Sherlock Holmes
Page 3
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) deals with ancient terrors in a desolate landscape of moor and bog, where—to borrow some phrases from that devoted Sherlockian T. S. Eliot—the Grimpen Mire affords no secure foothold and the visitor is menaced by monsters and deadly enchantment. It is a tale, above all, about an aristocratic family haunted by a monstrous beast that brings terror and violent death. Conan Doyle dedicated the book to Robinson, who claimed he’d written parts of it and who sometimes called himself its joint author. No one will ever know for sure the extent of his probably minimal involvement. Still, only one thing really mattered: Holmes was back! Unfortunately, his creator hadn’t actually resurrected the great detective. Instead Conan Doyle subtitled his book “Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” and set this chilling case sometime before the fatal encounter with Moriarty. Then Watson had memorialized his friend in words originally applied to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo. As The Hound opens, one can again hear echoes of Platonic dialogue in some of the detective’s exchanges with his old friend:
“Is it then stretching our inference too far to say the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”
“It certainly seems probable.”
Humankind, as the philosophers tell us, swings between the bestial and the angelic, partaking of both flesh and spirit. Throughout The Hound of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle plays up the metaphysical, and practical, issues surrounding the relationship of the body and the soul. Holmes’s informant Dr. Mortimer analyzes human skulls for “supra-orbital development” and indications of atavism. When the great detective meditates over a map of Devonshire, he claims to travel there “in spirit.” An escaped convict presents “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face . . . it might have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.” Another villainous character turns out to be “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” When an ominous-seeming figure is dimly glimpsed standing on the summit of a rocky tor, we are left wondering if it is just a passing hiker or the devil surveying this fallen world.
Despite Holmes’s warning in The Sign of Four, Watson continues to judge people by their physiognomies and the good doctor is wrong in almost every instance. For example, he concludes, quite mistakenly, that the “dry glitter” in a servant’s eyes and the “firm set of his thin lips” indicate “a positive and possibly harsh nature.” Throughout the novel people continually find themselves confused or deceived by appearances. That animal-like escaped prisoner is mistaken for the aristocratic Sir Henry Baskerville. Dr. Mortimer isn’t sure which gentleman at 221B is the sleuth and which his chronicler. A London cabman drives a bearded passenger who claims to be, but isn’t, Sherlock Holmes. A young woman named Beryl Stapleton initially assumes that Dr. Watson must be Sir Henry. One of the novel’s French commentators, Pierre Bayard, even argues that Holmes fails to identify the actual villain. And then there’s the monstrous hound: Is it real or imagined? Out on the moor a shaken Watson hears a “long, low moan, indescribably sad. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again.” Could this be a spectral predator hot on the trail of Sir Henry Baskerville—or the whimper of a beast in pain?
The legend of the hound began with the kidnapping and intended rape of a local girl by the eighteenth-century Sir Hugo Baskerville. Continued violence against women—a crucial theme in A Study in Scarlet and many of the short stories—takes multiple forms here as the reader learns of unhappy marriages, thwarted love affairs, and abusive, even sadistic relationships. (Little wonder that Conan Doyle would become a leading voice in divorce law reform.) Yet this richly layered novel also turns on inheritance in multiple senses, whether of property and money, genetic traits, or a family curse. In its construction, the book nearly resembles a case file or murder dossier, since Conan Doyle assembles a panoply of documents: a tattered manuscript, newspaper reports, a warning message made from words cut from printed sentences, the account of a witness cross-examined in the manner of a trial lawyer, Watson’s dispatches to Holmes, Watson’s own journal, various telegrams, handwritten notes, and letters. One character is even a professional typist and her father obsessed with legal briefs. All this written documentation, so representative of modern order and rationality, is nonetheless eclipsed by the elemental forces of Nature at her most hostile and threatening.
While The Hound of the Baskervilles is both structurally more unified than the first two Holmes novels and compelling throughout, it does exhibit minor flaws. Besides the long absence of Holmes in the middle, we also learn the identity of the villain well before the novel’s end. No matter. This isn’t just a mystery, this is Mystery, a spiritual confrontation with sinister forces as fog rolls across an ancient and haunted terrain:
There was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes’s elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralysed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.
In some lights, The Hound of the Baskervilles could be categorized as a tragic regional novel, like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: the desolate landscape—“the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky”—dominates the merely human characters. By contrast, The Valley of Fear (1915) presents itself as a modern novel about business, not just because its second half deals with management/worker clashes, but also because it focuses throughout on contracts, on pledges and oaths, on marital promises and other binding commitments.
John Dickson Carr, the grandmaster of the locked-room whodunit (or rather howdunit), once named The Valley of Fear as his favorite Sherlock Holmes novel and called it “a very nearly perfect piece of detective-story writing.” The critic Anthony Boucher seconded that judgment, maintaining, “Here is Holmes as the perfect thinking mind, in cryptanalysis, in observation, in deduction. And here, more than in any other Canonical story that comes to mind, is Holmes at his most completely charming. . . . There is, in fact, more overt humour here than is usual in the Canon; there is a certain fey quality in this Holmes.”
Humor? Holmes laughs regularly during his numerous exploits and he often slyly mocks his friend (“Really, Watson, you excel yourself”), but here, for once, it is the good doctor who temporarily triumphs. The scene opens at Baker Street with an encrypted message that needs to be deciphered, but is quickly followed by an extended discussion of a certain Napoleon of Crime:
“‘You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?’
“‘The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—’
“‘My blushes, Watson!’ Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
“‘I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.’
“‘A touch! A distinct touch!’ cried Holmes. ‘You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson.’”
Note the allusion to the swordplay in Hamlet, first employed in A Study in Scarlet but now part of the repartee between this prince of detectives and his Horatio. All this talk of Professor Moriarty, however, underscores that this novel, like the others, is set before the events chronicled in “The Final Problem.” Of course, by now contemporary readers had known for over a decade that Holmes was never really dead. Yielding to popular demand and substantial financial incentives, Conan Doyle had finally explained, in �
��The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903), how the great detective actually survived his meeting with Moriarty and what he had earlier called, with moving understatement, “the final discussion of those questions that lie between us.” After his “great hiatus” (spent partly in Tibet under the name Sigerson), Holmes eventually returned to solve numerous subsequent mysteries before retiring to keep bees on the Sussex Downs. Nonetheless, as here, Watson sometimes reaches back to record an older case.
By chapter 3, Holmes, Watson, and two go-getting policemen have arrived at Birlstone Manor, where the master of the house has been found dead in the library. Apparently John Douglas was surprised by an intruder who used a sawed-off shotgun to blow away most of his face. There are, however, some puzzling elements to this apparently run-of-the-mill burglary turned homicide: What is the meaning of the strange mark branded on Douglas’s arm? Why has one half of a set of dumbbells gone missing? And why does the oddly cheerful Mrs. Douglas speak so intimately with her husband’s friend Cecil Barker? Inevitably, Holmes proclaims, “in all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study.” Of course, attentive readers will smile, remembering that he has made almost precisely the same assertion about the crimes in each of the other novels. For all his vaunted rationality, Holmes is susceptible to bursts of lyrical enthusiasm (for music, art, Nature), to melancholy observations about life, and to exclamatory hyperbole when in the middle of a case.
The Valley of Fear is the most metafictional of the novels. It is a book filled with other books and carefully manufactured texts, where truth is stage-managed and nothing is natural. Police inspectors allude to Watson’s published works and coyly remark, “when the time comes we’ll all hope for a place in your book.” One important character refers to Watson as “the historian of this bunch” and then hands him a substantial manuscript with the air of a writing student soliciting the attention of a published author. The man even insists, “You’ve never had such a story as that pass through your hands before, and I’ll lay my last dollar on that.” In part 2 Watson presents that gritty hard-boiled narrative, a third-person account of a rebellious young bravo’s induction into a murderous Irish-American secret society called the Scowrers. Like some fearsome provincial Moriarty, its leader, “Bodymaster” McGinty, has spies everywhere and “every whisper goes back to him.” His word is law among the lawless.
In tone the two halves of The Valley of Fear are radically different. “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” as the first part is called, prefigures those elaborately contrived puzzle-murders of the 1920s and ’30s, in which witty amateur detectives solve impossible crimes. But the second part, “The Scowrers,” could have been published in Black Mask; it is abrupt and violent in word, action, and denouement, almost a foreshadowing of Dashiell Hammett’s brutal Red Harvest. Among Conan Doyle’s contemporaries it somewhat resembles a social-realist novel by Jack London or Upton Sinclair, while some aspects of its plot call to mind Conan Doyle’s nasty stories about the murderous pirate Captain Sharkey.
In Conan Doyle’s work, violence—usually in conjunction with ill-gotten wealth—nearly always originates outside England’s green and peaceful land, typically in gangsterish America. Consequently Holmes, like the medieval knights his creator idolized, often works to preserve the civilized values of the British Empire against barbarity and disorder. That said, The Valley of Fear is only partly about the danger of lawlessness. On closer inspection, both halves are built around a tangled spiderweb of promises, oaths, and pledges. No matter what the cost or how long it takes, contracts—whether honorable or ignoble—must always be fulfilled.
Throughout, Conan Doyle sets up, and quickly skates over, a series of moral ambiguities. Under what circumstances, if any, can a man stand by and allow bloodshed to occur without acting? Does Sherlock Holmes himself cause the death of two men? Is John Douglas’s wife betraying him with his best friend? And, most troubling of all, has Holmes’s deductive genius actually been subverted by Moriarty to assist the professor’s nefarious purposes? An epilogue, set amid the seeming security of Baker Street, adds further twists to this most intricate, most Heisenbergian of all the Sherlock Holmes novels. After all, nearly every element in the narrative is susceptible to multiple interpretations, so much so that reality itself comes to seem labile, any truth undecidable. Even more than in the other novel-length adventures, Conan Doyle actually avoids neat and tidy closure. Mysteries remain. The modern world has arrived.
Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote, “So elementary a form of fiction as the detective story hardly deserves the dignity of a preface.” But are the Holmes adventures so “elementary”? I’m writing this during the centennial year of The Valley of Fear. Over the past century and more, the Sherlock Holmes “canon” has received the kind of microscopic attention usually bestowed on the Bible, Shakespeare, and James Joyce. Every word has been studied, every angle explored, multiple interpretations expounded. There have been annotated editions, scholarly editions, and even manuscript editions of the stories; there are critical studies, journal articles, and Internet rants about Holmes; conferences and blogs are devoted to every aspect of his life and times.
I myself have contributed to this plenty. In 2002 I was invested into the Baker Street Irregulars and given the canonical name “Langdale Pike.” Pike is a journalist, a gossip columnist really, who appears in arguably the worst Sherlock Holmes story, “The Three Gables.” Since then I’ve written playful accounts of Pike’s various misadventures, a book about Arthur Conan Doyle, and presented numerous talks on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Still, most important of all, I’ve been privileged to share with many others—artists and scientists, businessmen and bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors, people of every age and from every walk of life—a common delight in the world of 221B Baker Street. After you read these four novels, and then go on to the short stories, you might want to be part of that world too.
In the end, though, it is worth remembering that Holmes’s adventures, while inviting endless annotation and exegesis, chiefly aim to provide, as Conan Doyle once said, “distraction from the worries of life.” So turn to A Study in Scarlet, let the introduction be made—“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes”—and settle back with a contented sigh. The game is afoot!
MICHAEL DIRDA
A Note on the Text
The texts of these novels have been drawn from the individual Penguin Classics editions. Interested readers should turn to the following 2001 Penguin Classics editions: A Study in Scarlet, with an introduction by Iain Sinclair and notes by Ed Glinert; The Hound of the Baskervilles, edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Frayling; and The Sign of Four, with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd and notes by Ed Glinert.
A STUDY IN SCARLET
CONTENTS
PART ONE
Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson MD, late of the Army Medical Department
1 Mr Sherlock Holmes
2 The Science of Deduction
3 The Lauriston Gardens Mystery
4 What John Rance Had to Tell
5 Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor
6 Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do
7 Light in the Darkness
PART TWO
The Country of the Saints
1 On the Great Alkali Plain
2 The Flower of Utah
3 John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet
4 A Flight for Life
5 The Avenging Angels
6 A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson MD
7 The Conclusion
PART ONE
Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson MD, late of the Army Medical Department
1
Mr Sherlock Holmes
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Ha
ving completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.
The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.
Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched accordingly in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.