You might think you know where things are going here. A mysterious man named Blessington offers to set young Doctor Percy Trevelyan up in a private consulting practice. This sounds like a cover, much like inviting Jabez Wilson to become a member of the Red-Headed League and paying him to copy out pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or offering Violet Hunter a job to sit in a window while wearing a particular dress.

The strange thing is that Blessington, though he has a shady background involving yet another historical crime that is chasing him down, is on the level. But then why does he want to be Dr. Trevelyan’s benefactor? I don’t know. I can certainly think of better, less complicated ways to drop out of sight.

Of course, you’ll suspect, this time entirely correctly, that the Russian nobleman and his burly son aren’t what they seem to be. All Holmes needs to be convinced is a look at the footprints they leave.

I didn’t think any of this was terribly interesting. What I found myself most intrigued by was the opening paragraph:

In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavored to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose. For in those cases in which Holmes has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish. The small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of “A Study in Scarlet,” and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis which are forever threatening the historian. It may be that in the business of which I am now about to write the part which my friend played is not sufficiently accentuated; and yet the whole train of circumstances is so remarkable that I cannot bring myself to omit it entirely from this series.

Accepting Watson’s division of cases into those that (1) show off Holmes’s analytical method to best advantage, despite being of little importance, and (2) more dramatic or remarkable cases where Holmes had less work to do, I wasn’t sure how such a scheme would work in practice. Even Watson’s two examples don’t strike me as obvious. Was he classifying A Study in Scarlet as of the first type: a “small matter” despite being an account of novel length and involving adventures on different continents with historical actors of some prominence? And was “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” supposed to be a more significant case, despite showing little in the way of method (as I put it: “Holmes’s great skills at detection aren’t put to much of a test”)? Or did Watson have them the other way around?

As it is, “The Resident Patient” strikes me as not sailing between the Scylla and Charybdis so much as foundering on both. It’s neither very remarkable (at least within the canon) nor a case where, as Watson admits, Holmes’s role was “sufficiently accentuated.” It is only a simple Holmesian entertainment.

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