The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Two tests, and they part. Within a story the subtractive test mostly fails to find waste. “The Red-Headed League” spends its long comic first half on Jabez Wilson, the advertisement and the copying of the Encyclopaedia, and every comic detail is a clue: the notice of dissolution, the assistant’s knees, the pawnbroker’s cellar. “The Speckled Band” plants a whistle, a ventilator, a bell-pull that rings nothing and a bed clamped to the floor, and spends all four. Across the book the test succeeds too easily. The twelve were made as monthly numbers, each complete, and any one could go without loss to the rest; “The Noble Bachelor” and “The Engineer’s Thumb” add nothing the book lacks. The shape repeats. A book whose order could be shuffled is assembled, not compelled.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Two disclosures hold. The first is the book’s real subject: the respectable household as the site of crime, and money as its motive. Windibank courts his own stepdaughter in disguise to keep her income; Roylott kills one stepdaughter and tries for the other before their marriages can take their money; Rucastle shuts his daughter up to keep her from marrying. In the last story Holmes says it outright: the “smiling and beautiful countryside” holds a worse record of sin than the London alleys, because no one is near to hear. The second is the city’s hidden economy, in a gentleman who earns more by begging than in the City. Both can be stated and both hold. Held back because the disclosures are made in passing, and the form restores order each time: the condition is shown and then closed.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Elevation is real and of one kind, dread, and it comes often in small measure. The vigil in the dark at Stoke Moran, the low whistle, Holmes lashing at the bell-pull and Roylott found with the band about his brow, is the book’s height, and the scream that follows it carries. “The Five Orange Pips” opens in an equinoctial gale that sets the tale’s fatality and ends with the client drowned and the ship lost. The opium den of the Bar of Gold, the locked wing at the Copper Beeches and the hydraulic press closing on Hatherley each rise. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that these are the thrills of a well made tale, not transport; about half the book never rises at all, and its other pleasure, the mind at work, is delight rather than the sublime.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The myth is built, not evoked, and argued from the stories rather than from the fame. The reasoner is the knight-errant of the modern city, who reads a man’s history off his hat and so restores the hidden order; the companion narrates what he admires and cannot do; the rooms in Baker Street are the threshold every client crosses. Older patterns bear weight in the plots: “The Speckled Band” is an ogre’s house with a stepfather and a girl to be saved, “The Copper Beeches” Bluebeard’s locked wing, with a governess who must not look. “A Scandal in Bohemia” gives the hero his one adversary of equal wit and makes her “the woman”. Held a tenth under the gate: the figure was founded in two earlier novels, and Holmes is rarely changed by the myth he carries; he is an emblem more than a fate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is Poe’s three tales of Dupin, Gaboriau’s Lecoq and the sensation novel. Two departures are the book’s own. The first is of form: a series of complete stories, each one number long, around one recurring pair, so that the character is the continuing thing and the plot is not. The magazine story and later the series on radio and television inherited that shape, and it is made here. The second is quieter, of content: a detective beaten in the first story, who loses his client in the fifth, finds no crime in two, and lets a thief go at Christmas. Held in the sevens because the method, the display of inference and the narrating companion are Poe’s, and because the stake was small: the venture was commercial, and it paid at once. A swerve that risked little.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Watson’s narration is the instrument. A narrator who sees, records and does not observe lets the reader hold every clue and still be surprised, and lets the book show reasoning as a gap between two minds. Told in the third person, or by Holmes, the stories would lose their finding, that intelligence is visible chiefly to the one who lacks it. The short form is matched to the case: one problem, one hearing, one solution, the client’s statement set at the centre as testimony to be read. Held off the top because the form is the same in all twelve and frames the plot more than it thinks, and the long statements of clients, Hatherley’s and Violet Hunter’s among them, run as set pieces in a borrowed voice. A form fitted to its content, not one that is its content.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evidence over 134 years, of two kinds, weighed apart. There is a vast literature of play: the Game of treating the stories as a record and reconciling their dates and slips, kept by the Baker Street Irregulars since 1934 and never stopped. It is evidence of return, but it returns to the inconsistencies and the world, not to the depth. There is serious criticism too, among it Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the evidential paradigm, which sets Holmes beside Morelli and Freud. On return the puzzles are spent; what yields is the London, the map of class and the cruelty of households under the plots, and these yield less than a novel’s. The reader comes back for Holmes, not for questions the stories leave open.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is English fiction of the late nineteenth century, popular and literary. The intrinsic force is moderate: the book did not reorganise what prose fiction could do, but took a form already made by Poe and gave it a shape fit for the magazine and the series. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is among the widest of any English book of its decade, and it is named. The pair of detective and admiring narrator governs the genre that followed: Christie’s Poirot and Hastings from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Chesterton’s Father Brown, written in answer, Rex Stout’s Wolfe and Goodwin; Borges and Bioy Casares wrote in the line, and Eco named his friar William of Baskerville from a later Holmes novel. The series of self-contained stories became the shape of popular fiction. Reach counts; force holds it under the gate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over 134 years, and it is shown. The text is whole: the twelve stories as printed, never lost or recast, and the one known slip of a name is part of what survives. Presence has been continuous, in print in every decade, translated, taught in schools, read by children and by adults, and adapted without end; it is among the most widely read books of its century. Two charges hold it below the widest presence. Fame is not proof, and much of the presence is of the figure rather than of this book: the deerstalker, which the text does not give him in Baker Street, and “Elementary, my dear Watson”, which these stories never print. And the surface is fixed to its moment, gas-lamp, hansom and telegram, though it has outlived its conditions and become part of the charm.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Doyle’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the story’s engine, and it is high: exposition by dialogue that is itself entertainment; the client’s statement, which carries the plot in a voice not Watson’s; the display of inference, which characterises Holmes and the client at once, the hat in “The Blue Carbuncle”, the typist’s sleeves in “A Case of Identity”; and the timing of the reveal. The prose is clear, quick and even, and the openings are built to hook: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” Three charges. The prose is serviceable rather than distinguished, its sentences rarely doing more than carry. The plots fail physics and law in known places, a swamp adder that drinks milk and answers a whistle among them. And the formula repeats. A perfectly made engine, not a prose that carries the argument.

Score: 8.2 / 10

One law governs the book: the world is legible to trained attention, and whatever is hidden, a tunnel under a pawnshop, a beggar’s face, a goose’s crop, yields to it. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of “The Red-Headed League” and “The Noble Bachelor” and the dread of “The Speckled Band” and “The Engineer’s Thumb”. They obey the same law, and Watson’s voice holds them in one register. The moral law is also one: Holmes acts as a private court, and the law of the land is beside the point in eleven endings of twelve. Held because the law is narrow, a genre’s range, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the book’s own law is broken in places, where Holmes guesses while claiming to deduce and the physics fails where the plot needs a snake.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Judged on what one book of twelve stories holds, and it holds more of its world than its form promises. Clients and culprits run the scale of city and country: a King of Bohemia, a peer and an American heiress, a City banker, a pawnbroker and his assistant, a typist, a governess, a hydraulic engineer, a gentleman turned beggar, a lodger in an opium den, a ruined baronet with an Indian past. Empire runs under the plots, in the Australian goldfields of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, the American South of “The Five Orange Pips” and the India of “The Speckled Band”. Family and money are held together. What it does not hold: consciousness, since no mind is entered beyond Watson’s surface and Holmes’s method; the state as more than a policeman; the sacred; the inner life of any woman it rescues. A wide map at the scale of the anecdote.

Score: 7.3 / 10