The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual

Book excerpt: Reginald Musgrave, a school friend of Holmes, saw his butler searching through private family papers. The butler Brunton got caught red handed with an ancestral ritual of the Musgraves as well. The ritual seemed worthless to the family but Brunton was determined to decipher it. A few days after Brunton disappeared. "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" is a part of "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes". Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After his studies, he worked as a ship’s surgeon on various boats. During the Second Boer War, he was an army doctor in South Africa. When he came back to the United Kingdom, he opened his own practice and started writing crime books. He is best known for his thrilling stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He published four novels and more than 50 short-stories starring the detective and Dr Watson, and they play an important role in the history of crime fiction. Other than the Sherlock Holmes series, Doyle wrote around thirty more books, in genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, historical novels, but also poetry, plays, and non-fiction.