The Adventure Of The Musgrave Ritual by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1893
The magic trick:
Building usual Sherlock suspense and intrigue, but doing it with a different kind of narrative framing
I’ve always felt the 12 stories in the first Sherlock collection, The Adventures Of, are the real class Sherlock stories. Everything afterward feels like a set of ideas that aren’t quite as good as that initial burst of creativity. “The Musgrave Ritual” sits right there in the middle of the collection that followed Adventures. It’s the 18th published Sherlock story. So it’s in that zone for me of merely pretty good early Sherlock.
But that’s akin to talking about the Beatles’ second-tier early songs. Consider this “If I Needed Someone” of the Sherlock catalogue. Basically, that means it’s still better than the vast majority of detective stories ever written; just not a top 10 Sherlock story.
Anyway… it differs from the usual Sherlock fare in that it’s not narrated by Watson. Well, wait, that’s not quite true. It is narrated by Watson. But Watson’s narration tells us about Sherlock finding some old case notes and then recounting to Watson all the details of that case. So Waton’s narration isn’t unfolding the mystery; it’s unfolding Sherlock unfolding the mystery.
That means we don’t get any bait-and-switch moments. No Sherlock in disguise. No Watson confused by the misdirects. So it’s interesting to watch Doyle generate his usual suspense and surprises through different means.
I wonder what made him frame the mystery in this way. I wonder if he wanted to try to do a frame tale in the voice of Sherlock and applied this plot to that structure; of if he had this plot and played around with different options for maximizing its mystery.
Either way, it certainly works.
And that’s quite a trick on Doyle’s part.
The selection:
He dived his arm down to the bottom of the chest, and brought up a small wooden box with a sliding lid, such as children’s toys are kept in. From within he produced a crumpled piece of paper, and old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old disks of metal.
“Well, my boy, what do you make of this lot?” he asked, smiling at my expression.
“It is a curious collection.”
“Very curious, and the story that hangs round it will strike you as being more curious still.”
“These relics have a history then?”
“So much so that they are history.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Sherlock Holmes picked them up one by one, and laid them along the edge of the table. Then he reseated himself in his chair and looked them over with a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.
“These,” said he, “are all that I have left to remind me of the adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.”
I had heard him mention the case more than once, though I had never been able to gather the details. “I should be so glad,” said I, “if you would give me an account of it.”
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