Taking Stock

"The Stockbroker's Clerk" has many similarities with an earlier Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League." Both of them involve a client who has been given a very bizarre job under suspicious circumstances -- in this case, a man is offered an exorbitant advance on a ridiculously high salary to come work for a start-up company... that may not actually exist. In both stories, the client is being made this offer by criminals looking to abuse his position -- in this case, the client had just accepted a job as a broker, and the people paying him want to make use of that.

But there are also some interesting differences between this story and Doyle's earlier one. In "Red-Headed League," the client has no idea he's being duped, and he's contracting Holmes to discover why he hasn't been paid. In this story, the client knows something is amiss, and has even figured out that the two "brothers" with whom he has interacted are in fact the same individual switching between disguises. That makes this a first for a Holmes story, a case where the client has already cracked some of the mystery, but needs Holmes to ferret out that last little bit that exposes the whole truth.

The story is also intriguing for being one of the only cases so far in which Dr. Watson actually uses some of his medical knowledge (as opposed to merely being whisked away from his medical practice to accompany Holmes on an adventure). I've noticed that in the modern-day incarnations of Sherlock Holmes (both the BBC's brilliant Sherlock series and CBS' good-but-not-nearly-as-good Elementary), the writers go to considerable contortions at times to make Watson's medical background matter in the story. They do this for good reason, to make sure we know that Watson brings something vital to the mix, and isn't just a hanger-on sidekick for Holmes. Doyle didn't really seem to notice or care about that particular problem -- at least in the stories I've read thus far -- relegating Watson to the role of simple narrator most of the time. And here, Watson doesn't really do much, but it's at least more than normal.

Despite the different spin on aspects of this tale, I find the story still treads a bit too close to the earlier one for me to truly praise it as one of the better Holmes stories. I'd give it a B-.