Arcane Ritual

Following right on the heels of "The Gloria Scott," the next Sherlock Holmes tale, "The Musgrave Ritual," is quite similar in style. It's another previous adventure from Holmes' early days, narrated to Watson by the consulting detective himself. But unfortunately, this story has all of the same flaws and far fewer good elements to recommend it.

I noted of "The Gloria Scott" that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to break from his established format, and yet was unwilling to set aside the character of Watson. The same holds true here, and so the story has an awkward Inception-esque nested narrative in which Watson writes to us of things Holmes tells to him, some of which include things that a past client once said to Holmes, which sometimes includes dialogue spoken to the client. A dizzying number of embedded quotation marks ensues, both making for a dense read and robbing the story of any sense of immediacy.

It's the same technique I disliked in "The Gloria Scott," but at least that tale had an intriguing mystery at its heart, and a satisfying resolution. "The Musgrave Ritual" is short on the latter. The crime involves a butler who goes missing after being found snooping in his boss' papers, and another woman who goes missing shortly after him. Eventually, the man is found dead, introducing yet another puzzle -- did the woman kill the man, or was his death just an unfortunate accident she fled from? Holmes never learns the answer to this, leaving it an unsatisfying unresolved thread at the end of the tale.

This is only one of the dangling plot elements within the mystery. It turns out that all the fuss surrounds a hidden object now recently uncovered, the actual crown of a past king of England that has been missing for centuries. The question is raised, how did this crown go missing that the king himself didn't seek it out? And that too is a mystery unresolved in the tale.

The creaky wheels of artifice can be sensed in this story as well. By now, we readers know full well that whenever a detail seems insignificant in the narrative, it is in fact the key on which the mystery will be exposed. In this tale, that detail is in the papers which the butler snooped on prior to his disappearance. It wouldn't be so maddening that so obvious a detail is planted in plain sight, but for the fact that Holmes' client goes out of his way to repeatedly assure us that there's no way the contents of the papers could be at all important. Doyle is simply working too hard to try to misdirect his readers, and it makes the effort transparent.

I feel like this mystery was a bit lazy on Doyle's part, simply trading on royal intrigue with its tale of a missing king's crown. This may have held some allure for a British audience, but doesn't translate well to me, a American reader more than a century later. I try to imagine if I'd have been more excited about this story had it, say, revolved around a missing draft of the Declaration of Independence or something. Maybe.

But there are a couple of bright spots. The opening sequence, setting up Holmes' tale for Watson, is a wonderful vignette of "life as Sherlock Holmes' roommate." Doyle paints a thorough and entertaining picture of Holmes as a slovenly hoarder. Particularly amusing is the way the Holmes manipulates Watson to get out of cleaning the place up, basically: "how about I tell you a story you've always wanted to hear about instead?" The mystery is also notable for having more macabre touches than most other Holmes adventures; there are passages where it reads almost more like Edgar Allen Poe than Arthur Conan Doyle.

But overall, "The Musgrave Ritual" is an unresolved mystery burdened by an overly complex narrative structure. I think it one of the weakest Sherlock Holmes tales, and give it a C-.