One for mystery lovers who are having a bad day and want something to make them feel good about themselves.

Why? Because this is one easy mystery. I mean, the title gives it away. That’s a tip-off you’d never see a mystery writer handing out today. In the last hundred and thirty years we’ve become more sophisticated and we expect authors to try harder to trick us.

Even if the title didn’t register you’d likely twig to the way “Mr. Hosmer Angel” speaks with a whispery voice, and wears tinted glasses and bushy whiskers. “There was never any mystery in the matter,” Holmes tells Watson, though “some of the details are of interest.” I wonder if what he meant by that is the creepy sexual angle, with a guy pretending to be his stepdaughter’s lover. That might have been pushing the envelope for Victorian readers.

We begin with some general pronouncements of the kind that Holmes is fond of making but that I always wonder about. “Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.” Is “unnatural” the correct word? Doesn’t he mean something like “telling” or “significant”? Or later: “The larger crimes are apt to be simpler, for the bigger the crime the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.” Well, maybe. But then a large crime might have a lot of different moving parts, fed by a combination of motives. Don’t small crimes have simple motives, like immediate gratification? Why would a small crime be more complicated? And what is meant by a small as opposed to a big crime anyway? The value of what’s stolen? The number or status of the victims? I have to say I don’t like either of these very much, and I suspect Doyle was sometimes having fun with making Holmes just sound like he’s blowing smoke.

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