Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  After painting his dog with phosphorus, he took it to the meeting place and stood near the wicket-gate giving onto the moor. The hound, incited by its master, leapt over the fence and rushed at Sir Charles:

  In that gloomy tunnel it must indeed have been a dreadful sight to see that huge black creature, with its flaming jaws and blazing eyes, bounding after its victim. He fell dead at the end of the alley from heart disease and terror. The hound had kept upon the grassy border while the baronet had run down the path, so that no track but the man’s was visible. On seeing him lying still the creature had probably approached to sniff at him, but finding him dead had turned away again. It was then that it left the print which was actually observed by Dr. Mortimer. The hound was called off and hurried away to its lair in the Grimpen Mire.16

  Stapleton then turns his attention to the second person who stands in his path to fortune: Henry Baskerville. Accompanied by his wife, he sets out to keep watch on him as soon as he arrives in London. Stapleton locks Beryl into a hotel room, and disguises himself with a fake beard as he shadows Dr. Mortimer. The vital thing for him is to procure some piece of clothing belonging to Henry. Stapleton’s wife, terrified, doesn’t dare write directly to Henry; instead she resorts to an anonymous letter in hopes of putting him on his guard.

  With the help of the shoe stolen in the hotel, Stapleton can carry out the second murder by putting the hound onto the scent of the new heir. This time it will be less a matter of provoking a heart attack than of weakening him psychologically, to put him at the monster’s mercy. The death of the second Baskerville would open his way to the fortune.

  With the double disappearance of the animal and its master, the riddle of the Hound of the Baskervilles is resolved, at least in Holmes’s mind, and the detective, triumphant and completely free of doubt, can declare the mystery solved and the case closed.

  * After arriving in Devonshire, Watson tries without success to find out if the telegram was hand-delivered to Barrymore.

  III

  The Holmes Method

  THE METHOD USED by Sherlock Holmes in the four novels and fifty-six stories Conan Doyle devoted to him is the primary reason that these texts have become famous. But not only that: The method itself had such success that it is often referred to, well beyond the realm of literature, as a model of intelligence and rigorous thinking.

  Even though Holmes appears only rarely in The Hound of the Baskervilles, his method pervades the book: it is this that allows him to arrive at the truth, or to what he regards as the truth. Thus it is fitting to point out a few of the method’s guiding principles before looking into the way it is applied in Conan Doyle’s masterpiece. Then we can form our own conclusions.

  Holmes’s method is revealed, in both theory and practice, in the detective’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, which provides a kind of working outline for all the other texts to come.

  It is during this investigation that Watson meets Holmes. The doctor is looking for someone with whom to share the rent on a London flat; having heard of a scientist with a similar wish, he presents himself at his flat, accompanied by a mutual friend:

  “Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

  “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit.

  “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

  “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.17

  Watson will have to live with Holmes for several weeks before the detective explains the analytic method that allowed him to guess at his sojourn in Afghanistan:

  “You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”

  “You were told, no doubt.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”18

  Although this is far from the most interesting of Holmes’s analyses, even in A Study in Scarlet, the first of the detective’s deductions—or more precisely the first to appear in print—does include in miniature all the elements of his method. And it is all the more interesting because it is accompanied by an explanation of this method by Holmes himself.

  Holmes had explained his method only after Watson, having read an article in a magazine lying on their table, reproached the author of the article for being “some arm-chair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his own study,”19 but whose ideas are impractical—someone who, locked up in a subway compartment in the Underground, would be unable to guess the professions of his traveling companions:

  “I would lay a thousand to one against him.”

  “You would lose your money,” Sherlock Holmes remarked calmly. “As for the article I wrote it myself.”

  “You!”

  “Yes, I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”20

  Observation and deduction: revealed for the first time here but repeated throughout all the stories, these are the two keys to Holmes’s method, the ones that allow him to carry out his investigations successfully. We must study each of these two operations attentively if we want to form a correct idea of the method created by Sherlock Holmes, and to evaluate its validity.

  Let us begin, then, with observation—which is to say, searching for clues. Clues can take many different forms, but they can be sorted into two main categories: material elements and psychological behavior.

  The category of material elements is undoubtedly the one that has most contributed to making Holmes’s method known. It is this material search that has popularized the image of a detective, magnifying glass in hand, in search of minute clues that let him reconstruct a whole chain of disparate facts. These elements may be divided into several types, many of which are present in one form or another in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  A first type is what we could call the identifying sign: the various physical elements that allow us to recognize an individual. It is resorted to twice in the novel. During the London episode, it is this sort of sign that Holmes uses to try to identify the man who has been shadowing Baskerville. Further, it is the physical similarity between Stapleton and Hugo Baskerville that, at the end of the novel, provides the detective with the missing element he needs to arrive at the truth.

  A second type of clue, one of the best-known, is the print, or the trace left directly by the body of the criminal. A particularly common trace is the footprint, human or animal. Both of these types of prints can be found in The Hound of the Baskervilles (left by the hound and by Sir Charles Baskerville) and in fact play a determining role in the case; it is by deciphering these prints that Holmes is able to analyze Sir Charles’s death.

  A third type of clue is the indirect trace left by the criminal. One of them is tobacco, on which the detective, the author of a monograph on the subject, is an expert. His interpretation of the cigar ash allows him to feel certain that Sir Charles, just before his death, stood for some while in front of the wicket-gate giving onto the m
oor. In a more anecdotal way, a cigarette stub allows Holmes, when he comes back to his moorland hiding place, to guess that his visitor is Watson.*

  A fourth kind of clue is the written document. This type comes in at two essential points in the investigation. In the beginning of the book, the examination of the anonymous letter urging Henry Baskerville not to go to the moor allows Holmes to affirm that it was written in a hotel using a Times editorial. At the end of the book, the study of the fragment of a letter written by Laura Lyons leads the investigators to guess that this letter was intended to lure Sir Charles Baskerville into a trap.

  A fifth type of clue concerns objects. For Holmes, objects have their own life and thus are capable of giving valuable information about their owner; they have the same value as written documents. This “reading” of objects is present in The Hound of the Baskervilles, even though it is used only for anecdotal purposes. The study of the cane left by Dr. Mortimer in Holmes’s flat at the beginning of the story helps the detective and his friend form a precise picture of its owner and of the circumstances in which the object was presented to him. What’s more, the examination of Watson’s clothes, in the same opening scene, allows Holmes to guess that he spent the day at his club.

  But observation of clues is not restricted to the study of material elements. It also concerns psychological behavior, which according to Holmes can be reconstructed with as much precision as actions that produced material clues. Just as matter itself is legible, the way individuals behave also constitutes a source of instruction, whether or not the detective was actually there to observe that behavior.

  This study of behavior is alluded to in the scientific monograph, written by Holmes, that forms the occasion for his conversation with Watson in A Study in Scarlet: “The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.”21

  Psychology here should be taken in its broader sense; it is not just mental operations that are in question, but the totality of ways in which living beings react and express themselves without realizing it. Thus in the scene in which Holmes meets Watson, it is Watson’s general demeanor that allows Holmes, at one glance, to guess that he is by profession an army doctor.

  This second series of clues is just as important as the first in the solution that Holmes proposes at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles. At the outset of his investigation, he pays attention to the behavior of the murdered Sir Charles Baskerville, and especially to the fact that he decided to wait in front of the gate giving onto the moor, then began walking on tiptoe as he moved away from his house. In this instance, the material clue is reinforced by a psychological clue.

  Attention to human behavior also drives the accusations Holmes will make against Stapleton, whose psychological reactions he carefully studies. In the middle of the story, the naturalist fails to show disappointment when he discovers that the man fallen on the moor was not Sir Henry Baskerville, but the convict Selden. This is Holmes’s comment:

  “What a nerve the fellow has! How he pulled himself together in the face of what must have been a paralyzing shock when he found that the wrong man had fallen a victim to his plot.”22

  Note that this second category of clues can be applied not just to human beings but also to animals. This sort, although rarer* in Conan Doyle’s work than the human variety, is central to The Hound of the Baskervilles. Its protagonist—and perhaps the murderer—is an animal, and the hypotheses Holmes forms about the animal’s behavior during Sir Charles Baskerville’s death are decisive in his solution of the mystery. So it is not only human psychology but also animal psychology that should interest us here.

  The other operation included in Holmes’s method, as presented by the detective himself, is deduction. As much as observation and the search for clues, deduction is inextricably linked with the legend of Holmes.

  A bit of study shows that deduction is in fact a complex mechanism, which should be divided into at least two distinct operations. These two are usually successive, though sometimes simultaneous.

  First, deduction is made possible not only by the examination of clues but by a preliminary knowledge the detective has that makes the clues decipherable. The solutions in Holmes’s cases are funded by a vast treasury of knowledge he has little by little amassed, specialized knowledge of the sort that might inspire a serious detective to write monographs—on tobacco ash, for instance, or on the tire tracks left by vehicles.

  This first stage of deduction might also be called comparison. It is not entirely separate from the act of observation; clues observed are meaningless if not read correctly. Holmes reads his clues by comparing them to a collection of similar signs, about which he has accumulated a great amount of information.

  Many passages in the text reveal the comparative manner in which the reading of clues functions for Holmes. Taking the anonymous letter Henry Baskerville receives at the beginning of the book, Holmes is soon able to demonstrate that it was written using individual printed words cut from an article in the Times. The conversation at this point between Holmes and Dr. Mortimer, who is impressed by the detective’s results, reveals the place of comparison in his method:

  “Really, Mr. Holmes, this exceeds anything which I could have imagined,” said Dr. Mortimer, gazing at my friend in amazement. “I could understand anyone saying that the words were from a newspaper; but that you should name which, and add that it came from the leading article, is really one of the most remarkable things which I have ever known. How did you do it?”

  “I presume,Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from that of an Esquimau?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “But how?”

  “Because that is my special hobby. The differences are obvious. The supra-orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve, the—”

  “But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening half-penny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimau. The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News. But a Times leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else.”23

  Comparison, then, is at the heart of the clue’s interpretation, since it helps give it meaning by bringing it closer to similar clues, and separating it from those dissimilar from it. In this way, there is a plurality of signs to be mobilized in every interpretation of clues, and not, as one might think, one isolated sign.

  If all deduction rests on knowledge and includes a share of comparison—allowing one to compare a given clue to other clues—it also involves another operation, aimed this time at understanding how the clue came into being, reconstructing its evolution. This second operation, which could also be called analysis, is described to Watson by Holmes in A Study in Scarlet as “reasoning backwards”:

  “In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

  “I confess,” said I, “that I do not quite follow you.”

  “I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.
”24

  As in all of Holmes’s investigations, reasoning backward is omnipresent in The Hound of the Baskervilles; it occurs during the reading of each clue. It is reasoning backward that allows Holmes to guess, for example, that the footprints left on the yew alley changed shape because Sir Charles Baskerville had started running.

  But beyond the isolated interpretation of each clue, reasoning backward is integral to Holmes’s larger attempts to suggest an overall version of what happened. It is the association of the tanned face, the wounded left arm, and the military appearance of a physician that leads Holmes to conclude that Watson has returned from Afghanistan. Similarly, it is the association of a whole series of clues (Dr. Mortimer’s testimony about a dog’s footprints, Selden’s death, Laura Lyons’s testimony, Stapleton’s resemblance to the Baskervilles, Beryl Stapleton’s testimony, and so on) that leads Holmes to his final hypothesis.

  Thus, reasoning backward, closely linked with comparison, is the final, essential step in interpreting clues. Whereas comparison opens up an initial, very general reading of the clue, reasoning backward refines this suggestion by reviewing the particular way it was formed, thus yielding its true meaning.