Tag: Sherlock Holmes Stories ranked

I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.

Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories

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. 

I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.

Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories

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.

I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.

Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories

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.

I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.

Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories

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).

Many reviewers find nothing redeeming in The Three Gables, but I disagree.  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.

---

I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.

We’ll start with the book’s preface!

Wherever Fact May Lead Me

Preface

One might think that—with the state of politics, war, and culture—society has enough conflict to divide itself upon, and that nothing contentious should additionally be introduced.  One would be right in the first, yet wrong in the second.  For the Sherlock Holmes stories (having been ranked many times before) nevertheless stand in ever-ready want of re-ranking, an act which obliges some contention.  That no one can agree upon the best and the worst of the Holmes stories testifies not only to the diverse tastes of Conan Doyle’s readership, but also to the high number of quality tales from which to choose.

Now, having read—time and again, over the course of many years—the Sherlock Holmes stories, I feel capable of ranking them (and, indeed, ‘tiering’ them) with a view to little more than occupying my own time for my own pleasure.  More likely than not, my rankings reflect the priority with which I would choose to read the stories.  And I shall qualify my tier by saying that there’s nothing inherently more meaningful in my hierarchy as compared to any other reader’s.

My sole criterion: I valuate the Holmes stories based upon what I believe to be their aesthetic quality.  While recognizing that “aesthetics” is a rather subjective valuation, I can only say that these are the stories that give me the greatest pleasure to read—a measuring system which is not, surely, easily explicable—but one which I hope gives readers a reference for when they judge these stories for themselves.  That said, I believe that my aesthetic taste is most predisposed toward: original plots, expressive language, evocative settings, strong characterization, and emotional resonance.

While ranking these stories, I have added illustrations by Sidney Paget for those stories which he illustrated, and, for those stories which were illustrated by others, I have not included any illustrations.  This is because the only Holmes illustrator whose work consistently resonates with me is Paget.  The illustrations that I’ve chosen from his oeuvre are those that I find most memorable.  Also while ranking the stories, I have stuck to the original fifty-six of the canon, and I have excluded the four novels, as well as the two so-called special occasion stories: The Field Bazaar and How Watson Learned the Trick.  This is because the two special occasion stories are quite short and were never, in my opinion, intended by Doyle to be of the same quality as those canonical fifty-six.  I have not delved into the novels because they do not fit the same class as a short story for a variety of reasons.  Thanks to their length, novels have greater purchase for character and plot development; they have also, again thanks to their length, more opportunities to stall and go wrong; novels can digress in ways that stories cannot, and so on and so forth.  Suffice it to say, this will be a ranking of the fifty-six stories of the canon with illustrations, where possible, by Paget. 

I’d also like to note here that—while I understand that it is conventional for stories to receive quotes around their titles, and for longer works to be either underlined or italicized—I am going to italicize story and novel titles alike.  This decision is being made out of courtesy for the reader.  I am a writer who expresses himself most easily through long, syntactically complicated sentences.  I feel that, once the various grammatical marks that I am fond of—parentheses, commas, semicolons, and M-dashes—are placed into my sentences, the application of additional quotation marks (particularly when I am already quoting a piece of text) will foul the reading experience.  So while I shall quote text, and, thus, include quotation marks in my document, I shall reserve italics only for titles.  And, since the only title in this document that recurs as both a short story title and as a collection title is The Last Bow, there is little chance for readers to conflate a short story’s title with a novel’s title.  Bearing this context in mind, the decision of foregoing grammatical convention for the sake of grammatical lucidity seems to me to be the appropriate one here.

Key: (month and year of first publication, collection)

Collections

(Adventures) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892.

(Memoirs) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894.

(Return) The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905.

(Last Bow) His Last Bow, 1917.

(Case-Book) The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927.

I want to also state, here at the outset, that there are spoilers in my little commentaries.  Now, without further ado.