Is The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes Really That Bad?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Even among diehard Sherlockians, the nine-book ‘canon’ of Conan Doyle-authored Sherlock Holmes books has surprisingly few out-and-out classics that all can agree on. The first two novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, show Doyle still finding his feet with the two central characters, and the mysteries themselves are in some respects short stories stretched out to novel (or perhaps only novella) length.

Indeed, this was a problem in all four of the Sherlock Holmes novels which Doyle wrote himself: even the one universally-regarded classic among the novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles, has a solution which strains credulity almost to breaking point. And after a strong opening chapter in which Holmes immediately launches into one of his ‘deductions’ (more properly abductions, as the pedants will remind us: and, being a pedant, I should know), Holmes himself is absent for long periods in the narrative that follows.

So that leaves the five short-story collections. But Doyle famously killed off his most famous creation at the end of the second collection, and when he brought him back from the dead a decade later, many fans of the stories felt that they were far lesser efforts than the previous stories, with accusations that Doyle was on ‘autopilot’ or ‘phoning them in’ by the end.

So really, it’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and its follow-up collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, that are regarded by all fans of the pipe-smoking sleuth as the universal classics of the canon. And special disappointment and dissatisfaction are reserved for the last of the five story collections, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, some have even regarded a few of these final stories are ghost-written, because they don’t come up to the high standard set by the earlier stories.

I’ve been a diehard fan of the deerstalkered one for nearly twenty-five years, and whilst I’d agree that the Adventures and the Memoirs are peak Sherlock Holmes (and the character was always best-suited to the short story form, in my view), even lesser Doyle beats pretty much every other mystery writer out of the park.

Nonetheless, I realise that by giving the title of this blog post a question mark I’m in danger of succumbing to what we might call the ‘Anti-Betteridge’s Law’. Betteridge’s Law is the maxim that ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word “no”’. Here, though, you might expect the natural answer to the question, ‘Is The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes Really That Bad?’, to be ‘yes’. Maybe I won’t persuade anyone convinced of the inadequacies of the Case-Book, which was published in book form in 1927 just three years before Doyle’s death, that they are better than – or at the very least, not so bad as – many would have us believe.

But I think someone should stick up for the qualities of this volume which raise it above the level of much of the forgotten mystery-writing of the period. Case-Book Sherlock is several rungs below Adventures Sherlock but still a good few rungs above the best Max Carrados, and a whole ladder above the best Martin Hewitt, for example (and I enjoyed both the Carrados and Hewitt stories).

Let’s start with the worst aspects of the book. ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’ has not aged well now that so many readers are more educated about marine life, and many fans of science and nature shows are likely to guess the solution even before it is revealed. But this points to another problem with that story: its solution is so straightforward that rereading the story (as I discovered when rereading the whole collection recently) has few delights for the reader. The details of other Holmes adventures may fade in the memory, making rereading as thrilling an experience as that first encounter, but in that story, there are too few details or complexities to make the experience satisfactory.

The racist language and comments we encounter at the beginning of ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’, when prize fighter Steve Dixie bursts into 221b Baker Street, also leave a bad taste in the mouth, especially after the positively progressive portrayal of mixed-race marriages in the earlier ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’.

And then there are the stories which have such promising setups but fail to follow through on this initial promise. The worst offender here is perhaps ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’, which posits a delicious problem: what really happened when a woman and her husband working as lion-tamers were attacked by the lion they kept in a cage? The husband died, and the woman was left badly scarred (hence the veil she wears); but for Holmes, the details don’t add up. Unfortunately, the ‘adventure’ fails to materialise, and the solution is cleared up by the titular veiled woman herself, with Holmes simply acting as her confidant.

At the same time, some of the objections to the book are too harsh. Holmes as a narrator strikes us as odd when we’re so used to Watson’s narrative voice recounting the adventures to us. (Watson is absent from both ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’ and ‘The Adventures of the Lion’s Mane’.)

But Holmes’s flair for the dramatic means that he can still, as narrator, withhold the crucial details of the mystery from us until the right moment: the word he writes down (but doesn’t reveal to us immediately) near the end of ‘The Blanched Soldier’ is a prime example. Even ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’, the one story in the canon told in the third person, only fails because so much of the ‘action’ takes place in 221b Baker Street.

So lack of action, rather than any problem arising from Doyle’s attempts at narrative innovation, constitutes the chief problem of the Case-Book. So what if the solution to ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ retreads much of the same ground as the earlier ‘Red-Headed League’? It’s a joy watching Doyle work as he constructs a curious little puzzle and then sets Holmes and Watson on the scent. And I love the moment where the two of them close-read an advertisement in the newspaper and immediately realise it’s suspicious, not least because of the use of the word ‘plows’.

And despite the worry that Doyle might have been branching out into Dracula-inspired horror with ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’, it’s pleasing to find that the story has a completely rational explanation. True, none of these stories reaches the heights of ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, but then isn’t the solution to that story rather ridiculous and far-fetched? We don’t read Sherlock Holmes for the realism of the mysteries, but to escape to a world where pure intellect can bring clarity, avert disaster, and haul the guilty to justice.