The Musgrave Ritual E-Book

Arthur Conan Doyle

• Herausgeber: SAMPI Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Seitenzahl: 36

Beschreibung

In "The Musgrave Ritual", Sherlock Holmes recounts one of his earliest and most intriguing cases, which centers around a peculiar family tradition. When Reginald Musgrave seeks Holmes' help, a centuries-old riddle tied to his family estate unravels a tale of betrayal, hidden treasures, and murder. The seemingly innocuous ritual recitation leads Holmes on a quest to uncover long-lost secrets buried beneath the Musgrave mansion, proving once again that even the smallest details can reveal the grandest truths.

Leseprobe

The Musgrave Ritual

Arthur Conan Doyle

SYNOPSIS

In “The Musgrave Ritual”, Sherlock Holmes recounts one of his earliest and most intriguing cases, which centers around a peculiar family tradition. When Reginald Musgrave seeks Holmes' help, a centuries-old riddle tied to his family estate unravels a tale of betrayal, hidden treasures, and murder. The seemingly innocuous ritual recitation leads Holmes on a quest to uncover long-lost secrets buried beneath the Musgrave mansion, proving once again that even the smallest details can reveal the grandest truths.

Keywords

Riddle, Treasure, Mystery

NOTICE

This text is a work in the public domain and reflects the norms, values and perspectives of its time. Some readers may find parts of this content offensive or disturbing, given the evolution in social norms and in our collective understanding of issues of equality, human rights and mutual respect. We ask readers to approach this material with an understanding of the historical era in which it was written, recognizing that it may contain language, ideas or descriptions that are incompatible with today's ethical and moral standards.

Names from foreign languages will be preserved in their original form, with no translation.

The Musgrave Ritual

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coalscuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butterdish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his common-place book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.

“There are cases enough here, Watson,” said he, looking at me with mischievous eyes. “I think that if you knew all that I had in this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting others in.”

“These are the records of your early work, then?” I asked. “I have often wished that I had notes of those cases.”