Is this the the best title in the Sherlock Holmes canon? I don’t mean the best story, but rather the most intriguing combination of words put together to entice you in.

If so, prepare to be slightly disappointed by…

‘The Musgrave Ritual’ (1893)

The Case

To get out of tidying his flat, Sherlock Holmes pulls out a large box that contains mementos of his old, pre-Watson cases. What possible story could “a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old disks of metal” have in common? And how do they tie into the disappearance of a trusted family retainer?

The Characters

Reginald Musgrave, alumnus; a man down.

Brunton, butler; probably sleeps in the box room.

Rachel Howells, second housemaid; Welsh and apparently conforming to type.

The Timeline

We’re pre-Watson here, this being one of the early cases brought to Holmes “principally through the introduction of old fellow-students”. This is “the third of these cases” ever brought thus, though how you put a timeline on that I don’t know (yes, I have no doubt that someone has tried). Why did I ever think that trying to chart the timelines of these stories was a good idea?

The Tropes

Fairly amazing that it’s taken this long for Doyle to get around to discussing the domestic affairs of living with Holmes, but all the trappings — the “tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper”, the “unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece”, the indoor pistol practice which sees a “patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks” in the wall — all come from a single paragraph here.

Plenty of unrecorded cases in that “large tin box” of stories: “the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife”.

Also note that the cases “are not all successes” — that from Holmes’ own mouth. So can people please stop saying that he was a faultless machine who never made a mistake?

Points of Interest

I find the timing of this story interesting. The one immediately before this was ‘The “Gloria Scott”‘, Holmes’ first ever ‘case’, and now this case comes, presumably, fairly hard upon the heels of that. Was Doyle experimenting with other forms of narrative, realising some limitation in Watson’s involvement in the Holmes canon? It’s just curious that two ‘prologue’ cases were published back-to-back, is all.

The third-hand speech reporting in this is very distracting, requiring as it does three different sets of speech marks at the start of each line to covey accurately. And expecting us to believe that someone said something to Musgrave which he tells to Holmes which he tells to Watson and it’s all rendered perfectly from memory is…a stretch.

And, look, it doesn’t really matter, but if “North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one” means 20 paces north, 10 paces east, 4 paces south, and 2 paces west, then you’ve travelled 16 paces north and 8 paces east. Why give the illusion of extra complication? Anyone who got that far into deciphering the thing is hardly likely to be stumped by the redundant steps.

There’s something delightfully Poe-ish about Brunton’s fate, sealed in a stone sarcophagus and left to asphyxiate in darkness. Doyle doesn’t dwell on it here, but it’s another piece of pure Victorian melodrama. Although the sort of man who looks up his jilted lover and asks for help with this manner of enterprise, frankly, has it coming to him.