by Josef Steiff
What’s absent from Holmes’s interactions with Spedding, though, and in other encounters in these early films, is the sexual tension and frustration that oozes from encounters between the deadly woman and the hard-boiled hero. Still, there’s just enough hint of a sexual dimension to Holmes’s character: Under the right circumstances, who knows what might happen?
A Man and His City
While the Holmes stories do take us on occasion to carnival grounds and country inns, and the noir detective does break free of the urban setting once or twice, it’s the city that defines the detective genre. Cawelti writes:
The importance of the city as a milieu for the detective story has been apparent from the very beginning . . . We can hardly imagine Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes far from his famous lodgings at 221B Baker Street in late-Victorian London, surrounded by hansoms, fogs, the Baker Street Irregulars, and the varied and ever enchanting mysteries of a great urban area.
The modern city as a place of fascination and mystery is evident in the early Holmes films, as much as it is in the hard-boiled films. But in the hard-boiled films, the city is darker, scarier. The menace seems larger than any one source of evil. In the films I revisited—all set in modern England—the evil is out there, but we sense that it can be rooted out—as long as Sherlock Holmes is on the case.
In the final scene of The Woman in Green, after Holmes has foiled Moriarty’s sinister plot, he looks out at the city, Watson at his side:
WATSON: What are you thinking of?
HOLMES: I’m thinking of all the women who can come and go in safety on the streets of London tonight. The stars keep watch in the heavens, and in our own little way, we too, old friend, are privileged to watch over our city.
This scene, like others throughout the Holmes films, provides a portrait of a city in which hope and order are possibilities. This rarely exists in the world of the doomed noir hero. Each set of films, Holmes-Rathbone and film noir, reinforces hope (or its absence) in its own language, an unexpected discovery as I revisited the Holmes I had once turned away.
I’ve always been attracted to the language of noir. In the best of these stories, the heroes speak a language that is part toughness and part poetry. Holmes addressing a woman as “My dear lady” doesn’t have the impact of a Chandler character saying “Listen, sister.” Where else but in noir can you find brutality wrapped up in beautiful words like Sam Spade’s closing lines in The Maltese Falcon or Joe Morse’s voice-over narration as he descends the steps at the end of Force of Evil?
But there is another passage (“This blessed plot, this England . . .”) delivered by Holmes at the end of The Secret Weapon. Sure, Holmes and the noir hero are both detectives, but they draw on two different literary traditions, one that offers a world where heroes can change their fate; the other where they are doomed by it.
Final Recommendations
In his iconic essay about the detective hero, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler writes:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor . . .
In the end, there are more similarities than differences between Sherlock Holmes and his American counterpart. Like Holmes, many of my noir favorites are men of honor. They, too, have lines they won’t cross. And just as the hard-boiled detective has a soft center, Holmes’s detective can pull out the tough guy when he needs to. Both men need answers, and they will persist until they get them. They are detectives.
I will always be true to my hard-boiled heroes. Maybe it’s a question of loyalty, one of the central themes of film noir. I can’t turn my back on these guys. But I now see that maybe there’s room in my heart for another type of detective: a detective who’s capable of leading with instinct and brawn, but instead chooses reason and logic. Maybe I’ve discovered that there’s something nice about a world with partners and friends and people who have your back. Maybe I like the idea of a detective who is not alone. And a world filled with hope.
Still, I don’t think I’ll be trading in my trench coat for tweed any time soon. But who knows? The investigation is far from over.
Chapter 7
The Mystery of the Horrible Hound
Rafe McGregor
May 1902 Publisher’s Weekly printed two statements about Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles: that it was the finest detective story ever written, and that no one would be reading it in 2002.
A hundred and nine years later, it seems as if the anonymous advertiser couldn’t have been more wrong about the novel’s endurance. A brief look at Amazon’s online database shows forty-five editions published in English in 2010 alone, and a “hound of the baskervilles” search on Google produces a little over a million results. I think Publisher’s Weekly was wrong on both counts: not only has The Hound endured for longer than a hundred years, but it wasn’t the finest detective story of its time.
No, I’m not suggesting that The Sign of the Four (1890) was superior, or that Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) deserves pride of place. The Hound isn’t the finest detective story ever written simply because it isn’t a detective story at all.
Deconstructing Doyle’s Dog
How can I convince you that The Hound isn’t a mystery? By drawing your attention to the following passage from a paragraph at the climax of the narrative (Chapter 14):
Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night. I am reckoned fleet of foot, but he outpaced me as much as I outpaced the little professional. In front of us as we flew up the track we heard scream after scream from Sir Henry and the deep roar of the hound. I was in time to see the beast spring upon its victim, hurl him to the ground and worry at his throat.
The problem for The Hound as a detective story is that this is the second curious incident of the dog in the night-time on Dartmoor. Like the first, in “Silver Blaze,” this dog does nothing. It is a very poor murder weapon, as the lines that follow the quotation reveal. Holmes discovers that the beast is corporeal, a bloodhound-mastiff crossbreed whose natural savagery has been exacerbated by starvation. Yet Watson writes, “We saw that there was no sign of a wound.” Perhaps Holmes destroyed the dog before it could bite Sir Henry? This explanation would require a creative interpretation of the text, and would in any event be insufficient because the hound never bites anyone.
Does it matter? I’ll answer this question by borrowing from the work of Jacques Derrida, the controversial philosopher famous for commentating on—and perpetuating—the postmodern condition.
The what? The radical changes that occurred all over the world in the second half of the twentieth century, changes driven by the mass media, multiculturalism, the digital revolution, globalisation, and an increasing belief that everything from personal identity to truth was relative rather than absolute. Language was regarded as particularly suspect, because the words it employed didn’t refer to reality, but to human conceptions of reality, conceptions which were often misinformed. Derrida believed language was inherently unstable, and he exposed the extent of this instability with his introduction of deconstruction in Of Grammatology in 1967.
Deconstruction involves the identification of a pair of opposing concepts in a piece of writing. For example, we might examine an encyclopaedia entry on liberal democracy and recognise that the term contains a necessary tension between the freedom of the individual and a requirement for social justice. Usually, where there is a set of oppositions in a work, one will be given priority. In this case the author might define liberal democracy as a political system that maximizes individual freedom. A deconstructive reading involves a re-conceptualisation of the distinction with the aim of showing how the language of the text undermines the selected priority. Just like what is at play in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The nove
lla is presented as a mystery that borrows elements from the horror genre. There is a relationship between mystery and horror in the work, the distinction mystery-horror, where mystery seems dominant. Derrida’s idea in deconstruction was that the text would contain a specific point beyond which its inherent logic could not progress, and he called this the aporia. So the aporia in The Hound would be the passage which exposes how the narrative undermines the apparent dominance of mystery in mystery-horror.
So far, so good. Derrida also believed that every piece of writing contained a re-mark, which was an indication of the genre of the work by the author, a feature of the law of genre, whereby every piece of writing belonged to a particular category. We should find at least one part of The Hound which explicitly announces that it is a detective story. But Derrida didn’t achieve his reputation for complexity by accident: his distinctive idea was that the re-mark was paradoxical because it was itself outside the genre that it marked. The re-mark was thus both a part of and apart from the writing. Now The Hound is a particularly good candidate for a deconstructive reading because the aporia and the re-mark interlock in the single passage above.
The dog is a very poor murder weapon, one that is only able to kill victims with weak constitutions (Sir Charles) or bad balance (Selden). In the first murder, the savage, starved hound doesn’t even take a nibble of its quarry. Holmes explains to Watson: “Of course we know that a hound does not bite a dead body and that Sir Charles was dead before ever the brute overtook him.” Could Doyle—highly intelligent, widely-travelled, and a qualified doctor—really have believed that dogs only ate live prey? Had he never seen a tame, replete dog gnawing the last scrap of flesh from a raw bone? The novella’s logic fails at the aporia of the dog that doesn’t bite as a murder weapon.
Holmes’s especial energy in saving Sir Henry is due to his sense of responsibility for the events described. He has arranged for the aristocrat to walk across the moor at night in order to present Stapleton with an opportunity to use the hound. The ruse is risky, as Holmes is aware that the beast has been trained to target Sir Henry specifically, and that the death of Selden was caused by the fact that he was wearing Sir Henry’s clothes. Given this harsh lesson in failure, one would expect the master sleuth to have prepared for every possible contingency.
Yet, when the fog on the moor begins to obscure Holmes’s view of Merripit House, he says to Watson: “Very serious indeed—the one thing upon earth which could have disarranged my plans.” Doyle is asking us to believe that a brilliant detective has constructed a plan that fails to account for the possibility of fog—on Dartmoor, at night—despite having recently spent several nights upon the moor himself. Anyone who has ever visited any of England’s moors will understand how ludicrous the idea is, and Dartmoor is renowned for being one of the most inhospitable in the country. This impossible oversight by Holmes is the re-mark that announces the genre of The Hound. The fact that the oversight is made by an ineffective detective—that mainstay of the mystery genre—meets Derrida’s criterion that the passage which announces the genre of the work as horror is itself apart from that genre.
The Philosophy of Horror
Why horror? Even if I have convinced you that The Hound is a seriously flawed mystery, why should it be a horror story when there are plenty of other genres from which to choose? I think the context in which the work was created provides several clues. The genesis of the novel is the subject of heated debate, but it seems as if the idea was suggested to Doyle by his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson while they were golfing in Norfolk in April 1901. Doyle had laid Sherlock Holmes to rest in 1893 in order to concentrate on his literary historical romances, and the new project was envisaged as a collaboration. There appear to have been three main sources of inspiration: the legends of black dogs and Wisht hounds widespread in the British Isles; “Followed” (1900), a short story by Dr. Robert Eustace and Mrs. L.T. Meade; and “The Brazilian Cat” (1898), one of Doyle’s own horror titles.
Doyle was already an accomplished author of tales of supernatural horror, and amongst his numerous and varied contributions to the genre was “Lot No. 249” (1892), which is the first appearance of a reanimated Egyptian mummy as a monstrous antagonist in literature. He twice used the phrase “a real creeper” to describe his work in progress, but made two important decisions at some time prior to August 1901. First, to introduce Holmes into the story; and second, to write the novel on his own (with an acknowledgement to Fletcher Robinson). The choices may well have been related, and the selection of Holmes as the protagonist—likely motivated by financial considerations—would effectively disguise the tale as a mystery.
Amongst his many other achievements, Noël Carroll is the leading philosopher of film, and one of the foremost writers on genre. He claims that although different genres are identified in different ways, mystery, suspense, horror, and melodrama are designed to elicit specific emotions. In The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Carroll identifies horror as part of a wider family of stories about monsters, and monsters as “beings that do not exist according to the lights of contemporary science.” Horror is distinguished by involving monsters that disturb the natural order, and the essence of horror is that it produces a compound reaction of fear and disgust.
For something to disgust rather than scare us, it must be impure or grotesque, and this can occur in three ways.
●First, we have an aversion to incompleteness. The long list of fictional villains who either have parts missing (like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick) or parts that don’t work (like Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life) reflects the real-life discrimination with which physically disabled people have to contend.
● Second, we’re uncomfortable with contradiction. The reanimated mummy in “Lot No. 249” is not just frightening because of the physical threat it poses, it is revolting because it is un-dead, dead and alive.
● Third, and related, is that we not only react to contradiction, but to creatures that cross accepted cultural categories. The mummy is a cross-contamination between “live things” and “dead things” in the same way that a crab is a cross-contamination between “things that live in the sea” (which usually swim) and “things that walk” (which usually live on land).
The hound straddles the distinction life-death in the same way as Doyle’s mummy. Throughout the novel the monster is identified both as a fearsome physical antagonist and as a frightening otherworldly creature. The following descriptions come immediately before and after the slaying of the hound respectively:
an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. . . . Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face . . .
In mere size and strength it was a terrible creature which was lying stretched before us.
The hound produces fear by being physically strong and revulsion by being a crossbreed dog-ghost. In addition to this compound reaction that defines horror, Carroll notes four factors that provide supplementary support for his theory: the prevalence of monsters with insufficient strength to instil fear in protagonists, a geography that locates monsters in marginal or unknown places, a predominant concern with knowledge, and the link with mass aesthetic satisfaction. All of these are relevant to The Hound of the Baskervilles.
There is a sense in which the hound should not inspire fear. Either Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade are facing a real dog that they are well-equipped to kill, or a ghost dog that cannot wound them. We have already seen that the hound, whatever it is, doesn’t bite. Nonetheless, Watson—frequently noted for his bravery—feels fear, an emotion which is, I imagine, shared by many readers. With regard to the geography of horror, the hound is a denizen of Dartmoor, a grim, lonely, and forbidding landscape. The moor is very much one of the “marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites” that Carroll mentions as figurative spatializations of the unknown lurking beyond cultural categoris
ation. The effect is increased by the hound’s kennelling in Grimpen Mire (grim-pen). The habitat is not only the most secluded place on the moor, but deadly to living creatures because of the bog holes.
So,
1.The combination of remarkable success and flawed mystery should make us think twice about what kind of story The Hound of the Baskervilles. really is.
2.A horror story is a plausible alternative: there’s a monster in the story, and the characteristics of this monster match those that Carroll identifies as definitive of horror.
3.There is further evidence for The Hound as horror in the irrational quality of the horror induced and the geography of horror.
Convinced? Not yet? Then let’s look at the rest of the evidence.
Re-Solving The Hound
The third supplement to Carroll’s definition is his description of horror-story plots as repetitive and having a link with knowledge, and he categorizes the two main structures as the discovery and overreacher plot clusters. The latter is the well-known “mad scientist” story, made famous by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. A case could be made for The Hound of the Baskervilles as a version of the former, where the protagonists discover that a monster is responsible for unexplained deaths. If we consider the novel in terms of the typical sequence Carroll identifies (onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation) the idea is very tempting. But the discovery plot structure overlaps with many mysteries, so this seems more like an instance of Derrida’s law of genre—where hybrid genres are the rule, not the exception—rather than proof that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a horror story.