But I don’t care about such small factual lapses, for this contains one of the greatest pieces of dialogue in the stories, if not in English literature itself. Oh, and it’s a Christmas story too.Ĭonan Doyle cited this as one of his favourite stories, let down only by a slight mistake in the rendering of rules for entering horses into races. Our heroes even visit a pub, The Alpha Inn, that still exists to this day (known now as The Museum Tavern) and it contains a superb example of Holmes’ easy cunning with members of the public, as well as his natural sense of justice and clemency.
It starts in classical fashion, with a stray object (a hat) in need of Holmes’ deductive powers, and ends up romping through Covent Garden and all the way to Brixton, in order to solve the case of a missing jewel. Sherlock Holmes is above all else a Londoner, and I love this story for its quintessential Londonness. As with most of the best Holmes story, it also contains a valuable piece of advice for everyday life: never take the first taxi that presents itself, nor the second but the third. Perhaps best of all, it introduces Professor Moriarty in all his glory, the world’s first true super-villain, ‘The Napoleon of Crime’. It’s soaked with Watson’s sorrow about his dead friend, yet it also contains a gripping account of Holmes and Watson’s flight from London and the eventual ‘demise’ of the great detective. This is a majestic story, full of drama, pathos and menace. Let’s start at the end or the end of the beginning.
But then I realised I’d already done a lot of this work, for in my two novels – using Doyle’s character of Wiggins as the hero – I had already referred to more than half my favourites, referencing either locations, or lines or plot points. When I first sat down to make this list, I thought I’d be deliberating for weeks sifting through Conan Doyle classics, weighing up excitement, humour, thrills and the exquisite pleasures of deduction.
The Top Ten Sherlock Holmes short stories
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