Sherlock Holmes notes: The worst death in the canon and the detective story most likely to make you smile

Tuesday 6/24/25

In the Holmes and Watson stories, people die by gunshot, stabbing, poison, hanging, jellyfish, being thrown into a chalk pit, asp bite, horse, falling into a gorge, gas, and being harpooned, but the worst death has to be that of Brunton in "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual."

"The Musgrave Ritual" may be the best story in the canon. It might not be the first you'd recommend to someone, though, because save for the framing element--which involves Watson imploring Holmes to clean up the mess he's made of their shared lodgings--it's Holmes off on his own before he knew his Boswell.

But there are no plot holes, and usually you could ride a train through the various plot holes in any given Holmes story. The story is compelling, smart, creepy, and the historic component lends it further mystery and frisson. There's human drama, and no one is really outrightly "bad," though Brunton is a cavalier--pun!--cad when it comes to women. We have the sense that he beds them all, moving from one to another, making use of his greater intelligence to charm these simpler creatures, but takes this approach to romance of his one woman too far.

The Granada TV adaptation with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke tweaks the story so that Watson is part of the principle action as well. There's that memorable shot of Holmes standing up at the prow of the skiff. For all of the drama of the measuring and the math--which gets exciting out on the lawn--they end up in a cellar of the house. Holmes knows what's happened, but Musgrave has no clue. I've always liked how Holmes tells Reginald Musgrave they need to get the police before opening the covering in the ground, which he does in part so that they'll not be suspects themselves, a plot detail which I can't imagine many pick up on now.

Conan Doyle had something of an uneasy relationship with his Holmes work. He wanted to be thought of as a proper, "literary" author, and he didn't rate the Holmes tales as proper, literary work. The thing was, Doyle was no great writer. But he could be entertaining, and he hit upon some great tenets. The best aspect of the Holmes-Watson stories is the bond. The friendship. Doyle was also good at creating characteristics that in turn illuminated character. All of Holmes' reoccurring habits and tics.

What I love about the Hobbes/Shelley adaptations is how often Holmes and Watson laugh together. It's a great sound, and I think that sound does a better job of getting to the root of that relationship than what we're likely to see--or hear--in any other adaptation. Hobbes' Holmes is not this avuncular figure like you read about in half-assed write-ups of these adaptations that I'm convinced were done by people who either didn't listen to them or were glossing over them as they did. He still likes the cocaine needle. Even sarcastically tries to get Watson to stick it in one of his own veins.

But listen to "The Blue Carbuncle" when they've left the goose seller who wouldn't tell them where he got his geese and had to be tricked into doing so, and was still sufficiently "warm"--as Holmes put it--to taunt our duo as they left, in that voice of a man who not only doesn't like someone but thinks he's just gotten the better of him and is having his victory lap. The pair erupt in laughter. It's a laughter you don't encounter quite this way--or with quite this regularity--in any of the other adaptations.

Conan Doyle didn't exercise a great deal of care with the Holmes stories in terms of plausibility. I think he was irked, but he turned that feeling into one of a kind of writerly piss taking. In other words, he had some fun with it, which is how I believe he coped with his own creation--or, rather, the popularity of this thing he wished was less popular than his other things that he took more seriously. The irony being, that Conan Doyle was best at this other thing. He overrated his own gifts. Or he wanted to possess gifts he didn't. I've read all of that other stuff. It's capable and workmanlike and you don't regret reading "The Captain of the Polestar" (Doyle's ghost stories might be his "next best" writing), but it doesn't stand out like the Holmes and Watson tales.

"The Musgrave Ritual" is what I'd call a very sound, tight Sherlock Holmes story. There's no loopiness. No huge plot contrivances. It's believable, it doesn't overstretch. It stays within itself and that works because what it's working with is good stuff. "Silver Blaze" is another such example, about which the above can also be said. The Hobbes/Shelley adaptation has Holmes delaying part of his big, theatrical reveal because he has money on the next race. Great touch. He's having a day out at the races and he's going to make the most of it, damn it!

The vast majority of the Holmes stories are kind of preposterous. Even when they're more plausible, they rely on highly unlikely coincidences (the fancy wife just happening to be outside of the dodgy building where her husband is standing in a top floor window in "The Man with the Twisted Lip") or pretty much completely unbelievable ones (the goose containing the rare jewel being brought to Holmes' door of all the doors in London in "The Blue Carbuncle"), but "The Red-Headed League" is like punk Doyle. He fires off the absurdity and then more of it without bother, shame, or seemingly any reservations or a care at all.

The extent the criminals go to in order to try and bring off their crime is most amusing. They rent rooms, pay four pounds a week. A guy gets a job and works there for a while and is pretty good at the job. All to get this pawnbroker--who is described as old and obese, though he never sounds that old in any adaptation, and he doesn't look old in the Jeremy Brett TV version--out of his shop for a couple months.

I'd contend that Doyle thought, "Fuck it, if they wanna like this stuff, I'll give them this stuff," and wrote the story whilst laughing up his sleeve. He actually liked it a lot, citing it as one of his favorites. And it's one of mine, too. The Jeremy Brett version ropes in Moriarty as the mastermind behind this ludicrous scheme, which Holmes foils, and sets up the events of "The Final Adventure." You messed up my bonkers bank robbery plan and now you must be eliminated because I'm counting on plans like that to work out smoothly!

Like I said, it's silly. The Hobbes/Shelley radio adaptation is a particular treat. You have Shelley's Watson basically mocking the pawnbroker, Jabez Wilson, as he's recounting his experience with the red-headed league. You don't hear Watson nearly so acidulous and put out--as if he finds the stupidity of mankind too much to bear--as you do here, but it's funny. Very modern, too. "Get paid?" When we get to the part about the store that sells artificial kneecap replacements, both Holmes and Watson lose it. They just start laughing at Wilson. It's not mean, exactly, and they mollify the irked/insulted pawnbroker swiftly/easily enough. He's cheap--basically, he just want to have to pay for any answers to and explanations for his vexatious conundrum, to paraphrase Holmes when he and Watson go to the violin concert not long thereafter.

The setting up of the red-headed league involves its own brand of trash talking, and the Hobbs/Shelley adaptation sends us tittering again. "This isn't the bald-headed league," a candidate is told--the crooks are clearly having a blast slagging people off. These criminals even seem to enjoy their scheme and its extensiveness more than we'd expect them to enjoy the money they would have had if they were successful. When John Clay is apprehended in the bank vault, there's a last bit of humorous business. He says that he has royal blood and complains about not being addressed as sir, before cheerily instructing his captor to lead on--that is, in escorting him to the police station. That the inspector plays along makes it funnier still.

These criminals are nuts, but a lot of fun. You could argue that this is an absurdist version of detective fiction. "The Stockbroker's Clerk" employs the same plot device of the bad guys going to some extreme measure to get some innocent person to be somewhere else for a while, but is a far less happy story. There may be no tale of deduction that's likelier to make you smile than "The Red-Headed League," especially so with the Hobbs/Shelley radio adaptation.