It Was a Piteous Business [BLAN]

"The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" is bogus.  Not only was it not written by Sherlock Holmes, but I’ll argue that it is a completely made up tale.

For decades, Holmes had dismissed Watson’s colorful way of writing his series of tales.   Sherlock Holmes was a clinical writer.  The Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos.  The Variety of the Human Ear.  The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses.  The Polyphonic Motets of Lassus.  The influence of a trade upon the form of the hand.  We are expected to believe that the writer of such monographs, some of which were said by experts to be the last word upon the subject, is now a chronicler of detective stories?  Pfft.

“The Blanched Soldier” was published in 1926.  By this time, Holmes was at least twenty years into his retirement on the Sussex Downs.  It is very unlikely that at this stage in life, around the age of 70, he would start to record cases.

Plus, Holmes frequently credits Watson as a companion.  Could we believe that he would call Watson one “to whom the future is always a closed book”?  That seems too caustic for even Holmes.

And speaking of Watson, in BLAN Holmes says that “Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales… by concealing such links in the chain.”  Holmes does the exact same thing here by hiding his dermatologist friend until the big reveal at the end, not letting the reader in to the necessary facts of the case.  Sure Holmes has a flair for the dramatic in real life, but none of his writings show such a manner.

According to E.W. McGinley in The Firearms of Sherlock Holmes, “anyone hit in the shoulder by an elephant bullet should have lost his arm and a good part of his shoulder.”  The fact that Emsworth was barely injured by such a weapon seems preposterous.

This is an elephant bullet.  Emsworth had a small injury from it.  Riiiiiiight....

And doesn’t it seem just a little too convenient that Holmes has a dermatologist on call when he supposes that someone is suffering from leprosy?  And that Emsworth's disease could be misdiagnosed as leprosy after he had been to a leper colony?  Holmes is quick to dismiss coincidences in A Study in Scarlet, “The Speckled Band,” and “Silver Blaze,” but when Dr. Saunders chalks Emsworth’s diagnosis up to a coincidence, he just rolls with it.

And Dr. Saunders provides quite the happy ending here.  The Canon is full of adventures that don’t end in happy endings.  “The Greek Interpreter,” “The Five Orange Pips,” The Valley of Fear, and “The Dancing Men” just off the top of my head.  I’m sure we could brainstorm plenty more.  “The Blanched Soldier’s” fairy tale ending is just too much to accept.

But the final nail in the coffin for me is Holmes’s maxim that is shoehorned into the story: “That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  Holmes’s further explanation that he has ruled out crime and insanity is pretty flimsy.  Based off of the scant evidence of James Dodd’s two fleeting glimpses of his friend and his minuscule knowledge of the family and surrounding area, leprosy is a significant conclusion to jump to.  Whoever the author of this story is, they wanted Holmes’s famous impossible/improbable phrase in here, whether it made sense or not.

We are expected to believe all of these things, but “The Blanched Soldier” falls very short of the quality of Sherlock Holmes adventure that we have come to expect.  To cover up for this, the author has tried to convince us that it was written by Holmes himself, which is nonsense.  You may as tell me that it was written by a failed ophthalmologist from Portsmouth.  That would be just as believable.