Don't Be Such a Squire

I read "The Adventure of the Reigate Squire" on the flight home from my trip to Mexico, and was frankly not impressed. Maybe it's because I'd just had an amazing series of adventures myself. Maybe it's because I hadn't read another Sherlock Holmes story in a while. Or maybe I was just dog tired and cranky. But for whatever the reason, I found it to be one of Arthur Conan Doyle's weakest efforts.

Appropriately enough for the time I read the story, Holmes himself is on a vacation of sorts in this tale. Following a particularly demanding case, Watson has persuaded Holmes to head to a friend's estate for some rest. Of course, a brand-new case pops up there for Holmes to spring into action.

This is another mystery that I feel can't possibly be solved by the reader, for lack of information in the text. This case turns largely on the handwriting on a scrap of paper. We learn at the resolution of the mystery that every other word of this note is written in a different handwriting -- something that would likely be readily apparent if the audience could actually see the note. But Doyle doesn't describe this detail at all until the moment Holmes is revealing it as crucial to the case. And while it's a perfectly acceptable writing technique to let the characters see something the readers don't, I feel it's cheating to not tell the readers there's something they're not seeing. (By that I mean, it's perfectly fair game to write, "when he broke down the door and barged into the room, his jaw dropped at the ghastly scene before him"; end of chapter. But tell us the characters are seeing something!)

Frankly, the "every other word" handwriting gimmick seems like a preposterous one to me in any case. Is this a spiritual precursor to writing a ransom note by cutting letters out of magazines and newspapers? It just never seems realistic to me that a key part of the culprits' plot involves the two of them writing alternating words in a letter.

There are some tantalizing hints in the framing of this tale about the back story of Watson before he met Holmes. The two are vacationing with an old friend of Watson's, and there are dribs and drabs of information about the nature of that friendship. But in all, I felt like things were left a little too vague, with a little too much time spent on the mystery itself, to pay off that history in a satisfying way. For that matter, Doyle writes just as much about Holmes' unspecified previous case that exhausted him so as he does about Watson's history.

A confusing tale that doesn't play fair with the reader, I give "Reigate Squire" a D+.