I think this is one of the slighter Holmes stories, and it’s one that Doyle himself ranked near “the bottom of the list.” A British aristo, the Lord Robert St. Simon, gets married but his bride pulls a runner as soon as they get home from the wedding. It turns out she was already married back in America to a man she thought was dead, but who had secretly appeared to her at the church. Since she still loved him, she ditched her new husband, who then went to Holmes, asking him to investigate and figure out what the heck just happened.

It’s not much of a challenge for Holmes, and what sticks in the mind is the moral judgment on display. Holmes doesn’t care for St. Simon from the get-go, treating him as a pompous ass in need of being taken down a peg or three. Indeed the intake interview basically just involves Holmes laughing and mocking him repeatedly, though it isn’t clear what’s so foolish about him, aside from his dress, which is only “careful to the verge of foppishness.” And what’s wrong with that?

The dislike clearly goes deeper than what’s registered by Holmes. Doyle seemed to have something in for the dregs of the British aristocracy, and made St. Simon into the standard-bearer for his class, being a poor fellow with a fancy title out to wed an American heiress. Which is true on the face of it, but again St. Simon doesn’t seem like he’s just a mercenary prig. And I’m honestly at a loss to explain the way he’s treated at the end. Does Holmes really think it likely that St Simon will join the newly reunited couple in a celebratory dinner? I don’t think that’s possible, which means the fancy meal was prepared as another form of mockery. But doesn’t St. Simon deserve to feel hard done by? I felt more than a little sympathy for him, as the typical ending of having lovers reunited is achieved very much at his expense and I don’t see where he’s done anything wrong.

The plot is again driven by a backstory set in a wild, foreign land, in this case the American West in the 1880s. And that link to America adds something to Doyle’s critique of England’s ruling class. As Holmes puts it at the end of the story: “It is always a joy to meet an American . . . for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a Minister in fargone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

A nice thought, foreshadowing the mostly rhetorical “special relationship.” But wouldn’t the marriage of St. Simon to Hatty Doran have better dramatized the consummation devoutly to be wished? And if so, why was Doyle so against it?

Holmes index