A Noble Effort

The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor strikes me as a difficult Sherlock Holmes story to evaluate now, 120 years after its original publication. It involves a rich lord who contracts Holmes to find his missing bride. She's gone missing just after getting married to her new husband, and it may have something to do with an unusual run-in she had with a mysterious stranger she encountered in the church.

To a point, the Macguffin of the mystery is a very easy one for the reader to puzzle out. I think that the notion of a "runaway bride" is much more familiar in this day and age than it was in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's time; at least, I imagine that to be the case. In this respect, I feel like a modern reader is farther ahead than a contemporary one would have been, and the mystery is thus a bit dull.

But past that specific point, the mystery is quite opaque indeed. It's clear that the runaway bride escaped after meeting the man in the church, and that his identity is the key to the whole thing. But the details that Holmes seizes on seem too minute even for his vaunted skills. From the mere fact of the bride's American background, and a couple other casual details, Holmes deduces that -- SPOILER ALERT -- the woman ran into a former lover who was a gold claim prospector in the West, who left her to amass his own fortune.

It's possible that in this respect, the modern audience is running behind the contemporary audience. Is it actually possible that to an audience of the 1890s, the thread of logic here ran unfailingly from A to B to C? Or did Doyle merely reach for some imaginary, fanciful notion of foreign America (like the depiction of Mormons from A Study in Scarlet, for example) and fashion this resolution to his mystery?

I suspect it was the latter. In any case, it certainly reads like it was the latter. This installment of Sherlock Holmes doesn't feel like it's playing fair with the mystery. I give it a C-.