by Arthur Doyle
Academy Chicago Publishers
363 West Erie Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Published in 1989. Reprinted 2005.
Copyright ©1989 by Frank D. McSherry, Martin H.
Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh
Printed and bound in the U.S.A.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
The best horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
Bibliography: p.
I. Horror tales, English. I. McSherry, Frank D.
II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Waugh, Charles. IV. Title.
PR4621.M35 1988 823’.8 88-3436
ISBN: 978-0-89733-265-1
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Captain of the Folestar
The Case of Lady Sannox
The Rend of the Cooperage
The Horror of the Heights
J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement
John Barrington Cowles
The Leather Funnel
The Lift
Lot No. 249
The New Catacomb
The Silver Hatchet
The Striped Chest
The Terror of Blue John Gap
THE SHORT HORROR FICTION OF A. CONAN DOYLE
by
Frank D. McSherry Jr.
This is the tale of the coming of the Hound in 1742:
The fog rolled in over the Devonshire moors. Through it, a terrified girl fled from a pursuing band of drunken revellers riding after her in the darkness. One rode ahead of his friends, and when they caught up with him they saw a sight that froze their blood in its veins: the girl collapsed on the ground, and, “standing over Sir Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that mortal eye has ever rested upon. And even as they looked, the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor.”1
Thus began the Curse of the House of Baskerville: any Baskerville who ventured onto the moors in the dark of night would die a horrible death.
A mere legend, said the country doctor who told the story to the famous London detective, Sherlock Holmes—or so the doctor thought until Sir Charles Baskerville was found dead on the moors, with no signs of physical violence upon him, but a look of terror on his face, and footprints on the ground around him: “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”2
So Sherlock Holmes’ most famous case commenced, shot through with a thrill of unresolved horror. Although Holmes eventually deduced that Sir Charles had been murdered and trapped the killer in a suspenseful climax, the death of Sir Hugo was never explained. Thus in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as he was to do throughout his career, Conan Doyle dealt with the horror evoked both by the supernatural and by explicable acts of violence.
The thirteen stories reprinted here are almost evenly divided between these two types. All the stories are credible, carefully crafted and very compelling, and all were written in the same decade as the Sherlock Holmes stories which established the author’s international reputation.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859; his father was an architect and illustrator and his mother, an Irishwoman, had been educated in France. The boy was educated at the Jesuit School, Stonyhurst, and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. During this period he discovered the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which had a strong influence on him.
At six foot two and weighing two hundred pounds, he was an excellent athlete, a first-class boxer as well as an enthusiastic rugby and cricket player. After graduation he signed on as ship’s surgeon to the whaler Hope and took a six-month voyage to the Arctic. Following this he sailed for four months to the African Gold Coast, a trip that became a nightmare when fever struck the crew and fire broke out on board.
He married in 1885 and went to Vienna to study diseases of the eye. He returned to Britain to set up an opthalmology office in Swansea. By 1891 it was obvious his practice was a failure, but, although he had a family to support, he was no longer interested in medicine, and had decided to become a professional writer. His first two stories were taken by The Strand, then a new magazine, whose editor, Greenough Smith, later said, “I at once realized that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe.”3
He drew, of course, from his own experiences for his fiction. “The Captain of the Polestar” deals with a ship trapped in Arctic ice; its captain is hounded by the sounds of “plaintive cries and screams in the wake of the ship, as if something were following it … unable to overtake it.” This story was probably inspired by his voyage on the Hope and “The Fiend of the Cooperage”, in which watchmen at a large tropical warehouse vanish under mysterious circumstances, came probably from his voyage to Africa.
Some of his stories are based on real mysteries. “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”, for instance, was inspired by the episode of the Mary Celeste, a brigantine which in December of 1872 was spotted yawing some 600 miles off the coast of Portugal. Crew members of the British ship Dei Gratia boarded the Mary Celeste to find it deserted; the captain, his wife and two-year-old daughter and the entire crew were gone, and there was no sign of violence or any disturbance on the tidy ship. The last entry in the log had been made on November 25th, about six miles off the Santa Maria Island in the Azores; there was no indication of any trouble. But the mystery of the Mary Celeste was never solved.
“J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” offered a fictional solution to the puzzle. It was published anonymously in The Cornhill magazine in 1884 and was widely assumed to have been a factual account of the case by J. Solly Flood, the British Advocate General at Gibraltar, who had been in charge of the investigation. Mr Flood hotly disclaimed any connection with “Jephson” and fired off telegrams to newspapers all over England denouncing the story as “a fabrication from beginning to end”.4
This is of course a reflection of Conan Doyle’s talent for building credibility into his fiction. Note the skill with which the events of “Lot No. 249” slowly create an atmosphere of horror: Abercrombie Smith, a medical student, becomes interested in the actions of the student living in the room on the floor below his—a fat man named Bellingham, with a froglike face, who collects ancient Egyptian artifacts. Late at night Smith hears voices in Bellingham’s rooms, and the servant tells Smith, “I want to know what that is that walks about his room when he’s out and when the door’s locked on the outside.” Then the murders begin, committed apparently by a monstrous beast with incredible strength…
Conan Doyle was interested also in the horrors inside the human mind. Jealousy and spite seek a monstrous vengeance in “The Case of Lady Sannox,” for instance.
Sometimes he showed a laudable prescience. In “Danger!” which appeared in The Strand in 1914, he foresaw the use of undersea craft to starve England into submission in a future war, and in “The Leather Funnel”, in which nightmares afflict the occupants of a certain room, he wrote: “Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order … no longer the amusement of the mystic, but the foundations of a science.” “The Leather Funnel” was published in 1900, the same year in which Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in German. Freud’s book did not appear in English until 1909.
Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his defense of Great Britain’s c
onduct in the Boer War. He went on to write plays and to dabble in amateur detection: his efforts in that direction—to clear the name of a man unjustly convicted—were instrumental in the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. He remarried after the death of his wife, and, after his son and brother were killed in the first World War, he became a believer in Spiritualism. His interest in parapsychology is evident in some of the stories: “The Striped Chest” and “The Silver Hatchet” combine psychic influences with crime; an eerie suggestion of hypnotism from far away pervades “John Barrington Cowles” and Flight-Commander Stangate has an extra-sensory perception of approaching danger on a calm, beautiful day in “The Lift”.
There has been a resurgence of interest in horror fiction in America since the end of the second World War. The amazing accomplishments of Science have perhaps, paradoxically, increased both our certainty and our uncertainty at the same time.
It is fitting that we leave the last word to Sir Arthur—taken from one of the stories in this collection:
‘When we think how narrow … this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom … it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.”
1. A. Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City: Doubleday & Co. n.d.), p. 790.
2. ________ , Ibid, p. 794.
3. Reginald Pound, Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950, (n.p.: A. S. Barnes, n.d.), p.41.
4. John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 40.
THE CAPTAIN OF THE POLESTAR
[Being an extract from the singular journal of John M’Alister Ray, student of medicine.]
SEPTEMBER 11th.—Lat. 81° 40’ N.; long. 2° E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice-fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county. To the right and left unbroken sheets extend to the horizon. This morning the mate reported that there were signs of pack ice to the southward. Should this form of sufficient thickness to bar our return, we shall be in a position of danger, as the food, I hear, is already running somewhat short. It is late in the season, and the nights are beginning to reappear. This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the fore-yard, the first since the beginning of May. There is considerable discontent among the crew, many of whom are anxious to get back home to be in time for the herring season, when labour always commands a high price upon the Scotch coast. As yet their displeasure is only signified by sullen countenances and black looks, but I heard from the second mate this afternoon that they contemplated sending a deputation to the captain to explain their grievance. I much doubt how he will receive it, as he is a man of fierce temper, and very sensitive about anything approaching to an infringement of his rights. I shall venture after dinner to say a few words to him upon the subject. I have always found that he will tolerate from me what he would resent from any other member of the crew. Amsterdam Island, at the north-west corner of Spitzbergen, is visible upon our starboard quarter—a rugged line of volcanic rocks, intersected by white seams, which represent glaciers. It is curious to think that at the present moment there is probably no human being nearer to us than the Danish settlements in the south of Greenland—a good nine hundred miles as the crow flies. A captain takes a great responsibility upon himself when he risks his vessel under such circumstances. No whaler has ever remained in these latitudes till so advanced a period of the year.
9 P.M.—I have spoken to Captain Craigie, and though the result has been hardly satisfactory, I am bound to say that he listened to what I had to say very quietly and even deferentially. When I had finished he put on that air of iron determination which I have frequently observed upon his face, and paced rapidly backwards and forwards across the narrow cabin for some minutes. At first I feared that I had seriously offended him, but he dispelled the idea by sitting down again, and putting his hand upon my arm with a gesture which almost amounted to a caress. There was a depth of tenderness too in his wild dark eyes which surprised me considerably. “Look here, Doctor,” he said, “I’m sorry I ever took you—I am indeed—and I would give fifty pounds this minute to see you standing safe upon the Dundee quay. It’s hit or miss with me this time. There are fish to the north of us. How dare you shake your head, sir, when I tell you I saw them blowing from the masthead?”—this in a sudden burst of fury though I was not conscious of having shown any signs of doubt. “Two-and-twenty fish in as many minutes as I am a living man, and not one under ten foot.1 Now, Doctor, do you think I can leave the country when there is only one infernal strip of ice between me and my fortune? If it came on to blow from the north to-morrow we could fill the ship and be away before the frost could catch us. If it came on to blow from the south—well, I suppose the men are paid for risking their lives, and as for myself it matters but little to me, for I have more to bind me to the other world than to this one. I confess that I am sorry for you, though. I wish I had old Angus Tait who was with me last voyage, for he was a man that would never be missed, and you—you said once that you were engaged, did you not?”
“Yes,” I answered, snapping the spring of the locket which hung from my watch-chain, and holding up the little vignette of Flora.
“Curse you!” he yelled, springing out of his seat, with his very beard bristling with passion. “What is your happiness to me? What have I to do with her that you must dangle her photograph before my eyes?” I almost thought that he was about to strike me in the frenzy of his rage, but with another imprecation he dashed open the door of the cabin and rushed out upon deck, leaving me considerably astonished at his extraordinary violence. It is the first time that he has ever shown me anything but courtesy and kindness. I can hear him pacing excitedly up and down overhead as I write these lines.
I should like to give a sketch of the character of this man, but it seems presumptuous to attempt such a thing upon paper, when the idea in my own mind is at best a vague and uncertain one. Several times I have thought that I grasped the clue which might explain it, but only to be disappointed by his presenting himself in some new light which would upset all my conclusions. It may be that no human eye but my own shall ever rest upon these lines, yet as a psychological study I shall attempt to leave some record of Captain Nicholas Craigie.
A man’s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within. The captain is tall and well-formed, with a dark, handsome face, and a curious way of twitching his limbs, which may arise from nervousness, or be simply an outcome of his excessive energy. His jaw and whole cast of countenance is manly and resolute, but the eyes are the distinctive feature of his face. They are of the very darkest hazel, bright and eager, with a singular mixture of recklessness in their expression, and of something else which I have sometimes thought was more allied with horror than any other emotion. Generally the former predominated, but on occasions, and more particularly when he was thoughtfully inclined, the look of fear would spread and deepen until it imparted a new character to his whole countenance. It is at these times that he is most subject to tempestuous fits of anger, and he seems to be aware of it, for I have known him lock himself up so that no one might approach him until his dark hour was passed. He sleeps badly, and I have heard him shouting during the night, but his cabin is some little distance from mine, and I could never distinguish the words which he said.
This is one phase of his character, and the most disagreeable one. It is only through my close association with him, thrown together as we are day after day, that I have observed it. Otherwise he is an agreeable companion, well-read and entertaining, and as gallant a seaman as ever trod a deck. I shall not easily forget the way in which he handled the ship when we were caught by a gale among the loose ice at the beginning of April. I have never seen him so cheerful, an
d even hilarious, as he was that night, as he paced backwards and forwards upon the bridge amid the flashing of the lightning and the howling of the wind. He has told me several times that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him, which is a sad thing for a young man to say; he cannot be much more than thirty, though his hair and moustache are already slightly grizzled. Some great sorrow must have overtaken him and blighted his whole life. Perhaps I should be the same if I lost my Flora—God knows! I think if it were not for her that I should care very little whether the wind blew from the north or the south to-morrow. There, I hear him come down the companion, and he has locked himself up in his room, which shows that he is still in an unamiable mood. And so to bed, as old Pepys would say, for the candle is burning down (we have to use them now since the nights are closing in), and the steward has turned in, so there are no hopes of another one.
September 12th.—Calm, clear day, and still lying in the same position. What wind there is comes from the south-east, but it is very slight. Captain is in a better humour, and apologised to me at breakfast for his rudeness. He still looks somewhat distrait, however, and retains that wild look in his eyes which in a Highlander would mean that he was “fey”—at least so our chief engineer remarked to me, and he has some reputation among the Celtic portion of our crew as a seer and expounder of omens.
It is strange that superstition should have obtained such mastery over this hard-headed and practical race. I could not have believed to what an extent it is carried had I not observed it for myself. We have had a perfect epidemic of it this voyage, until I have felt inclined to serve out rations of sedatives and nerve-tonics with the Saturday allowance of grog. The first symptom of it was that shortly after leaving Shetland the men at the wheel used to complain that they heard plaintive cries and screams in the wake of the ship, as if something were following it and were unable to overtake it. This fiction has been kept up during the whole voyage, and on dark nights at the beginning of the seal-fishing it was only with great difficulty that men could be induced to do their spell. No doubt what they heard was either the creaking of the rudder-chains, or the cry of some passing sea-bird. I have been fetched out of bed several times to listen to it, but I need hardly say that I was never able to distinguish anything unnatural. The men, however, are so absurdly positive upon the subject that it is hopeless to argue with them. I mentioned the matter to the captain once, but to my surprise he took it very gravely, and indeed appeared to be considerably disturbed by what I told him. I should have thought that he at least would have been above such vulgar delusions.