The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [20]
In addition to all this, the plot is perhaps the weakest of all the Holmes stories. It depends on a number of accidents, rather than ingenious deductions or a carefully laid trap into which the criminal inevitably falls. Why, for instance, would any crooks who had stolen a world-famous gem worth a hundred thousand pounds bring it with them to the apartment of Sherlock Holmes, whose address was surely well known among members of the underworld? How could any but the dimmest of bulbs have mistaken one of those early gramophones for a real violin in the next room? Or have failed to notice Holmes exchanging places with the wax bust of himself in the same room? Or attempt to exchange the jewel in Holmes’s apartment, even if he were playing the violin in the next room? The whole thing is preposterous. We might say about this story what Samuel Johnson once said to a man who asked his opinion about a book the man had written: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
To give one more example, consider “The Adventure of the Three Gables.” There Holmes taunts a servant, whom he calls by her first name (“Oh, Susan! Language!” and “Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff”), two things a gentleman never does, and Holmes is every inch a gentleman. To make matters worse, he sarcastically refers to her as “the fair Susan.” He also twice insults a black man, whom he also calls by his first name, by claiming he has a peculiar smell. Most repugnant of all, a character in this story refers to the black man as “the big nigger”; it’s true that the term is spoken by a pompous and dim-witted policeman, but it seems inconceivable for the man who wrote the appeal for racial harmony in “The Yellow Face” and the indictment of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Five Orange Pips” to have penned this. In addition to obvious affronts like these, the prose style itself furnishes more subtle clues that an unseen hand may have been at work. After you’ve read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Conan Doyle’s prose, you become so accustomed to its rhythms, its diction, its tone, that sudden departures from his style jump out at you. Almost nothing about either of “The Mazarin Stone” or “The Three Gables” has the true ring of Conan Doyle’s style about them.
One could suggest that, after all, these stories were written at the end of Conan Doyle’s life, by which time his creative powers had begun to flag. He was also in ill health during these years. This might be a reasonable explanation, were it not that some of these last stories still show remarkable power. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” for example, are superior to some of the stories in the first two volumes of Holmes’s exploits. Some of the other less successful stories also have passages of considerable power, making a judgment that parts were written by someone other than Conan Doyle extremely difficult to sustain.
Not everything in The Case Book is cartoon fiction, however. In “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” Holmes solves no crime, nor does he even clear up any sort of mystery. The lodger, a woman who had been horribly disfigured by a lion while trying to kill her husband, simply wants to confess her crime of years ago before taking her own life. Holmes, after listening to the confession, dissuades the lady from ending it all by telling her “your life is not your own.” Days later she sends him the bottle of poison she was planning to swallow to show him he has saved her