant detective.  As to Mr. Holder, one can only wonder how, and with what degree of horror, the banker’s illustrious client will react on receiving his precious security back, whose injury, he said, “would be almost as serious as its complete loss.”  Yet there’s nothing to be done for Mr. Holder here, except to silently chastise him for not using the bank safe, and to hope that some skilled jeweler can repair the coronet.  His troubles lie beyond our compass, and we may satisfy ourselves with the virtuoso performance of Holmes in the magnificent Adventure of the Beryl Coronet.

15.  The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans (December 1908, Last Bow)

An exquisite story, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans is most notable for its ingenious method of disposing of young Cadogen West’s body.  West’s murderers, when the train beneath their window pauses, place West’s body atop the train.  The train carries the corpse off, then throws the body from its rounded roof to the ground while cornering.  West’s body is found with no train ticket, a requisite for boarding the train, but with seven semi-critical papers relating to the patents of the new Bruce-Partington submarine.  Three patent papers remain—first they are in the hands of the traitorous and indebted Col. Valentine Walter and, afterwards, in the murderous spy’s, Oberstein’s, grubby paws.  These papers are the most important, and Holmes and Watson must find them.  They do so, first by luring Walters into a trap, then by enticing Oberstein into a similar one.  Both Walter and Oberstein rot in prison, while Holmes, for his services, gets an emerald tie-pin from the queen, and Watson gets a story to add to his collection. 

Reminiscent of The Second Stain in some ways—with its list of three spies, focus on international intrigue, and stakes of national security—The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans also seems to borrow from The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.  Both Naval Treaty and Bruce-Partington feature, as villains, unlikely and treasonous family members: Joseph Harrison and Valentine Walter.  All three stories share a whiff of espionage.  Here, however, we are treated to a special appearance.  The inclusion of Mycroft, who leaves his orbit, is more coal for the Partington engine.  Not often are we treated to an appearance from brother Mycroft, and this instance is the only occasion in the canon that he visits Holmes’ quarters.  Typically able to collate affairs of state from his office chair, this Woolwich Arsenal matter brings Mycroft ’round, and, like seeing a leopard on a safari, we feel a real thrill at his sighting.  So, though there’re some echoes of other stories in Bruce-Partington,there’s still enough ingenuity to keep readers clattering pleasantly along this tale’s tracks. 

14.  A Scandal in Bohemia (June 1891, Adventures)

Irene Adler—the Marie Curie, the Joan of Arc, the Judit Polgár of Holmesian fiction—is introduced here in Doyle’s first short Sherlock story.  And brazen indeed it is for Doyle to start Holmes off in his short story career with a failure!  When one puts him or herself into the author’s shoes, and one imagines setting out with a number of stories, the idea of starting your masterful detective off with a failure feels strongly like a nonstarter.  Granted, Holmes has previously succeeded in mysteries that were written in novel-length form (A Study in Scarlet, 1887 and The Sign of the Four, 1890).  Still, so daunting—so rife with seemingly unnecessary risk—is the prospect of giving Holmes a goose egg on his first short outing that most authors, nearly all, would shy from it.  The fact that Doyle allows Holmes to fail in his first outing shows the reader from the very beginning that here is a writer with stones.  Perhaps, readers may suppose, Doyle is supremely confident in his writing, almost arrogantly so.  Perhaps Doyle’s disinclined to put much stock in what the reader’s tastes are, or into whether the reader likes his work.  Perhaps, the reader may fairly wonder, Doyle has just goofed tremendously; he has, as the saying goes, “gotten in wrong,” and his work shall founder and be lost to the sprawling, mountainous stacks of great but unnoticed writing.  So it is reasonable here, at the outset of Doyle’s career, to wonder what influence The Strand Magazine had on Doyle’s success.  

In the first place, The Strand Magazine was widely read, with a circulation that was highest in London, one of the most literate places in the world.  Furthermore, the magazine’s high rate of publication allowed Holmes to rebound quickly from his initial defeat, and it also allowed Doyle to keep his detective foremost in readers’ minds.  Between June of 1891 when A Scandal in Bohemia story was published and August, not a peep was heard of Holmes.  But, between August of 1891 and June of 1892, Doyle produced eleven more short stories, one for every month.  In June of 1892 came the end of The Adventures, Doyle’s first collection of Holmes stories.  Already in December of 1892, Doyle began publishing the stories that would comprise The Memoirs, and he published every month (The Naval Treaty was a two-part story) until December of 1893.  From the first words that introduce Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887 to the demise of Holmes in The Final Problem in December of 1893 (presumably a Christmas gift that Doyle wanted more for himself than for his audience), Doyle wrote an almost Dickensian 278,000 words.  This is more than a quarter of a million good words, with many dazzling sentences, and with many enviable turns of the English language.  The adventures, then, of Holmes hinged greatly upon the rate at which high-quality Holmes stories were produced, and they were produced very, very quickly.  One may well wonder how many Holmes stories Doyle had stashed up his sleeve, for it’s not easy to cobble together a good mystery story every month, much less one that (in The Adventures) averages about 8,700 words in length.  And while we’re on the subject, here are the average lengths of stories in every Holmes collection.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: 8,744 average words per story

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: 7,971 average words per story

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: 8,656 average words per story

His Last Bow: 8,463 average words per story

The Case-Book: 6,911 average words per story

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the stories shorten in length continually till we reach Doyle’s final collection, The Case-Book.   And, since we’re here, and I have never seen the collections ranked, I will rank them, from best to worst. 

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sparkling from first to last, and a great pleasure to read, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains many of Doyle’s finest literary gems and jewels. 
2. The Return of Sherlock Holmes – After Conan Doyle gives himself a break, his readers are rewarded.  Abbey Grange, Second Stain, Empty House, Norwood Builder, Charles Augustus Milverton, and The Golden Pince-Nez are all wonderful, wonderful stories.
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Best known, perhaps, for The Final Problem, The Memoirs also contains such great tales as Silver Blaze and The Reigate Squire.  It seems, on looking back, that Doyle might have been undergoing some fatigue in the middle of this collection, but he did his best by the stories, and they are all very well written.
4. His Last Bow – Doyle’s shortest collection may be best remembered for the ingenious means of two disposals: that of Cadogen West’s corpse and (nearly) that of Lady Frances Carfax’s, for the poor woman barely survives her ordeal.
5. The Case-Book – A wildly uneven collection which is, unfortunately, tattooed by a few of Doyle’s stories that are so bad that some scholars have questioned whether Doyle actually wrote them, The Case-Book is a collection that ought to have been trimmed of its dead weight.  For Doyle, whose august reputation was already established, such stories as The Three Gables, The Mazarin Stone, The Veiled Lodger, The Creeping Man, and The Sussex Vampire would have been better attributed to another author.  Still, such stories as Shoscombe Old Place, The Three Garridebs, and Thor Bridge vindicate the collection and make it a worthy volume to add to any personal library.

Returning to Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, she has come to occupy, despite her fleeting appearance, a place in the canon that is equals such secondary characters as Mycroft, Lestrade, and Col. Sebastian Moran.  Adler has not the stature of Watson, but her presence seems greater than that of Hopkins, most villains, and every other woman in the canon, including Mary, Watson’s wife.  Accordingly, Irene Adler has been frequently adapted on stage and on screen.  She has entered the public consciousness, or she is, at the least, on its fringe.  She has also not yet been overworked nor lost to the changed mores of our era, as some other characters—James Bond, for instance—seem to have been.  There is room for Irene Adler to grow, and she can occupy a role that satisfies more than token feminism.  I would love to see her, for instance, engaged in another duel of wits with Holmes (even while both are mostly preoccupied with other things; he with a major case; she with her work)—and, at the outcome, have the outcome be a clean draw.  Others may want to see Adler as the titular character in a production, but, if she does play a lead, her role should neither be clearly defined as protagonist or antagonist.  Already, audiences have been treated to an Enola Holmes (and, of course, to an Enola sequel), so the space for a female lead that acts as a sleuth is already occupied in the Holmes universe.  And because Adler’s character in A Scandal in Bohemia is one that was primarily concerned with her own self defense, Adler doesn’t seem to be a suitable character for an antagonist’s role.  Adler would do very poorly, for instance, cast as a Harley Quinn to Moriarty’s Joker—an avenue that I could envision Hollywood executives talking themselves into taking.  Irene Adler needs to remain her own character: a freethinking woman, a bittersweet wildcard with a strong moral code, someone who can amicably clash with Sherlock Holmes’ intellect, and someone who can leave a king panting, as she did in A Scandal in Bohemia.

13.  The Final Problem (December 1893, Memoirs)

Sorely am I tempted to place The Final Problem within the top ten, though the story itself is not as gripping as some others that are better ranked.  For indeed, The Final Problem introduces us to Professor James Moriarty, whose name has become the apotheosis for Machiavellian evil.  Moriarty has achieved such popular notoriety that—since the long-ago beginning of his meteoric rise—he’s now either equaled or displaced such mononymical worthies as Iago, Faust, and Fagin.  Moriarty has become the symbol of the sinister spider at the center of the web, he who but plucks a thread and thereby sets in motion a finely made and necessary part of a precise master plan.  He is the beating heart of the body that capillaries, veins, and arteries flow through.  Or, it can also be said, he is the brain that works the body.  If for no other reason than this colossal professor, The Final Problem deserves consideration of a high place in any Holmes-ranking’s list.

And in The Final Problem, not only do we meet Moriarty, but Doyle kills off Holmes.  For eight years, Holmes lies at the stony bottom of Reichenbach Falls, less transparent than the ghost of Hamlet’s father, less present than the skull of poor Yorick.  We have not a word, not a whisper, not a hope for Holmes; like all those faithfully departed whom we care deeply about, he becomes gone but not forgotten. 

Following his death, a distraught, yelping readership cancelled, en masse, subscriptions with Strand Magazine to express their displeasure.  Only if JK Rowling had killed off Harry Potter halfway before book four ended could such a seismic result have been registered today on the literary Richter scale.  For the demigods of modern literature have never ruled the literary universe like Potter, Holmes, Voldemort, and Moriarty have.  Lisbeth Salander, Pennywise, Paul Atreides, and Daenerys Targaryen are contemporary literary icons whose roles have translated well upon the silver screen, but none possess the cachet of Potter and Holmes.  We can only thank Heaven that, in killing off Holmes, there was not the whiff of treachery by faithful Watson, otherwise, when Doyle brought him back, we would have had no end of resurrection story parallels.

Still, despite the rippling ramifications of The Final Problem, it has always waffled at The Rest Test: the story that, on a cold, winter’s night—when I am relaxing, and I want something homey, pleasant, and familiar to read—I will pick up and turn to.  And there are multiple stories in the Holmes canon that strongly pass that test for me.  Partly I am dissuaded by The Final Problem’s incomplete ending, for I know that Holmes returns in The Empty House as a poor bibliophile carrying The Origin of Tree Worship.  (And The Empty House feels, in some ways, like the second half of The Final Problem.)  Partly I am dissuaded by the lack of mystery; this chronicle feels more deserving of its title of Adventure than most other Holmes stories do.  And, finally, despite all the harm that Moriarty is reputed to do, we, as the audience, never actually see him succeed at anything.  Killer Evans in The Three Garridebs actually wounds Watson.  Irene Adler stays a step ahead of Holmes.  Baron Gruner’s men smash Holmes’ head.  Dr. Grimesby Roylott bends a poker with his bare hands.  But Moriarty cannot kill Holmes, though he does send him packing to the Continent.  There is much for and much against this weighty story, so, at last, we see that proper placing on a list of Holmesian stories is a challenge with regard to The Final Problem.

12.  The Adventure of the Priory School (February 1904, Return)

An extremely original and arresting Holmes story, The Adventure of the Priory School takes us up north to meet two of Doyle’s more memorable characters—the Duke of Holdernesse and his secretary, James Wilder.  With his long red beard and austere character, the duke is at once a victim and a perpetrator, though his social standing makes him mostly invulnerable to prosecution.  Wilder—illegitimate son, bypassed heir, vengeful young man, and casualty of his own machinations—is interesting because, though an ostensibly weaker force than the duke, it is Wilder’s scheming that so often drives the duke’s decision making.  Throw in the brilliancy that is the horses’ hooves which are shod to look like cattle tracks, and readers are treated to one of Doyle’s prettiest little mysteries. 

Heidigger, the German master, has gone missing along with Lord Saltire, and the supposition in the official force is that the young heir has been kidnapped by the morose school teacher.  A bit of luck—the road that serves the priory school was watched at one end by a constable and at the other by a party on the lookout for something else—serves to allow Holmes to eliminate both the eastern and western routes from the priory school as directions of Saltire’s egress, and, with the southern route from the priory school inaccessible to bicycles thanks to the presence of numerous stone walls, Holmes may safely focus his attention on the northern territory.  In a morass, Holmes and Watson search about for bicycle tracks, looking, in particular, for a Palmer tire, yet finding first a Dunlop with a patch.  This tire, they later discover, belongs to Wilder, and, as readers, we are granted profound insights into Holmes’ investigative powers, insights such as we could only hope for in stories like Black Peter, when the first week of Holmes’ investigations are shrouded from us.  Here, though, we are able to follow Holmes every step of the way, even as he and Watson follow the tire tracks to Heidigger’s body.  It is the grisly discovery of this corpse that sets off terrific consternation in the mind of the scheming secretary, for though he’d planned for the abduction of Lord Saltire, he had not foreseen that such tragedy would be wrought by his uncontrollable minion: the brutish and unsympathetic Mr. Reuben Hayes. 

Holmes and Watson, waiting outside the inn, find the boy (whom, thankfully, Doyle assures us is being treated well), and, what’s more, they discover how shamefully the duke acts.  Rather than expose Wilder, the duke covers for him at the expense of young Lord Saltire.  Holmes, rightfully, takes an opportunity to chide the duke over this, after receiving his check for six thousand pounds (equivalent to 1.1 million USD in 2025!).  To satisfy Holmes’ curiosity, the duke then shows Holmes and Watson into a museum room in the hall where the ingenious cloven footed shoes are kept: relics from yesteryear when they were allegedly used by robber-barons, a class of people who seem to have transitioned into a class contemporarily, and perhaps modernly, called: the nobility. 

From the sensational entry of Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable (Thorneycroft!  What a name!  Can you imagine naming your child that?  Or even proposing the name to your partner when talking of potential baby names?  What kind of a family… But I digress—to each their own; we must live and let live), to the wonderful revelation that the horses’ feet were shod to look like those of cattle, to the unlooked-for and surprising twist that James Wilder is not only the duke’s secretary but his illegitimate son, there is no shortage of intrigue in The Adventure of the Priory School, and this reader, for one, would have been happy to have accompanied Holmes to other cases in the north of England, or even further: up to Scotland and its majestic, fog-wreathed isles.

11.  The Adventure of the Reigate Squire (June 1893, Memoirs)

Containing one of my all-time favorite Holmes lines, “Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me…” (one that I used as an epigram in my own mystery novel, The Murders in the Endicott Hotel), The Adventure of the Reigate Squire is a lovable story that is made more endearing by seeing Watson’s plans for Holmes to convalesce thwarted at every turn. 

Upon completing an exhausting case that took him across Europe in search of a swindler, Holmes is fatigued.  Our good doctor and chronicler takes him for some fresh country air and relaxation at an old army friend’s house, one who is a bachelor, where news of a very peculiar robbery crops up, causing Holmes’ ears to prick.  His instincts are dampened by the doctor’s wagging finger, however, and Holmes allows his professional self to be subdued.  The next morning, however, when news of a murder appears, there is nothing that Watson or any other earthly force can do to stave Holmes off the case, and the detecting hound’s energy returns as he takes up the hunt again. 

After entering a house with Malplaquet’s date (an 18^th century battle in which the revered English General, the Duke of Marlborough, led England over France) over the door, Holmes tricks the Justice of the Peace into giving evidence against himself by writing the word “twelve”.  Holmes then intentionally spills a water carafe and a bowl of oranges, and, while the others are cleaning up the mess, he slips away, finds the missing part of the note in Alec Cunningham’s dressing-gown pocket, and is strangled by the Cunninghams for his efforts.  He then proceeds to elucidate to Watson, et al, as to how he solved the crime. 

The Squire case is very well written, enjoyable from start to finish, with an air of mystery, strange enough in its manifestation to warrant entry into Watson’s chronicles, and readers are shown sufficient deduction and skill from Holmes to be impressed.  It is really more than solid, and a good many mystery writers have never done better.  Furthermore, there is little to detract from it.  This is one of those stories that I return to when I am looking for a pleasant Holmes story to read, for there is a bit of mischief in Doyle’s writing when he stymies Watson time and again that makes the narrative amusing, while the mystery, clues, and solution are strong enough to keep me entertained, even though I know the plot’s resolution.  Indeed, quintessentially Holmesian and worth many re-reads is The Adventure of the Reigate Squire.

The Second Tier: Artistic Treasures

With stories such as Silver Blaze and The Man with the Twisted Lip, we find in the second tier five stories that show Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the height of his not inconsiderable powers.  These stories all share something in common: I loved these stories when I first read them, and I love them still.  Each story in this tier I consider to be magnificent.

10.  The Adventure of the Empty House (October 1903, Return)

The Adventure of the Empty House, in my mind, shall always be associated with The Final Problem.  While some other stories in the canon (such as A Scandal in Bohemia and The Adventure of the Naval Treaty) have multiple parts, they nevertheless feel like cohesive stories.  Empty House is the opposite.  It is a single story that feels as though it is the continuation of The Final Problem. 

Now, it may be immoral of me to say so, but—as a person who believes that evil has existed for as long as humanity, and that evil will be a permanent fixture of humanity’s future—The Empty House makes me pine for reasonable crime.  Hear me out.  So often, one hears of senseless violence, e.g.: the husband, hopped up on a cocktail of drugs, beats and kills his wife.  Terrible, awful, needless!  This is the human at its basest, a vulgar display of our worst aspect.  In The Empty House, however, we have an aesthetic murder, of the sort that is rarest.  A man, with meticulous planning and a silent gun, who has been hunting—with a strong motive and extraordinary patience—his equal adversary, finally has the chance to pull the trigger.  He does pull that trigger, and, at the very moment when he believes his quest is a success, Holmes leaps upon him like a tiger, and torpedoes the villain’s greatest hopes.  Here we have crime with a cause and, what’s more, crime with artistic merit.  If only such crimes were the norm, and the ugly crimes of the commoner were forever blasted from existence, the world would indeed be a better place.

The gun used in The Adventure of the Empty House is nearly as fine a detail as any in the Holmes canon.  At the time, the idea of a silenced weapon (a far more novel idea then than it is today) must have been wonderfully inspiring and intriguing to the average Londoner, whose day—in a year of banalities such as trudging through the London slush, taking out trash, washing clothes, paying rent, blundering through thick fog, and spending many tedious hours as a tailor, or a cart-driver, or a hotel clerk, or what have you—would very rarely be filled with thoughts of exotic, noiseless rifles.  Even today, the silent rifle is a specialist’s tool, and, though far more common than at any time before in history, it is an artifact whose preserve is almost exclusively American, western European, and Russian, and whose utilization still piques curiosity and interest.  Now, there being multiple subsonic rounds that pair well with silencers—in pistols, the 147 grain 9mm and .45 ACP; in rifles, the .300 Blackout and 8.6 Blackout—the prospect of silent murder is more common, yet still very unique in practice.  And, when such murders are carried out with silent weapons (such as by the cowardly murderer Luigi Mangione who shot an unarmed man in the back), the results are often sensational, though the adversaries are rarely on equal footing.  How cunning and subtle it is for Colonel Moran to hunt Holmes with an air rifle!  The stealth, the stalking, and the precise planning produced one of the greatest plots and one of the greatest villains in the Holmes canon.  That they did so was marvelous, that they did so at a moment when, perhaps more than any other, Doyle needed the sum of the parts to be greater than the whole, was superlative.  With accurate aim, Doyle resurrects Holmes and hits the bullseye in The Adventure of the Empty House.

9.  The Red-Headed League (August 1891, Adventures)

One of two stories, along with Blue Carbuncle, that begins with the words, “I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes”, The Red-Headed League is one of those stories in the Holmes canon whose strength lies in its lack of weaknesses.  Superbly written, pleasant to read, inventive in its plot, and with a quality of creating equally and expertly a mellifluous tone, an inviting atmosphere, and textured characters, The Red-Headed League is an exemplar for the student of prose.

In regards to The Red-Headed League’s tone, the subtle British dry humor, which is so welcome as a source of amusement and which so often rewards the reader when re-reading a text, is manifest here.  Sometimes, all that sets off the humor is the use of a single, well-chosen adjective, or just a properly timed quaint turn of a phrase.  For instance, Holmes asks Wilson, “And what is the name of this obliging youth?” and is, of course, quite wry in his query.  Later in the story, Doyle writes, “his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge pinch of snuff.” 

As to the atmosphere of the story, it is more than agreeable.  We readers are treated to a gentle rising action in which Watson calls upon Holmes, a seamless transition into hearing the client’s story, and, following that, Holmes engages in what he calls a “quite a three pipe problem.”  Holmes, having arrived at the conclusion that it must be the location of the house that is of interest to John Clay/Vincent Spaulding (I shall call him Spaulding here)—and not the rather uninteresting “average commonplace British tradesman: obese, pompous, and slow” with fiery red hair—he and Watson set out on a walk to Saxe-Coburg Square.  There Doyle describes the pawnbroker’s as “poky” and characterizes the neighborhood as “uncongenial” writing that, “reedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel-bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere.”  Doyle then goes on to send Holmes to the concert, where Doyle describes Holmes’ languor in a way that other forms of art—drama and film—have imitated many times since.  (Holmes prefers the German music to the Italian and the French, and as usual I find myself in agreement with him.) 

The characterization in this story is quite fine.  Good characters are hard to define in a sentence or two, yet Doyle puts in the maestro’s touch.  The bank directive is a plaintive, rather skeptical fellow whose attitude changes to respect and wonder in an instant upon the apprehension of Spaulding.  The police inspector is given a few lines of conceit so that, later, he might be brought to the level of Watson and ordinary mortals.  Above all, Doyle’s characterization of Holmes is a model.  At the client’s first visit, Holmes makes a few astute observations to surprise him and to show his worth.  Holmes then sinks into a reverie as he contemplates the problem.  He takes reasonable steps to test his theory: checking Spaulding’s knees, knocking his cane upon the walk, and looking around the block to find the bank—the goal of Spaulding’s game.  Holmes listens to music, then he (in anticipation of his enemy’s movements) waits in patience for his prey to emerge from the tunnel in the floor.  Then, Holmes nabs him.  (One does not readily think of the terrible consequence to Mr. Jabez Wilson if Spaulding had decided to murder the poor man in his bed before setting out into the tunnel, but certainly the possibility existed, and it is a slight mark against Holmes that he failed to take action to prevent the danger.)  The characterization of Holmes in this story is one that helps define the detective for many years to come.  In this way, The Red-Headed League shows its value, for a story when it is published more or less owes its initial success to publicity, but it owes its endurance to the work’s literary merit.  Here we have a story that has lasted in readers’ minds for more than a century, and gives some credence to the Flaubertian words that close the Red-Headed League: L’homme c’est rien, l’œuvre c’est tout.

8.  The Adventure of the Speckled Band (February 1892, Adventures)

It is in The Adventure of the Speckled Band that Holmes shows the greatest amount of physical strength that ever he displays, and Doyle shows us the first of the mysteries in which an animal is in some way responsible for a death.  (As I write this, one of my dogs—the littlest, and our only female, Velvet—has come and put her paws upon my leg and rested her head upon my knee as if to put in a good word for the mammals of the animal kingdom, and to say, “Snakes may be bad, but dogs are sweet and good.”)  Like in The Five Orange Pips, there is no time to waste and little margin for error, but this time (as opposed to in Pips), Holmes acts decisively.  He drives out to Stoke Moran, investigates the scene at once, and formulates a plan.  Helen Stoner shall retire early, signal Holmes and Watson when she is in her bedroom, then they shall take her place.  Once in the bedroom, they begin an eerie (and, it must seem to Watson, frighteningly interminable) vigil.  When Dr. Roylott presumes his victim to be asleep, he looses his snake through the dummy ventilator and down the bell rope that doesn’t pull.  Holmes beats the serpent back, and it recoils angrily onto the devilish doctor.  What a story! 

Not only is the mechanism for murder ingenious, but the atmosphere at Stoke Moran is thrilling.  A cheetah and a baboon inhabit the doctor’s grounds!  And Holmes and Watson must cross these grounds to reach Helen Stoner’s window.  Zounds!  However, perhaps in the extraordinary course of Holmes’ adventures, he is more inured to such things than others would be, so he does not find them so outlandish.  So, to gauge the weirdness of the situation more accurately I shall put myself into the shoes of someone more conventional—say, those of Dr. Roylott’s neighbor. 

I imagine that, as Dr. Roylott’s neighbor, I am living a respectable life in staid and genteel England, where all is expected to be decorous, respectable, and unadventurous.  Yet next door to me, this doctor who has returned from India permits a cheetah and a monkey to roam the yard.  Dr. Roylott lets his house fall into disrepair.  Gypsies inhabit his garden.  He’s recently thrown the blacksmith over a rail.  I have reason to believe that he abuses his daughter, and I know that his other daughter died under suspicious and cloudy circumstances.  If I were Dr. Roylott’s neighbor, I would be thinking of him, “What an abominable pest!  What a horrible man!  What a black stain on the neighborhood he is!”  And, if I were the neighbor, upon hearing of Dr. Roylott’s death, I probably would have nodded my head and thought to myself (even while saying aloud to my neighbors, “Ah, such a tragedy.  The inconstancy of life.”), “I wonder how many cartwheels I can do down my living room hall?  And, just how indecent would it really be to plan a parade?”  The coroner, when summoned to examine the circumstances surrounding Dr. Roylott’s death, must have gone out with a skip in his step, and a twinkle in his eye, and he must have been hard-pressed to stifle the song on his lips.  Indeed, it is hard not to imagine the station-master, before Holmes boards the train back to London, stepping out specially to give Holmes a strong, quiet shake of the hand, to meet his Holmes’ eyes, and to give Holmes a manly, solemn, and understanding nod of the head.  Certainly Holmes does the community a great favor in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and, as to the snake, one may only hope that, as a reward for its services, it was returned to the jungle, where it devoured rats by the kilo, or as many as its serpentine heart desired.

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.

6.  The Adventure of Silver Blaze (December 1892, Memoirs)

One of Doyle’s most subtle mysteries, The Adventure of Silver Blaze is also one of his best.  The brilliant idea of setting up the horse as the killer of John Straker, and of permitting Silver Blaze to act in self-defense so that the mistreated equine might not seem culpable, is, of course, a master stroke.  But perhaps some of the soft touches on this wonderful story are even finer.  For instance, after Holmes reads the note from the milliner, it so happens that he then meets Mrs. Straker.  He asks her whether he met her at a garden party; she answers in the negative, and he responds with the remark that he was sure it must be her in the silk, dove-colored dress with ostrich feathers.  (This must be a beautiful dress.  A quick search on the internet to determine whether such queenly treasures are even sold today reveals that, in fact, they are.  There is a gorgeous one hundred percent silk dress with ostrich feather trim listed on Ivan Young’s website for $30,000.)  Mrs. Straker denies ever having owned such a dress, and Holmes’ gentle probing proves a remarkable success.  He has fathomed that Mr. Straker purchased the dress for another woman.

Later, when Colonel Ross states, “So you despair of arresting the murderer of poor Straker,” Holmes answers with such dry humor as to bring a smile to the reader’s face, “There are certainly grave difficulties in the way.”  Indeed there are, as the arrest of a horse would present grave difficulties.  Then, of course, there come two of Doyle’s most two zephyr-like yet damning touches: the “curious incident” of the dog in the night-time and the “singular epidemic” of the sheep.  Both clues serve to assure Holmes that his theory is accurate and thus condemn John Straker; both clues are indicative of Doyle’s position here: that of a masterful writer at work upon a polished text.

Finally, we have Holmes doing what Holmes does best, and that is empathizing.  In wondering where the horse goes, Doyle permits Sherlock to remark, “The horse is a gregarious creature.”  Indeed, it is this comment that leads him to calculate as a horse might.  Upon finding itself stranded on the moor, the horse (unlike, say, more solitary animals such as the fox or owl) may make for what the horse interprets to be civilization, looking for the company of its brother horses.  I do not say that Holmes thinks like a horse, but I believe that here Doyle shows how, more often than not, Holmes uses his great powers to predict what another will do by putting himself, more or less, in that other’s shoes. 

It must be noted that Silver Blaze is not the only episode in which Holmes empathizes, and that sometimes his success in cases is contingent upon his ability to do so.  He professes to put himself into the butler Brunton’s shoes in The Musgrave Ritual, and he is successful; he does not put himself into Irene Adler’s shoes in A Scandal in Bohemia, and he fails there.  The question, it seems, that he asks himself when solving a criminal case, is not so much, “What would I do?” but rather, “What would I do, if I were him?”  The dependent clause, of course, is infused with sympathy and togetherness toward the perpetrator, in the spirit of clearing up the matter for the sake of discovering the truth.

With atmospheric touches to the settings, with the subtlety and care that mark the best of all literature, Doyle gallops by lengths to preeminence in penning The Adventure of Silver Blaze.

The First Tier: The Crown Jewels

These are the stories that, more often than not, I turn to when I am looking for a Holmes story at bedtime.  Like the stories in the second tier, the five stories in this one are stories that I have loved ever since I first read them.  These “crown jewels” give me a sense of total contentment on a cold winter’s night when I am cozying up with a familiar story.  I enjoy reading them, again and again, and, as if they have drunk from the fountain of youth, they never seem to get old.

5.  The Norwood Builder (November 1903, Return)

I never cease to be amused by the passage in The Norwood Builder in which Holmes is gratified by the prospect of a devilish mystery, even one that threatens to put his prospective client’s neck in the noose: 

“‘Arrest you!’ said Holmes. ‘This is really most grati—most interesting. On what charge do you expect to be arrested?’

“‘Upon the charge of murdering Mr. Jonas Oldacre, of Lower Norwood.’

“My companion’s expressive face showed a sympathy which was not, I am afraid, entirely unmixed with satisfaction.”

Holmes, who loves a case as the artist loves art for art’s sake, has been bored nearly to death by the dearth of cases, so, when a fascinating mystery regarding the ostensible murder of the vengeful and reclusive Jonas Oldacre crops up, he’s delighted.  In this charming mystery, we have a case in which Holmes’ spirit rises in rebellion against the very idea that John McFarlane is culpable for the murder of Oldacre, but Holmes cannot prove it.  It is only when Oldacre, in a final attempt to assure blame for McFarlane, overextends himself, that Holmes is able to satisfy himself that something is definitely amiss in the case.  After Holmes finds that one passage in the house is shorter than the others, then Holmes, quite literally and very dramatically, smokes his quarry out. 

Norwood Builder is a case that bears multiple readings, and each time it is re-read, it enriches the reader anew.  The secret passage/hidden room trope is one that Doyle is careful not to overuse, and here he employs it with great effect.  Time and again, as readers peruse this story, we are satisfied to see the cunning and devilish Oldacre spring from his hiding place as the cry of fire echoes through the house and as the smoke rises.  What a treacherous old fiend Oldacre is!  What a monster!  Part of what makes Norwood Builder so good is the incredible vindictiveness of Oldacre himself.  For years the old miser (who reminds me of Ebeneezer Balfour in Kidnapped)has nursed a grudge against the woman who jilted him, and he finally, like a snake, lashes out at poor McFarlane, who is quite innocent of all the turmoil that transpired to bring about this grotesque state of affairs.  That Oldacre would go so far as to pretend to bring about his own death, secret himself in a hidden room, and then—as he seeks to escape his looming creditors—frame an innocent man for his murder is a truly heinous act.  The action makes him, at once, one of Doyle’s most fascinating and eyebrow-raising villains, mostly because there is no doubt that such people exist in real life.  And what’s most frightening is that such spiteful people may not be so rare as to only be someone else’s problem.  Many of us know an Oldacre personality type, and, what’s more, many of us might not put it past that person to try a stunt equivalent to what Oldacre himself has attempted.  And, it almost goes without saying, but, as soon as the Oldacre-personality type is caught, their reaction is just as Doyle portrays it: They minimize the consequences of their vile actions.

An absolutely captivating story, Doyle blends drama, mystery, double-edged, crafty statements (“It is a lesson to us not to trust our own judgment, is it not, Lestrade?) and an abominable villain in The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.

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.

3.  The Adventure of the Abbey Grange (September 1904, Return)

“The game is afoot.”  With these words that have echoed for a century, and with the less-often repeated descriptions preceding it, i.e.: “It was a bitterly cold and frosty morning” and “The candle in his hand shone on his eager, stooping face” one of the greatest stories in the Holmes canon begins.  The Adventure of the Abbey Grange is most notable, of course, for Holmes’ having to return to the scene of the crime, by his climbing on to the fireplace mantel to examine the bellrope, by his vexation over the beeswax in the wine glasses, and, finally, by his and Watson’s ad hoc trial of Captain Croker.  Yet Abbey Grange is also notable for its little details: the blackthorn cudgel that Sir Eustace carries, the ingenuity of the story so quickly concocted by Croker and the maid, and for the clever trick of throwing the silver into the icy pond where the swan resides.  Finally, the story is remarkable for its appropriate administration of justice: sure, swift, and popular: vox populi, vox Dei.

Sir Eustace Brackenstall is a hound, and though he has not traditionally been catalogued as a villain like Moriarty or Colonel Sebastian Moran, he is as bad as they are.  This is a man who drenches a dog in petroleum and sets it on fire; this is a man who beats his wife, calls her names, and stabs her with hat pins; this is a man who throws decanters at the maid.  This is the sort of man, with his title and his wealth, who was protected by contemporary British law and culture more than anyone save a peer of the realm or the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Sir Eustace could act with impunity, and he did, abusing his household and his station.  With this context firmly in mind, Holmes waits outside Scotland Yard with his brows furrowed, thinking the situation carefully over, before deciding that he wants more information before prosecuting Croker.  Therefore, Holmes meets with Captain Croker, and he asks the captain to tell his story.  Holmes tests Croker, finds his character rings true to the standards of good morality, and then sets him free.  As to Croker’s conduct, I feel the same about it as Squire Trelawny, of Treasure Island, felt when he spoke to Mr. Dance about the death of the pirate, Pew: “And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach.”  Good riddance to a bad egg.

The story reaches, perhaps, its pinnacle when Holmes steps off the train for Chiselhurst and pulls Watson after him.  Holmes says that the case feels wrong, all wrong, and that he cannot bear to leave it in the condition that it’s in.  He says that he fears that the British jury have not yet reached the “pitch of intelligence” necessary to side with his theories over Lestrade’s facts.  He says that, if only he had examined the case de novo, without being influenced by the lady’s story, then he would have never come to the conclusion that the lady’s story was true.  And, after a scintillating investigation, Holmes returns to Lady Brackenstall with one of his most dramatic pronouncements, “No, no, Lady Brackenstall, it is no use. You may have heard of any little reputation which I possess. I will stake it all on the fact that your story is an absolute fabrication.”  The maid calls Holmes “impudent,” surely out of line for her station, and Holmes does not deign to answer her, for he knows that the truth is on his side.  When the lady of the house still refuses to be forthcoming, Holmes takes matters into his own hands, visits the shipping office, and sends for Croker. 

Thus between lowborn sailors and highborn blackguards, quick deception and careful illumination, swift retribution and extrajudicial justice, exhilarating exposition and invigorating dialogue, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange nestles down, like slowly sinking bees-wing, in the top tier of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories.

2.  The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (April 1904, Return)

Perhaps (even more than Moriarty) the most contemptible of all Holmes villains, Charles Augustus Milverton takes center stage in this appropriately eponymous story.  Doyle’s description of Milverton is so memorable as to make it worth repeating here.  First described in association with snakes: a “slithery, gliding, venomous creature,” Milverton is then cast as the “king of all blackmailers” and a man with “a smiling face and a heart of marble.”  Once he enters Baker Street, Milverton appears as “a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile, and two keen grey eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, golden-rimmed glasses. There was something of Mr. Pickwick’s benevolence in his appearance, marred only by the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes.”  Milverton is diabolical evil incarnate, with an oily smile and a gun beneath his luxurious coat; he is the iron beneath the velvet glove; he is HBO’s Penguin: an amoral man, out only for himself, one who will stick at nothing.  Our vision of Milverton, as readers, is only improved and cemented by Sidney Paget’s masterful depiction.  There we see Milverton—hat in hand like a supplicant, deceitfully benevolent smile upon his face, the rich astrakhan over his shoulders—and we can hate him, for, as Holmes says, this is a man who cripples people’s lives “to add to his already swollen money-bags.”

There is less mystery in this case than in most, but the tale is unlike any other in the Holmes canon.  It is truly an adventure, one in which Holmes and Watson are in the moral right in burgling Milverton’s home.  (One only wishes that the poor maid’s heart didn’t have to get broken in the process, but one cannot make omelets without breaking a few eggs.)  The quibble I have with this story is with the presumptive husbands of the women whom Milverton is blackmailing.  I put myself into these men’s shoes.  If I were to receive a letter from a man like Milverton, of course I would be angry, and I would confront my wife about it.  She, likely upset, would explain to me how she was blackmailed by this man, whose name, Charles Augustus, would then be burned into my brain.  My anger would turn on him.  How dare this Milverton extort and blackmail the love of my life!  How dare he think that I would do nothing?  How dare he think that I would behave so single-mindedly as to have no notion of revenge toward Milverton himself?  Leaving things to simmer with my wife, I would track down that low and cowardly Milverton, and I would… Well, better not to say, but suffice it to say that there are other men in this world who, understanding the position, would act the same.  It is hard, therefore, to think that no man had revenged himself upon Milverton before, and thereby put an early stop to his dastardly scheming. 

That said, the plot is a great one, and the writing is superb.  I have always enjoyed the story, and I find that it’s one that I often go to when I’m looking for a good Holmes adventure to read before bedtime.  For its re-readability, its precipitating prose, its uniqueness, and for the sheer magnitude of the villain, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of Doyle’s best.

1. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (January 1892, Adventures)

The Christmas story.  A beloved tale whose ranking is all out of proportion with its mystery, but whose ranking, for me, is just right all the same.  When I was young, I loved reading about the Holmes’ analysis of the hat, and I always loved the detail of the lime cream.  I was fascinated by the bonny blue stone in the crop of the goose, and I was enchanted by the breakfast scene.  The Blue Carbuncle is, to me, the most lovable, re-readable, and cozy story in the canon.  On a cold winter’s night, when the house is quiet, and snow muffles the street noise, when candles are lit and the pets are asleep and I am interested in treating myself to a Holmesian delicacy, this is the story that I turn to.  For me, there is no better measure of a story’s worth than that.  Few other stories occupy such a place for me, and all are those that I consider my favorites.  They are: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Danny the Champion of the World, P.G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves! and The Code of the Woosters, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game.  Hundreds of other books and stories are close to my heart, such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October; Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game.  I could nearly go on forever.  There are too many well-told, good stories to name.  (How could I have left Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol off my list?  I really must stop somewhere…)  I feel some need of defending The Blue Carbuncle as my favorite, but, on reflection, I really oughtn’t.  This is, after all, my list, and I do not intend to push my beliefs on anyone.  If you like another story better, then I am happy for you, and I say Live and let live.  Blue Carbuncle is my favorite, but it certainly does not have to be yours too.  For me, this is an original story (the idea of concealing a stone in a goose is a brilliant one!), and the atmosphere and telling of it are impeccable, as fine as a Christmas dinner.  The story manages to engage and elevate all that is Victorian and Christmassy, to wrap it into a neat gift, and to give it without asking anything back.  Giving without expectation of receiving is the true Christmas spirit, and for many years I have found a great and merry gift, with nothing expected in return, in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle