I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories
20. The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual (May 1893, Memoirs)
An extremely arcane and complex problem that Holmes solves in less than a day, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual is the canonical story that reminds me most of Edgar Allan Poe’s A Cask of Amontillado. Both feature immurements of a living being, and both feature great distress, as manifested in unhinged laughter, among the characters. It may also be worth noting that the maid Rachel Howells immured the butler Brunton after he (like Fortunato in A Cask of Amontillado) added insult to injury. Both tales share these dark elements, and both end with freedom for the perpetrators: neither Howells nor Montresor are persecuted for their breathtakingly horrible crimes.
The Musgrave Ritual is a fairly unique one in that it is narrated by Holmes while he is drawing on his old letters. It is also singular for being, at its core, a treasure hunt with a mystery. The story has, to drive it, the cryptic Musgrave ritual and the character of the butler, Brunton, who is one of the strongest in the canon. Intelligent and handsome, a Jeeves who is fit for a station far greater than that which stratified England could permit him to take, Brunton recognizes a clue that ten generations of Musgraves have failed to detect. The understanding that the old property is the burial ground of some of the Kingdom’s most priceless artifacts impels Brunton to risk his career at the Musgrave household, but his infidelity to Howells costs him, for she—whether by intent or accident we never learn—buries him alive. Poor Brunton was Doyle’s Icarus, one who flew too close to the sun, and so was burned and crashed. Holmes traces Brunton’s flight toward the gold, and he deduces, with remarkable rapidity, that the Musgrave ritual is, in fact, a treasure map.
That the mystery’s solution is arrived at so quickly, in such a compressed frame of time, is perhaps the most jarring part of this story. Holmes meets Musgrave, who tells his story, and who brings with him a copy of the ritual. Their meeting is in the morning. That afternoon, Musgrave and Holmes are in Hurlstone, where Reginald Musgrave’s estate is located. In but a single afternoon, Holmes finds the appropriate trees, whittles out a stake for his geometric calculations, follows the ritual to Brunton’s body, summons the police, and recovers the jewels. That such rapid work is possible is technically feasible. However, Sussex, where Hurlstone is located, is some fifty degrees north latitude, and at that latitude, the sun would cast its shadow in very different ways in different seasons, so it is hard to know how accurate Holmes’ calculations would be with relation to the ritual. He would need to make his calculations at the correct time of the correct season, and the oak and the elm trees’ measurements would need to be roughly the same size as they were when the ritual was first made. Still, the slim possibility exists that Holmes’ calculations could be made, and, made quickly. Therefore, though this reader is skeptical of the likelihood of Holmes’ quick triumph in the face of such diverse variables and external factors, I have no firm evidence to say that Holmes could not accomplish what he says he did, so I shall believe him and say that Holmes proves himself to be quite the genius in The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.
