Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  Reconstructing the way the letter was composed is child’s play for Holmes. Asking Watson to hand him the previous day’s Times, he finds all the words of the anonymous message in an article on free trade, except for the word “moor.” Familiar with the characteristics of type in most of the major newspapers, and thus able to identify an editorial in the Times, Holmes easily guesses the source.

  But he doesn’t stop there. He also determines, by observing the shape of the letters, that the message was cut with short-bladed scissors. What’s more, the fact that the pen spluttered twice in a single word and that the ink ran dry three times indicates to him that the letter was written in a hotel, a place where pens are of poor quality and inkwells are seldom filled.

  Receiving this anonymous letter is not the only peculiar thing that has happened to Henry Baskerville since he arrived in London. Urged by Holmes to tell him about even the most trifling incidents, he tells him that one of his shoes—he had put a pair of them outside his hotel room—disappeared during the night. Holmes at the time pays little attention to this.

  But the detective shows more interest the next day when Baskerville tells him that not only was his shoe not returned to him, but that another one, belonging to a more well-worn pair, is now nowhere to be found. A hotel employee, when summoned, is incapable of explaining this series of disappearances.

  This time Holmes seems much more concerned about Baskerville’s revelations:

  “Well, well, Mr. Holmes, you’ll excuse my troubling you about such a trifle—”

  “I think it’s well worth troubling about.”

  “Why, you look very serious over it.”

  “How do you explain it?”

  “I just don’t attempt to explain it. It seems the very maddest, queerest thing that ever happened to me.”

  “The queerest perhaps—” said Holmes thoughtfully.6

  Strange occurrences seem to accumulate during Henry Baskerville’s and Dr. Mortimer’s stay in London. Just after this interview, Holmes and Watson follow the two men out and notice that they are being followed by a hansom cab. They rush toward it, but its driver spurs the horse on. Although they are unable to catch up with the cab, the two investigators glimpse “a bushy black beard and a pair of piercing eyes”7 staring at them through its side window.

  Having taken down the number of the vehicle, Holmes summons the driver to his flat. The driver is unable to provide a precise description of his passenger; he can tell Holmes only that the man told him he was a detective and offered him two guineas to obey his orders without asking questions. The driver and the detective had followed Mortimer and Baskerville from the train station to Holmes’s flat before taking flight when they were spotted.

  At Waterloo Station, where he asked to be driven, the mysterious passenger paid the sum promised, then turned to the driver and said, “It might interest you to know that you have been driving Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”8 The actual Holmes, laughing, obtains a rough, disappointing description of his passenger from the driver:

  “And how would you describe Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”

  The cabman scratched his head. “Well, he wasn’t altogether such an easy gentleman to describe. I’d put him at forty years of age, and he was of a middle height, two or three inches shorter than you, sir. He was dressed like a toff, and he had a black beard, cut square at the end, and a pale face. I don’t know as I could say more than that.”

  “Colour of his eyes?”

  “No, I can’t say that.”

  “Nothing more that you can remember?”

  “No, sir; nothing.”9

  The anonymous letter, the disappearance of the shoe, and the shadowing by the bearded man, added to Dr. Mortimer’s revelations, have the effect of creating a disturbing atmosphere.

  About all these mysterious occurrences that accompany the arrival of the Baskerville heir, Holmes’s investigation produces no conclusions. Searches made through hotel registers fail to identify the author of the anonymous letter, and the shoe thief remains elusive.

  As for the strange bearded man, Holmes thinks for a while that it might be Barrymore, Sir Charles Baskerville’s servant. So he sends him an innocuous telegram—asking if everything is ready at Baskerville Hall for Henry’s arrival—and then sends a second telegram to the postmaster nearest to the Hall, requesting that the first message be hand-delivered to its recipient. Unfortunately, the telegram is delivered to Barry-more’s wife, foiling the detective’s stratagem.

  Research into the inheritance is no more fruitful. The fortune and the Hall are left to Henry, aside from a few sums bequeathed to people like the Barrymore couple and Dr. Mortimer, or to various individuals and public charities. The total value of the property Henry inherits is close to a million pounds. If he were to die, the legacy would revert to a distant cousin, an elderly clergyman. Dr. Mortimer had met the clergyman once at Sir Charles’s house. He got the impression of “a man of venerable appearance and of saintly life”10 who declined to accept any settlement when Sir Charles offered it to him: in short, a man who could scarcely be suspected of murdering for money. Henry, for his part, has not yet had the time to make a will.

  Undeterred by the threats hanging over him, Henry—now Sir Henry—Baskerville decides to go to the family manor. Holmes approves of his plan, but advises him against going there alone; further, he says, Dr. Mortimer will be too busy with his patients to provide sufficient company.

  Kept in London by his own clients and by a blackmail case, Holmes cannot accompany the new occupant of the Hall, but he suggests the services of Dr. Watson, who is instructed to keep the detective scrupulously abreast of all the developments in the investigation.

  II

  On the Moor

  SO DR. WATSON is charged with accompanying Sir Henry Baskerville and Dr. Mortimer to Devonshire; it is up to him to conduct the investigation, and to keep Holmes informed. He settles into the manor house of Sir Henry Baskerville, the man he is expected to protect.

  The region the three men enter is harrowing, with its bleak landscape, all peat and quagmire, the frequent fog, and the array of creatures—human and animal—that have chosen to live there. We learn that a particularly dangerous escaped convict lurks in the vicinity. What’s more, mysterious cries can at times be heard at night.

  During the period he is away from Holmes, Watson keeps him up to date about his discoveries by sending him regular letters, which go unanswered; the detective sends no news of his own in reply. Watson’s letters, which are shared with the reader and so become an integral part of the novel, allow the doctor to keep a link with his friend, who for a long time seems to be keeping his distance from the investigation.

  One of the first leads Watson follows is the servants at the Hall, the Barrymores, who make no secret of their intention to leave the district soon; they had been attached to their master, and now that he is dead, they have decided to go.

  Suspicion rests first of all on the husband. He is bearded, like the mysterious occupant of the hansom cab that followed Sir Henry Baskerville in London. The investigators, as we’ve seen, had tried to ascertain Barrymore’s presence at the Hall on the day Holmes learned about the shadowing, but were unable to find proof.*

  Watson has noticed that Barrymore and his wife are behaving oddly at night: one of them comes holding a lamp up to a window that looks out onto the moor. One night Watson and Henry keep watch on the window and see the servant making signals with the light, signals that are answered from the moor.

  Although Barrymore refuses to talk under the pretext that the secret is not his to divulge, Mrs. Barrymore finally explains that she is the sister of the convict Selden, who has escaped from prison and is living on the moor. The signals serve to arrange the meetings so they can take food to the escaped prisoner.

  Having wrested the Barrymores’ secret from them, Watson and Henry decide that very night to pursue the convict, and start out toward the place from which the signals had come. They find a lighted candle the
re and glimpse a silhouette running away, but don’t manage to catch him.

  Also of interest to Watson is a couple who live out on the moor, the Stapletons. Jack Stapleton is a naturalist who has settled in the region along with his sister, Beryl.

  During her first encounter with Watson, Beryl takes advantage of a moment when her brother is out of the room to rush over to Watson, whom she mistakes for Sir Henry, and beg him, for his own safety, to leave the moor and return to London. As soon as her brother returns, her attitude changes. A little later, alone once again with Watson, she apologizes for having confused him with Sir Henry and asks him to forget her words. Watson goes away with the impression that the young woman is living in terror.

  As the book progresses, an attachment forms between Sir Henry Baskerville and Beryl Stapleton. Henry confides to Watson that he has fallen in love with the young woman; he thinks this love is shared, and he plans to marry her.

  But Stapleton obviously disapproves of the relationship. Watson, who has discreetly followed Henry to protect him, sees the naturalist confront him violently one day as Henry is courting Stapleton’s sister. Baskerville later tells Watson that in the course of their brief conversation, Beryl seized the chance to put him on guard against the dangers of the moor and to beg him to go back to London.

  Two other people live on the moor, far apart from one another yet connected by family ties: a man named Frankland and his daughter, Laura Lyons. Frankland is a cantankerous old man who is given to suing his neighbors for the most trivial reasons. He is estranged from his daughter, who married an artist without his consent; the daughter and her husband are now separated, but Frankland still refuses to see her.

  Watson is struck by the girl’s name; he has learned from Barrymore that Sir Charles went to the yew alley on the night of his death after receiving a mysterious letter signed “L. L.,” burnt fragments of which Mrs. Barrymore found in the fireplace. The letter ended with these words: “Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o’clock.”11

  When he contrives to meet Laura Lyons, Watson asks her if she is indeed the author of the letter to Sir Charles; she denies this, but then admits that it’s true. She had needed his financial aid, she says, and made such a late appointment with him because she had learned that he was leaving the next day for London for several months. The choice of the place was explained by her fear of being seen alone in a house with an unmarried man.

  But in the end, the help Laura sought turned out to be unnecessary, so she did not keep the appointment, and is thus unable to explain Sir Charles’s death. During their visit, the young woman refuses to give Watson any more details about why the meeting became unnecessary.

  There is another riddle Watson must solve: the presence in the neighborhood of a mysterious individual. Watson glimpses him for the first time as he and Sir Henry are pursuing Selden over the moor. They catch a glimpse of a tall, lean silhouette on top of a rock, someone standing “with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him.”12 It can’t be the convict; he has fled in another direction.

  The presence of this man is confirmed by Barrymore, who hasn’t seen him directly but has heard talk of him from Selden. According to Selden, the mysterious individual is hiding but is not himself a convict. He gives the impression of belonging to the middle class, and lives in one of the old stone huts dotting the moor; a boy brings him provisions.

  Watson pays a visit to Frankland, who has the habit of observing the terrain around his hut with a telescope. Through him, Watson gets on the track of the boy, and even manages to catch a glimpse of him. He sets out after the boy and discovers the hut where the unknown man is living, although the man is not there. He has just settled down to wait for him when Holmes announces himself from outside: “ ‘It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson,’ said a well-known voice. ‘I really think that you will be more comfortable outside than in.’ ”13

  Holmes, who turns out to have been the mysterious unknown man, explains that he stayed in London not to investigate a matter of blackmail, as he had claimed, but to avoid the risk of alerting his adversaries that he was on their trail; that way he would be able to carry out his investigation undisturbed. He has read Watson’s reports with the greatest attention, but chose not to tell him of his presence for fear his friend would unwittingly reveal it.

  Holmes then details the first results of his investigation. He tells Watson that Stapleton has a mistress, Laura Lyons, and that Stapleton is the husband, not the brother, of Beryl. Investigating the naturalist’s past, Holmes has discovered that he had once run a school in the north of England, which he had driven to ruin and then had to flee.

  In Holmes’s eyes, then, it is Stapleton who is their enemy, the one responsible both for the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville and for following Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer to London:

  “It is murder,Watson—refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder. Do not ask me for particulars. My nets are closing upon him, even as his are upon Sir Henry, and with your help he is already almost at my mercy. There is but one danger which can threaten us. It is that he should strike before we are ready to do so.”14

  The detective doesn’t realize how truly he has spoken. No sooner are Holmes and Watson reunited than another tragedy occurs. As they are talking over the affair, the two men hear cries and barking in the distance. They rush to the place and discover the corpse of a man whom they identify from his clothes as Sir Henry Baskerville.

  Holmes is appalled by his own negligence and reproaches himself bitterly, before turning the body over and recognizing that it is actually the convict Selden. He is wearing clothes given him by his sister,Mrs. Barrymore, who had been given them by Sir Henry; hence the detective’s confusion.

  But according to Holmes this confusion might also have brought about Selden’s death. The detective explains: in his view, Selden died as he was being pursued by a dog belonging to Stapleton. Already the cause of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, the animal was sent after Sir Henry but was deceived by the scent of his castoff clothes. Although Holmes is convinced of Stapleton’s guilt, he realizes that the evidence is weak and that it will be difficult to charge him. When the naturalist is drawn by the commotion and joins them on the moor, Holmes is careful not to accuse him.

  Two facts come in to reinforce the detective’s theory, however. The first is the discovery, soon afterward, of a curious resemblance between Stapleton and a portrait of Hugo Baskerville that hangs in Baskerville Hall. Holmes is convinced that Stapleton is actually a Baskerville, and hence has the motive for murder: the naturalist wants to eliminate everyone who stands between him and the succession to title and estate.

  Holmes then interviews Laura Lyons, to whom he reveals, to the young woman’s stupefaction, that Stapleton is married. She then acknowledges that the letter asking Sir Charles Baskerville to go to the yew alley was dictated to her by Stapleton, and that Stapleton went to the meeting place in her stead. After Baskerville’s death, he asked her to keep silent.

  Despite all these convergent facts, Holmes is still unable to prove Stapleton’s guilt, and so he decides to lay a trap. He tells Stapleton that he and Watson are returning to London and suggests to Sir Henry that he accept an invitation to dine with the Stapletons, a dinner to which the heir will go alone.

  Holmes and Watson then take up their post near the Stapletons’ house. Through a thick fog, the two men witness Stapleton and Baskerville at table; Beryl is absent from the room. Then they see Stapleton head toward an outbuilding near the house from which mysterious noises emanate.

  When Sir Henry leaves the house, he is watched over from afar by the two men, tracking him through the fog. Suddenly they hear the sound of footsteps and see an enormous hound rushing toward them, its eyes glowing, its muzzle and hackles outlined in streaks of fire. Overcoming their fear, Holmes and Watson open fire on the anima
l. Wounded, the beast keeps running and hurls itself onto Sir Henry, seizing him by the neck. Holmes empties his revolver into the dog, and it topples over dead.

  Pursuing Stapleton, Holmes and Watson reach his house. The man is not there, but they hear sounds upstairs and discover, in a locked room, Beryl gagged and tied to a post, her body wrapped in towels and sheets. Freed, the young woman collapses. She says that Stapleton has probably fled into the marsh.

  The two men start off after him, but in the darkness and the mire, the search seems hopeless. Yet Holmes sees on a tussock of grass one of the shoes the naturalist had stolen from Baskerville. Later on they discover traces left by the dog on an island in the middle of the mire, where Stapleton kept it confined between his excursions.

  The final pages of the book allow Holmes to suggest a complete explanation of the tragedy to Watson. According to him, it was Stapleton who organized everything, with the passive complicity of his terrorized wife. Stapleton is the son of Rodger Baskerville, Sir Charles Baskerville’s younger brother, who died abroad and had been believed to be unmarried. The son lived in South America, where he married Beryl, one of the beauties of Costa Rica, and, after stealing some money, changed his name to Vandeleur. He then founded a school in the north of England, and, after it “sank from disrepute into infamy,”15 changed his name again to Stapleton. He then settled in Devonshire, where he indulged his taste for entomology, a field in which he had become an eminent authority.

  Stapleton discovered that only two lives stood between him and a considerable fortune. At the time he had formed no definite notion of how he might get hold of it, but, having settled near the home of his ancestors, he undertook to cultivate Sir Charles Baskerville’s friendship. Realizing that Sir Charles was terrified of the legend about the hound, he decided to use this fear to commit his first murder. He procured in London a giant hound that he hid in the mire as he waited for a favorable occasion. But before the right time presented itself, he learned that Sir Charles was on the point of leaving the Hall, so he convinced Laura Lyons to ask him for a meeting on the eve of his departure.