🗂️ Charles Augustus Milverton
The king of blackmailers, smiling behind gold-rimmed glasses while he ruins wives and daughters by instalments. The one villain who makes Holmes turn burglar — and whose death Holmes declines to investigate.
“I am the best man in London to have as a friend, and the worst to have as an enemy.”
The worst man in London
Holmes has faced fifty murderers without half the revulsion Milverton inspires: a soft, smiling, fifty-year-old collector of other people's secrets, who buys compromising letters from treacherous servants and sells them back at ruinous prices — or releases them, now and then, purely to keep future victims persuadable. Murder, Holmes implies, is at least honest about what it is; Milverton tortures by instalments, within the letter of the law.
The case that made Holmes a burglar
Unable to beat Milverton legally, Holmes does something unique in the canon: he crosses the line himself, getting engaged to Milverton's housemaid for intelligence and cracking Appledore Towers' safe by night with Watson standing lookout. The story is the canon's most serious ethics problem — the great defender of law deciding that against this opponent, law is the wrong instrument — and it refuses to make the choice comfortable.
A justice Holmes declines to pursue
Hidden behind a curtain, Holmes and Watson watch one of Milverton's ruined victims empty a revolver into him — and Holmes, asked afterwards by Lestrade to take up the case, refuses: his sympathies, he says, are with the criminal. It is the sharpest moral inversion in sixty stories: the one murder Holmes witnesses is the one he declines to solve.