Who has beat Sherlock?

[Bruce]

Don't forget the date of the Adventure of Wisteria Lodge.

[Steve]

I started a whole other thread for those.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[J.]

There is the order that you read the stories, the order in which they were originally published, and then Baring-Gould's very ambitious effort to put the stories in chronological order. In his "Annotated Sherlock Holmes", he dates Scandal in late May of 1887 and Five Orange Pips in September of 1887 - so it's possible that the woman who beat Holmes is Adler, although one Sherlockian scholar, Gavin Brend, voted for Effie Munro (The Yellow Face), a case where Holmes came to the wrong conclusion.

[Bruce]

I’ve always assumed that Adler was the woman who beat him, and the men are from unrecorded cases or those where Watson mentions the title in another story. Also one or more could have been in his pre-Watson years.

[Steve]

I think John Clay was one of the men who beat Sherlock Holmes early in his career.

[Barbara]

Well another woman who beat Holmes was Isadora Klein from The Three Gables. An ex lover was planning to write a shocking expose about her. If the book was published, it would ruin her reputation just when she was expecting a rich nobleman to propose, so she has a couple thugs steal the only copy from his mother's house. They get the book and rough up the mother - Holmes forces Isadora Klein to give the mother enough money to travel the world, but nothing really happens to Isadora - sounds like she got what she wanted and probably married the aristocrat.

Then there were the people Holmes let off, in the Abbey Grange and the Blue Carbuncle.