This is called a “mystery” in the title, but I think it would have made more sense to have called it, as Watson dubbed most of Holmes’s early cases, an “adventure.” Holmes himself isn’t involved, having been sent away by Watson for some much needed rest and recuperation, and the story has our narrator heading off alone to Wiltshire and the usual pile of a country estate, apparently to act as a sort of bodyguard for Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet of Darkwater Hall. Sir Harry had sent one of the local peasants, a degenerate churl by the name of Black Ralph, to jail (or gaol, as they say in the old country), and now that Ralph is out he is apparently gunning for revenge.
Watson, using skills picked up from assisting Holmes, is able to figure out some elementary things and in the end he stops Ralph from killing Harry, though not without a bit of luck. There’s no mystery to any of this though. The only mysterious business going on is the S&M playacting that the lord and lady are up to, and Watson just blunders his way into finding out what that’s all about. Otherwise, this seemed a pointless sort of a story, interesting mainly for being written by Kingsley Amis and for the sexy subtext (it was first published in Playboy). This latter point shouldn’t be held against it though because Playboy really was a magazine worth reading, back in the day. When you were done looking at the pictures.
Alex Good 