The Stock-Broker's Clerk

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

We find another confidence game in this story, similar to the one in “The Red-Headed League.” Even the core ploy is similar: Mr. Hall Pycroft is given a false job in order to keep him out of the way for nefarious reasons. There’s a strangely modern flair, as the case revolves around identity theft, and it would be a story that would be very easy to modernize.¹ It’s not a bad story, but the similarities to “The Red-Headed League” end up making this one of the more unremarkable mysteries, even though it gives us some interesting glimpses into Watson’s life.

The timing of the story appears to be a few months after The Sign of the Four, since Watson has just settled into married life and Holmes asks as to Mrs. Watson’s recovery from the events of that novel. We learn a bit more about not only Watson’s home life as a married man, but also about his medical practice (which he purchased from a retiring doctor). We learn that he reads the British Medical Journal, so he keeps up-to-date on medical practices. It seems that married life agreed with Watson at some point, because here he mentions that he “had confidence…in my youth and energy,” when in A Study in Scarlet he confessed that he was extremely lazy!

It’s also telling that Holmes is calling on Watson at his home so soon after their marriage, which shows how much Holmes values his partner’s presence on certain cases. It’s not surprising, given that trying to untangle the chronology of previous stories has shown that they lived together for years before Watson got married, but given that Holmes has admitted that he has difficult making friends, it seems he would rather try to keep the one he has managed to make rather than going through the futile efforts of finding new friends.

By the end of the story, Holmes doesn’t even really solve the case — he just happens to be in the right place at the right time. Even the key piece of information about the robbery is conveniently provided by the thief’s brother! Granted, Holmes did manage to help the police to capture the partner for the robbery, but he certainly didn’t crack the case wide open by any stretch of the imagination.