The nasty truth was, historical fiction and sweeping world histories didn’t sell all that well. So in 1901, with what may have been an exaggerated reluctance (no author actually enjoys a waning of fame) Conan Doyle took a deep breath and prepared to dust off the man with the pipe, the violin, and the hooded gray eyes, sending him and the good doctor off on the adventure of their lives—and coyly obscuring the date when the story takes place, so as to continue the pretense that the scoured bones of the great detective still lay in the Reichenbach waters.
The public didn’t care about such authorial niceties. They pricked up their ears at the “step upon the stair”, knowing it could only bode well.
Their faith was not disappointed. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a glorious tale, the work of a gifted storyteller at the top of his powers, who moreover throws himself fully into the adventure, betraying not the slightest breath of his earlier resentment and disdain. “The hound of the Baskervilles”—the very taste of the phrase in the mouth, first rotund, then sharp and sibilant, says it all: Here is a book that has everything. And it does: brisk action; a dark and moody setting; fear and courage; loyalty and betrayal; a beautiful woman and the monstrous, glowing embodiment of a family curse; and the cold mind and passionate heart of a great man braced against a diabolical plot. Humor and yearning, evil and simplicity. Even the central character is a delight, returned to us undamaged from the cold depths of the waterfall.
So great is the pleasure in the book, in fact, that the hapless commentator hesitates to pick over it, wanting only to thrust the book, whole and unanalyzed, into the reader’s hand and urge, “Enjoy! Oh, this is your tenth read? Well, have a grand time!”
Still, with any great work of art, analysis cannot detract, it can only enrich. As the rabbis might say, God is great enough to receive our questions.
The reference to Hebraic scripture is considered, for the story-telling in The Hound of the Baskervilles possesses much of the enigmatic power, and a great deal of the curious style, of the Old Testament, where elements one might expect to find in a narrative are often omitted (for example, we are not told Holmes’ reaction to hearing that the overenthusiastic phrenologist Dr. Mortimer covets his skull) while other elements are drummed into the reader with an insistent emphasis (such as the word “thrill,” which seems to appear on every page, or the repetition “He was running, Watson—running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face.”)
A single word or gesture may carry an inordinately heavy burden (Holmes holding the letter “an inch or two from his eyes”, the import of which we do not learn until much later) while at other times lengthy excursus brings crystal clarity to matters of no real importance (the legalistic minutiae beloved of the neighbor Mr. Frankland).
Unlike the meandering Old Testament, however, this is a novel, and despite having been originally published in monthly episodes, it remains under the author’s tight control at each moment. No images are wasted; no characters appear but that they are fully used (although, admittedly, Conan Doyle does seem ultimately uncertain of what to do with his stalwart colonial, Sir Henry Baskerville.)
Look at the way the story begins (and fear not, those of you new-comers who insist on reading an introduction first: I shall give away little here apart from my own pleasure and awe). A client absentmindedly leaves his walking stick in lieu of a calling card, giving rise to a humorous exchange: Holmes and Watson are introduced and their relationship established.
The anticipation that comes with the sound of feet upon the stairs is resolved—Yes! This will indeed be a case worthy of the Great Detective. Not, however, because of the horrifying family history Dr. Mortimer reads them, of thirteen drunken squires set on rape, the bravest (or drunkest) of whom pursue their host and his intended victim across the moor to a prehistoric stone circle, there to witness a terrible revenge.
This ancient tale culminates in one of the many splendid phrases in which this narrative abounds, a heartfelt exhortation (best spoken in lowered tones even by daylight) to the Baskerville descendants that they keep from venturing onto the moor “in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.”
And Holmes’ response? He yawns, and tosses his cigarette end into the fire by way of comment. What really rivets his attention onto the case’s merits is not Mortimer’s “fairy-tale”, but the peculiar juxtaposition of a missing boot and an aged uncle’s death by natural causes. Those, he declares, make for a case that cuts deep.
One might suspect that Holmes is toying with Watson (and hence with us) by this pronouncement, but for the frank uneasiness he soon expresses, laying bare his deeper affections in a manner that is rare in the stories. Here he tells his companion that the case threatens to be “an ugly, dangerous business”, adding, “my dear fellow…I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street once more.”
Events follow fast on one another’s heels, curiosity upon curiosity, sweeping us along in a mounting anticipation of action before the case even begins to approach Dartmoor itself. A mysterious note, closely analyzed but its source undiscovered; a second boot missing, with Sir Henry’s choleric indignation provoking our smile even as we wonder; a dark and bearded spy who eludes Holmes and Watson, but not before presenting his name as (ah! pleasure upon pleasure!) “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Plot threads seem to weave around one another, only to be neatly and inexorably snipped. “There is nothing,” remarks Holmes, “more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”
With the reader well and truly stimulated, the case moves west to Dartmoor, where the bounce and humor of the opening pages gutters like a candle under the bleak and brooding breath from off the moor. Dr. Mortimer’s playful spaniel gives way to the mythic spectral hound, and alone Dr. Watson confronts the lonely landscape, the murderous peat bogs, a lurking escaped murderer, and the sound of weeping in the night.
The way in which the writer balances light moments with the darkness permeating the moor is masterful, and classic Conan Doyle. Even later on, when events are conspiring to make the tension nearly unbearable (and imagine having to read this in episodes, knowing at each climax that an entire month would have to go by before the next chapter arrived!), a vein of humor introduces itself, with the ridiculous Mr. Frankland allowing us to catch our breath before the good Dr. Watson forces himself to venture into the prehistoric dwellings that conceal a mysterious figure, glimpsed by night.
The book was written in the author’s customary fashion: at great speed and with few changes, so that the first chapter was in the hands of readers less than six months after the publisher’s contract was signed. The book’s flaws and holes should, no doubt, be attributed to the speed of composition and cursory editing.
And holes there are, if one looks: the denouement is not entirely satisfactory; Holmes exhibits a curious inability to notice an accent in a Costa Rican woman; Conan Doyle reveals a winsome naïveté in his assumption that a resident housemaid would not have noticed, shall we say, irregularities in the relations between her employers; and the ethics of inflicting a condemned murderer on the people of an unspecified South American country makes a later audience uneasy (indeed, the 1984 Grenada television production of the book took care to explain that the convict had been lobotomized to render him docile).
Despite the small glitches—or indeed, perhaps because of them—the relief of the reading public in August of 1901 was profound: Holmes was back, and he was still Holmes. He was, perhaps, even truer to life than he had been in some of the less inspired pre-Reichenbach stories, for Conan Doyle pulled out all the stops. The two instantly recognizable friends before the very same Baker Street fire; Holmes shaking his head as usual at Watson’s misguided attempts at the science of deduction; the laugh-out-loud humor when Holmes, faced with Watson’s sputtering protests at the quantity of tobacco smoke in the air, speculates that, if “a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought,” that maybe it wo
uld be logical to climb into a box in order to think—we are all home in Baker Street once again.
Conan Doyle would continue to produce Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927, three years before his death. The latest internal date in one of the Holmes stories, however (“His Last Bow”), is the eve of the First World War; all subsequent tales are set before the carnage of 1914-1918. The cutoff is necessary, for Holmes as Conan Doyle wrote him was a Victorian gentleman, at home with gas lamps, hansom cabs, and an unshakable faith in Science, who would no more have survived the Great War undamaged than did the author. Conan Doyle himself lost a son, and was driven to Spiritualism in the hopes of contacting those who had gone before him. He became a devout believer in mind reading and fairies, spirit possession and ectoplasmic oozings, and proved himself susceptible to half the charlatans of the Western world.
And being Conan Doyle, he made sure everyone knew about his beliefs, writing books and conducting worldwide lecture tours. The newspapers had a field day with the idea that the creator of the Great Rationalist could be as gullible as any farmboy in a carnival midway, and although Conan Doyle fought back with all his Irish-Scots-English will, the battle was not winnable and drained his resources on all levels.
Of course, in 1901 all that is in the future. In 1901, the gas lamps burn still, the hansoms rattle the cobbles streets, and the reader never really doubts, when Holmes sets his cold intellect against the ghostly hound, which will prevail.
But before that end there is a ripping story, with laughter to counteract the hackles rising on the back of the reader’s neck; with a long stretch of Watson operating all on his own, the drawn-out tension of both doctor and reader (where in heaven’s name is Holmes?) relieved at precisely the right instant; with a love interest to bring warmth onto the frigid moor; and with not one but a pair of deadly mysteries—ghostly hound and all-too-real convict—that dance around each other until they come together: This is story-telling at its finest, humane and intuitive, crafted by a man having the time of his life.
So I say again, whether this is your first encounter with the hound or your twenty-first: Take! Enjoy! And have a grand time on Dartmoor!
VIII. LRK on ACD
Let it be said straight off: I am not a Sherlockian.xxi I am no Holmesian, I have not memorized the canon backwards and forwards, I belong to no scion of the Baker Street Irregulars (although the idea of being an Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes does have a certain appeal). I will even admit that until I began actually writing a book in which Conan Doyle’s detective plays a major part, I had not read the stories since “The Speckled Band” and The Hound of the Baskervilles back—way back—in high school.
By now, of course, I am well aware of the multitudinous works of higher criticism on the Conan Doyle canon, critical volumes filled with essays concerning such pressing questions as how many times Dr. Watson married and the original color of Mrs. Hudson’s hair before being the landlady of Sherlock Holmes turned it white. Most of these, although one suspects not all, agree firmly with the judgment of Dorothy L. Sayers when she wrote that the whole business of Holmesian commentaries “must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s: the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.”
However, be they tongue in cheek or deadly serious, there is no getting around the fact that there are a lot of these essays and volumes, and that when relative neophytes such as myself are asked to give a talk on the subject, we are either left scratching around for some immensely arcane issue that has not been worked to death, or find ourselves dependent on those who have gone before.
I was trained as a theologian; I am not too proud to use the work of earlier scholars. Therefore, my talk largely consists of a series of quotations from minds better than mine. This may appear either as shameful laziness or as a rather obvious attempt to lend a spurious air of academic respectability to a worn garment, and I admit that when I first realized I had nothing but a string of quotes, I did come near to panic. However, I decided that really, as there is nothing new under the sun to be said about Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes anyway, I might as well present a few nuggets mined by others for the contemplation of my listeners.
In his introduction to John Gardner’s brilliant On Moral Fiction, (not, by the way, the John Gardner who writes crime fiction), Charles Johnson writes that very occasionally a writer
creates something that becomes emblematic for some sector of our experience. This happens when a writer stumbles, by genius or dumb luck, on an archetypal character. In some cases this naming, this dramatizing, crystallizes an experience we all know but until this creation occurs, have not found a way to utter.
Until the character of Sherlock Holmes crystallized under the pen of an out-of-work medical doctor in the end of the last century, Victorian England, and in its footsteps the rest of the world, did not have its defining modern hero, a man (I fear, inevitably a man) who could confront the truly awful problems of the age with the best weapons and values of that age: the power of science and knowledge arrayed against the immorality and chaos that threatened on all sides, a hero who depended not so much on swordplay (fisticuffs occasionally) as his mind. Problems, Sherlock Holmes says, are solvable, when the right person tackles them. That Holmes is as much adored in the late twentieth century as in the year of his birth says a great deal for the power of the image that Conan Doyle tapped into—or, if you insist, created.
Conan Doyle himself conceived of Holmes primarily as a thinking machine. In the first short story (not the first novel) he refers to Holmes’
...cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was...the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.... For the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. [“A Scandal in Bohemia”]
For those of us who had not read the Holmes stories since before we could vote, it sometimes comes as a surprise to find things going on in the stories other than this Thinking Machine persona. Indeed, it is a great joy not only as a literary discovery but as a bearer of psychological insight to stumble across this Holmes Who Laughs, a Holmes who shakes with passion.
The first we hear of Holmes is in the novel A Study in Scarlet. The narrator Dr. Watson is newly in London, having been invalided out of the army following an encounter with a Jezail bullet in Afghanistan. He runs into a friend, Stamford, and over a drink tells the man of his search for affordable rooms. Stamford recommends a young researcher he knows from the medical school, with the caveat, however, that “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.” He even suggests that Holmes might readily give a touch of poison to a friend (or, one wonders, to a roommate?) to see how it worked—although he admits that Holmes would be just as likely to take it himself.
And yet, the first we see of Holmes, working over a test tube in the hospital laboratory, he is springing to his feet with a cry of pleasure. He chuckles to himself, he seizes Watson’s sleeve (this perfect stranger) in eagerness to show him the results of this thrilling experiment, and claps his hands, looking as delighted as a child with a new toy, his eyes glittering.
Not perhaps the image of cold-bloodedness Stamford’s words had brought to mind. Fixation, perhaps, but not cold-bloodedness. About his work, at any rate, Sherlock Holmes is certainly passionate—but remember, the root meaning of passion is suffering. Webster’s gives several meanings for the word. The first three refer to the Easter passion, the suffering on the cross. The fourth mentions “emotion and an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction,” and the sense of an outbreak of anger (to fly in passion at something.) Only in the fifth position do we get down to the
idea of passion as “ardent affection.”
In speaking of the person of Sherlock Holmes, not just as a scientist but as a human being, Conan Doyle uses a spare, almost mythic language rather than the more descriptive style of the novelist. The descriptions we are granted are few and specific, and make it necessary to look for the indicators of personality in something other than the straightforward story line. These often come in little bursts, as if the man Holmes occasionally thrusts his way into Conan Doyle’s slow and deliberate account by the very force of his personality. Violent emotion appears, rapidly suppressed, and unexpected sparkles of humor pop to the surface.
Now, Victorian humor is a very special thing. A classic of the type is Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, filled with dry, self-deprecating, and occasionally very heavy-handed humor. In the Holmes stories, it is poor Watson who generally bears the brunt of these humorous asides.
In The Valley of Fear, Holmes declares sarcastically, “Your native shrewdness, my dear Watson, that innate cunning which is the delight of your friends, would surely prevent you from enclosing cipher and message in the same envelope,” and later on adds, “Perhaps there are points which have escaped your Machiavellian intellect.” In “The Three Students”, Holmes berates Watson,
By jove! My dear Watson, it is nearly nine, and the landlady babbled of green peas at seven-thirty. What with your eternal tobacco, Watson, and your irregularity at meals, I expect that you will get notice to quit, and that I shall share your downfall.
A rather different sort of jest is made in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Holmes admits to Watson that, although he has travelled to Devonshire by means of the Ordnance Survey maps, actually “My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.” He then explains his preference for the smoky fog he has generated in their rooms: “It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”
The Beekeeper's Apprentice Page 6