Detective fiction stories often depict villains capable of unthinkable acts of cruelty, and greed corrupts Dr. Grimesby Roylott until he fills this role remorselessly. Money looms large in his motivation from the beginning because of his family’s dire financial straits. As Helen Stoner explains to Holmes and Watson, the Roylotts were once one of the wealthiest families in England, but “four successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the days of the Regency” (144). These mentions of prodigality and gambling show that a disordered relationship with money is directly responsible for the Roylotts’ crumbling status. Due to their forebears’ vices, Dr. Roylott’s father suffers “the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper” (144), and Dr. Roylott himself is the family’s sole survivor. Greed clings to the Roylotts like a family curse, driving them progressively deeper into immorality and self-destruction.

Of course, Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s family history does not absolve him of his culpability for his own choices. He enters the medical profession out of a desire to amass wealth, but he shows admirable qualities in his earlier years when he graduates medical school and establishes a successful practice in India.