I like a well-crafted mystery, from time to time, as you may have guessed from my earlier articles on M.C. Beaton’s Death of a Witch and other Hamish Macbeth mysteries, or my review of Michael Connelly’s The Brass Verdict. But with all due respect to the prowess of the mystery-solvers in those books, there really is no one quite like Sherlock Holmes to unravel a conundrum with style and flair.
Some sleuths, like Lt. Colombo, clearly belong on the screen, but I think Holmes has always done his best work on the printed page. Attempts to portray him live have been uneven. A number of the Basil Rathbone movies were okay. Other live renditions were only so-so, and some less so. The 1965 Broadway musical, Baker Street, was a boring flop; the present PBS series of Holmes mysteries is dull and unpleasant, and the 1976 movie, The Seven-Percent Solution, was a waste of a perfectly good rental. Just letting you know, I’m not a pushover for any pipe-smoking limey in a two-billed hat.
In the course of formulating my list of what I consider the top 10 Sherlock Holmes stories, I have thrown in a somewhat unexpected twist, which will be revealed further on in this essay. I did not do it to be whimsical, but because it represents my taste in well-written mysteries.
Without further ado, let me start right in on the list. I’ll be listing the stories in chronological order.
A Scandal in Bohemia (pub. 1891)
The aspect of this story I liked the best was that the heretofore and thereafter invincible Holmes gets outwitted…by a woman.
The narrator in these stories, his assistant, Dr. John Watson, in case you did not know, goes on at great length how little Holmes seems to be impressed by a woman’s charms, even the most charming of them, or so it would seem.
The woman in question is a Miss Irene Adler, an actress and singer, from New Jersey. She does not prevent Holmes’ client-a Bohemian crown prince-from obtaining the relief from his dilemma that he seeks, but, in the process, she clearly gets the better of the brilliant sleuth from Baker Street.
And despite Holmes’ seeming disdain for the gender, he does show, in his own way, that he will never forget her.
Another amusing touch is at the beginning of the story, when Holmes tells Watson, whom he had not seen in a while, precisely what he had been doing a few days earlier, without his having said a word on the subject. This prompted Watson to observe: “You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.”
The Red-Headed League (pub. 1891)
The plot of this story is somewhat similar to the Coen brothers’ 2004 movie, The Ladykillers. Obviously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought of the idea first.
In both instances, would-be bank robbers need to distract an innocent person whose location abuts an underground bank vault. In the case of the movie, Tom Hanks, as the head of the gang, gains entry to the premises as a boarder, and, passing himself off to the lady of the house as a choirmaster, holds “choir practice” in her basement, with recorded choral music drowning out the pick-and-shovel work.
In the case of the Sherlock Holmes story, the ruse is “The Red-Headed League.” In this instance, the nefarious miners’ ploy is to get the occupant to leave the place.
The occupant happens to be a shopkeeper with a head of flaming-red hair. One day, his assistant shows him an ad in the local paper for a red-headed man to do some very well-paying work for an organization called The Red-Headed League. The shopkeeper-a Mr. Jabez Wilson-finds himself applying along with several red-haired men. The proprietor of the Red-Headed League expresses astonishment at the brilliance of Wilson’s red hair, and hires him on the basis of that alone.
For all the fanfare and excellent pay the job seems to promise, it turns out to be a humdrum affair of copying the contents of an encyclopedia. When Wilson reports for work on the project, one day, he finds nobody in and a sign stating that the Red-Headed League had been disbanded. Curious as to what may have caused him to suddenly lose such a good sinecure, he seeks Holmes’ advice. It does not take the detective long to figure out what was going on.
Wilson’s assistant and the proprietor of the supposed League were in cahoots, so it was no fortunate coincidence that the shopkeeper saw the ad in the paper.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (pub. 1892)
Many people, including Doyle himself, considered this one to be the best of his Sherlock Holmes Stories. To my way of thinking, it features the most despicable of Doyle’s villains after the notorious Professor Moriarity. The antagonist, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, is a scoundrel who thought he had married rich and stood to benefit from his wife’s demise. It turned out that the value of her holdings had decreased significantly, and the bequests she had made to her twin daughters, upon the occasion of their marriages, would have left the doctor with practically nothing.
At the start of the tale, he has already murdered one of his stepdaughters, right before her marriage, through the use of a poisonous snake (the “speckled band”). The remaining daughter is about to be married and has consulted Holmes to look into her sister’s mysterious death, since no sign of the snake had ever been discovered.
Holmes figures out how the doctor introduced the snake into the girls’ room (by means of a whistle, in response to which the snake had been trained to slide through a vent and down a non-functioning bell-cord, where it would bite the victim, then slither back to from whence it came.
Holmes substitutes himself in the room for the targeted stepdaughter, and, when the speckled band arrives, fully expected, Holmes drives it away with a cane. The retreating snake ends up taking out its frustration by biting Dr. Roylott instead.
As popular as this story has been, it overlooks two somewhat important points: snakes cannot easily climb or descend something as loose as a bell-cord, and they are unable to hear.
Silver Blaze (pub. 1892)
This is one of the more ironic murders Holmes is called upon to solve, and it is one of the ones where the police have apprehended the wrong suspect.
Silver Blaze is a prize racehorse and the overwhelming favorite to win an upcoming stakes race. The horse momentarily turns up missing, but is later found, well before the race. Of more importance, the horse’s trainer, a fellow named John Straker, is found dead on the scene from a blow to the head.
Through many brilliant deductions, Holmes is able to find out who was behind all the ill-doings and why. Let us just say that the victim, like the second victim in The Speckled Band, was pretty much hoisted on his own petard.
In the course of solving the case, Detective Gregory, of Scotland Yard, asks Holmes if there are any other points he wanted to bring up.
Holmes mentions “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Detective Gregory then points out that the dog did nothing in the night-time.
“That was the curious incident,” Holmes replies. What he meant was, by its failure to bark, the dog on the property must have recognized the person who made off with Silver Blaze.
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot (pub. 1910)
The title comes from the English translation of the Latin for the poisonous root that a killer uses in attempt to kill off his siblings (two brothers and a sister). The poison does kill the sister and severely affects, but does not kill the brothers.
Later, as happens from time to time in these stories, the killer himself is found dead, apparently by the same cause that caused his sister’s demise.
In the process of unraveling the mystery, Holmes notes that a family cousin seems to have taken the news of the lady’s death very hard. After he figured out that the intact sibling tried to do in the other three, he deduces that the cousin, an educated man, figured out what caused the tragedy and used the same device to kill the murderer. It turns out he had been deeply in love with his female cousin.
Just as we see in the first story I listed, A Scandal in Bohemia, that Holmes is willing to commit a burglary to foil a blackmailer, we see, in this story, he is willing to overlook a murder, when he considers the cause to be just, for he lets the cousin go, without a word of his involvement to anyone.
Right now, in my Netflix, subscription, I am renting the first episodes of the BBC series, Foyle’s War, about a police detective who has the even-more-thankless job of trying to uphold the law in a time of his nation’s utmost peril. The series begins in 1940, and, so far, the war has severely impacted all the episodes. I bring up the point because, unlike Holmes, Foyle believes that the law is the law and murder is murder.
And, while I prefer Foyle’s morality to Holmes’, I found The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot to be a very absorbing read.
And now comes the odd wrinkle. I am done with my list of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have five more to list, but they are by a modern-day mystery writer named Laurie R. King.
Ms. King adopted the conceit that, after Holmes retired to Sussex Downs to keep bees (which is where Doyle had consigned him), he stumbled upon a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl (or, rather, she, literally, stumbled upon him) named Mary Russell. Miss Russell was born on the second day of the twentieth century, so this meeting took place in 1914, while the Great War was raging on the Continent.
She proves to have a mind every bit as clever and deductive as Holmes, which soon causes Holmes to ignore a shared sentiment expressed by another gifted eccentric, named Henry Higgins, who would rather have “another imposition of the Spanish Inquisition, than to ever let a woman in my life!”
In fact, after Mary Russell runs into the retired detective, he initially addresses her, owing to her large hat that conceals a good bit of her face and head, as “Young man,” to her very vocal outrage.
But, as I provide this background information, I am intruding on the details of the first of the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes novels on my list. It is called:
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (pub. 1994)
This is actually my favorite story about Sherlock Holmes by any author. It shows aspects of the brilliant detective that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never saw fit to examine and which, to an extent, were very poorly considered in the aforementioned Broadway flop.
I also was amused at how both Holmes and Watson are said, in the book, to consider Doyle a meddlesome old fool. That is not to say I have anything against the original author, but it was amusing to get this particular viewpoint of his writing.
I became aware of this book (as I did of the Hamish Macbeth mysteries) in 2005, when my second cousin and her husband came to visit me in the hospital, where I was ensconced for an unfortunately long stay, to be followed by an even longer convalescence. They brought about half a dozen books for me to read, among which were M.C. Beaton’s Death of an Outsider and Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The former book came out somewhere in the middle of the Macbeth series, but the one by Ms. King was, fortunately, the first in the series, so I got in on the ground floor, even if my hospital room was actually on the second floor.
Mary Russell is young, slight of build, fraught with anxieties and a bookworm, but she is a match for Holmes, not only in terms of intellect, but of courage. She gets badly wounded while saving Holmes’ life in the book’s denouement, but, of course, she makes a nearly-full recovery…else we should have no more novels in the series.
She is also quite wealthy, but derives no joy from the condition. She blames herself for the motorcar accident that took her family’s lives, inasmuch as she thought she had distracted her father while he was trying to drive. The loyal reader who follows the series will get to learn more about that incident in a later book. Nevertheless, her more-that-comfortable finances enable her (and Holmes) to accomplish a great many things that a lone beekeeper might have difficulty arranging on his own-all in pursuit of justice, naturally.
A Monstrous Regiment of Women (pub. 1995)
This was Ms. King’s second Mary Russell novel, in which she turns 21 and where the reader first learns of the possibility that she and Holmes might marry. They actually do, further on, even though she retains her maiden name, and the two of them always call each other “Holmes” and “Russell,” respectively.
The title of the book is taken from a quote in 1558 by the theologian, John Knox. The term “regiment” refers, not to a military grouping of women, but to their increasing presence as rulers, specifically, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England.
This story provides some excellent insights into both mysticism and feminism, back when it was a far more dangerous and controversial belief to hold. It also makes mention of an illegitimate son Holmes fathered in his youth. That device was not purely an invention of Ms. King. There was some basis for it extant, before this novel.
The Moor (pub. 1998)
This story is set on the same spot as Doyle’s earlier adventure, The Hound of theBaskervilles. In this instance, the person needing Holmes’ assistance (and Russell’s, of course-they are married, by now) is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, an actual historical figure, whom some of you may recognize as the author of the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
I have read both this novel and The Hound of the Baskervilles, although at vastly different times in my life. That said, I definitely like this one better than the earlier one.
Justice Hall (pub. 2002)
The couples’ seemingly-Arabian guides in earlier novels, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, are revealed to actually be British nobility, with considerable holdings, including the mansion called Justice Hall.
The elder of the two former guides, who called himself Mahmoud Hazr, has inherited a dukedom and wants to pass the title on to a sole surviving nephew, who is alive, but his whereabouts are unknown. There was another nephew who did not survive, due to the recent war, and the story of his demise is both sad and horrifying.
As you would expect, there are plans afoot by nefarious evildoers to prevent the new duke from finding his nephew and passing the title on to him.
In terms of the dynamic between Holmes and Russell, this story does not measure up to the first two, but it is probably the best-crafted mystery in the series up to that point.
Locked Rooms (pub. 2005)
This story is set in San Francisco, where Mary’s father was from and where he conducted his business while he was alive (He was American and Christian. Her mother was Jewish and British.).
The quality of the mystery is up to Ms. King’s excellent standard, but this book stands out because of all the missing pieces of the puzzle we finally get to see regarding Russell’s background. For someone who has been faithfully following the series, it is a “must read.”
You the astute (and, clearly, patient) reader may have noticed that I have been very sketchy about specific details. That is so for a reason. I am not writing this article to brag about all the mysteries I have read. Any fool can read a mystery, and I take a back seat to no one when it comes to foolishness. No, it is my hope you will have become curious enough to read these books, and several others about this fascinating character, Sherlock Holmes, whether written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Laurie R. King.
Sources
Project Gutenberg
Wikipedia
laurieking.com
My Fair Lady
Own collection
