“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” doesn’t make a lot of favourite lists among Holmes fans, and just checking the editions I have it clearly hasn’t attracted the attention of the same armies of annotators that have feasted on much of the rest of the canon. And I find this a bit puzzling as it’s quite a sensational story, even in a macabre and modern sort of way, and has most of the popular elements that I think readers would have been looking for.

We begin with a young lawyer named John Hector McFarlane arriving at 221B Baker Street to beg Holmes to clear his name, as he has been accused of murdering a prominent Norwood builder named Jonas Oldacre. It turns out Lestrade is right on McFarlane’s tail and I think this inspires Holmes to take the case even more than his having fallen into a depressive lethargy after the recent loss of Moriarty (an event that has led to London becoming “a singularly uninteresting city,” at least from “the point of view of the criminal expert”). Holmes of course loves a good challenge, and the challenge here is to best Lestrade. Getting McFarlane out of a murder rap is just a bonus.

There would be no doubt in any reader’s mind that McFarlane is innocent once we learn the facts of the case: that McFarlane had been approached by Oldacre the day before to draw up Oldacre’s will, which would leave all of Oldacre’s property to McFarlane. This came as a surprise to McFarlane, as he had never met Oldacre before.

We will quickly identify McFarlane as one of Doyle’s recurring “stooge” characters, being cut from the same cloth as Jabez Wilson in “The Red-Headed League,” Violet Hunter in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” and Hall Pycroft in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk.” I don’t know why Doyle found these figures so intriguing. Perhaps he just felt they were useful for narrative purposes, but they show up quite a lot and no other mystery writer I can think of has ever employed the type as often.

Anyway, Lestrade is sure that he’s got his man just as we can be sure that he hasn’t. Holmes immediately upbraids Lestrade for not having any “imagination,” and this takes us into one of the more interesting points about the story. As Holmes admits to Watson, “All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other.” It seems to be an open-and-shut case, but Holmes exclaims (emphasis in the original) “I know it’s all wrong. I feel it in my bones.” This isn’t to say that Holmes is giving up on his deductive method, going over crime scenes with a magnifying glass, looking for footprints in the carpet, and pacing out distances. He’ll need to do all that, and more, including the first use of fingerprint evidence in the canon (a bit of work the idea for which Doyle bought off a friend). But it’s Holmes’s imagination and gut instincts that are in the driver’s seat. And it’s proving that these instincts are superior to Lestrade’s plodding police work that gives Holmes his greatest satisfaction. More even than the dramatic way he smokes Oldacre out.

So I don’t think there’s any big mystery about what’s going on. What sets the story apart is the sheer nastiness of Oldacre and the shape of his long, bitter revenge. This guy can really hold a grudge, and his final turn as Malvolio pledging revenge on Holmes is perhaps not quite as empty a threat as Holmes takes it be. Finally, while the backyard bonfire has an obvious purpose, I love the way the story leaves it open just how wicked Oldacre may have been in all his planning. A couple of rabbits? Not likely. But then what? Or who?

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