Holmes is frequently employed by a client in order to avert, or suppress a scandal. While secrecy is the client's objective, the scandal itself is – usually – revealed to the privileged reader. This is exemplified by the very first Holmes short story, whose scandalous subject is even declared in its title. When the King of Bohemia employs Holmes to save his forthcoming marriage to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe- Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia, full details of the incriminating evidence – letters and a cabinet photograph – are revealed in a comic catechism between Holmes and the King:

Other clients who employ Holmes to avert scandals include Lady Eva Brackwell, whose ‘imprudent letters’ to ‘an impecunious young squire in the country’ (Return, 159) threaten her forthcoming marriage to the Earl of Dovercourt in ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’; Hilton Soames, tutor at St Luke's College in ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’ (1904) who is desperate to avoid public knowledge of an attempt at cheating in the examination for the Fortescue Scholarship; and Colonel Sir James Damery, a fixer at the Court of St James who, in ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’ (1924), employs Holmes to neutralise the threat from Baron Gruner. Gruner is a murderous philanderer whose latest outrage against Edwardian morality is to mesmerise, in Svengalilike fashion, Miss Violet de Merville, daughter of General de Merville ‘of Khyber fame’ (Case-Book, 109), into an engagement. This latter case is the most enigmatic of these society scandal narratives: in contrast with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, in which layers of deception employed by client and detective are seen through and revealed to the reader, ‘The Illustrious Client’ is permeated by layers of obfuscation, several of which remain opaque at the end.