Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  Then there is another improbability that makes the dog’s presence even more difficult to accept. Just after discovering the corpse, Holmes and Watson are joined by Stapleton, who has also heard the convict’s cries. If he has indeed trained the dog well enough to attack Selden on command, the animal would most likely be well enough trained to return to its master, which is not the case. Where has Stapleton hidden the animal?

  The possibility that the dog killed Selden is so remote that Holmes dissuades Watson from mentioning it. After recalling that there was no proof of attack by a dog in the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, he notes that the file is just as empty for Selden’s death:

  “We are not much better off tonight. Again, there was no direct connection between the hound and the man’s death. We never saw the hound. We heard it; but we could not prove that it was running upon this man’s trail. There is a complete absence of motive. No, my dear fellow;we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we have no case at present, and that it is worth our while to run any risk in order to establish one.”34

  And to Watson, who tries to reassure his friend that there is still a case to be made, Holmes replies, in a flash of lucidity:

  “Not a shadow of one—only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such a story and such evidence.”35

  Though the dog is probably innocent of the first two deaths, it is hard to argue for its innocence in the third attack, the one against Sir Henry Baskerville. For it is indeed a violent attack, even a lethal one; Watson witnesses the dog leap onto Sir Henry, throw him to the ground, and “worry at his throat.”36 This scene is indisputable; unlike the others, this time there are several witnesses.

  But if we make an effort to break free of the perspective of Watson, who shares the Holmesian fantasy of murderer-with-dog, things appear a little more complex. It is true that an enormous hound, shining with a terrible glow, rushes toward Henry and throws itself upon him. But as dreadful as this fiery beast seems, it shows no sign of aggression at first, seeming content to run across the moor. It is only after it has been wounded by Holmes and Watson that it is seized with madness:

  With long bounds the huge black creature was leaping down the track, following hard upon the footsteps of our friend. So paralyzed were we by the apparition that we allowed him to pass before we had recovered our nerve. Then Holmes and I both fired together, and the creature gave a hideous howl, which showed that one at least had hit him. He did not pause, however, but bounded onwards. Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down.37

  Although Watson can hardly be suspected of sympathizing with an animal he regards a priori as guilty, a careful examination of his account leaves little doubt about the order in which things occurred. The dog committed no actual violence before being hit by the bullets, and it’s only after being shot that it sprang onto Sir Henry.

  Although it’s impossible to be certain, we are compelled by fairness to say that the gunshots do not punish the attack but cause it, and that there is a reasonable doubt about whether the attack would have occurred in their absence. Can we reproach a dog hit by a bullet for being overcome with rage and rushing at one of the people it legitimately supposes to be its assailants?

  But there is something even more important than these doubts about the attack. An attentive rereading of Watson’s account shows how the fantasy of the murderer with the dog subtly influences the narration—and probably even the events themselves.

  Even before it appears, the dog is caught in the web of a tale that makes the most ordinary fact seem fantastical. This literary alchemy is particularly revealing in the scene in which Holmes,Watson, and Lestrade are keeping watch, waiting for Sir Henry to leave the house:

  “Hist!” cried Holmes, and I heard the sharp click of a cocking pistol. “Look out! It’s coming!”

  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.38

  Though they still haven’t seen anything, the three men are at the height of excitement (“we glared at [the fog],” “uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it”;Holmes’s face was “pale and exultant,” his eyes “shining brightly”). In this state of mind, steeped in a supernatural universe that colors or even determines their perceptions, anything that appears before them will naturally seem terrifying.

  In such a context it is not surprising that the dog seems to them like a monstrous creature:

  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 paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog.39

  The pressure of their terror is so great that the animal is transformed by Watson’s gaze into a kind of mythological creature risen from hell:

  A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. 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 which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.40

  If we make the effort (unlike Watson) to avoid perceiving the animal through the prism of fantastical literature and mythological references, we have no choice but to note that what Holmes and Watson see is just a large black dog covered with phosphorus, running on the moor; this indeed merits some explanation, but it should not lead us to imagine ourselves at the very gates of hell.

  This fantastic transformation of the world, carried to its greatest height in the final scene, is already at work in the narrative of the dog’s other two “attacks.” It appears even in the descriptions Dr. Mortimer gives during his first meeting in London with Holmes and Watson; he tells them not of a large, scary dog, but of “a creature upon the moor which corresponds with this Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. [Several people] all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral.” 41

  And although the dog, with good reason, does not appear directly during Selden’s death, Holmes and Watson manage to imagine its presence from a noise heard on the moor—though there is no sign that the dog is its source. From this mysterious noise they extrapolate a terrifying representation of the animal:

  Again the agonized cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it, a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea.

  “The hound!” cried Holmes. “Come,Watson, come! Great heavens, if we are too late!”42

  Watson’s great narrative weakness—the habit of borrowing clichés from fantastic literature and applying them to reality—whenever the dog is involved descends nearly to the level of caricature, but is present throughout his whole narrative.

  He is even more apt to give way to the temptation of the frankly supernatural; and though Holmes officially refuses to let himself be caught up by the legend of the Hound, he soon shows he is just as taken in by it. Of course he gives no credence to the theory that the dog is a spectral creature that has wandered through the centuries, but he does accept a more modern version of the legend, in which the dog is serving a criminal’s interests.

  It is striking to see the way that Holmes, at the very beginning of the investigation, summarizes the affair for Watson. Having procured
a large-scale map of Devonshire, he describes the place this way to his friend:

  “This small clump of buildings here is the hamlet of Grimpen, where our friend Dr. Mortimer has his headquarters. Within a radius of five miles there are, as you see, only a very few scattered dwellings. Here is Lafter Hall, which was mentioned in the narrative. There is a house indicated here which may be the residence of the naturalist—Stapleton, if I remember right, was his name. Here are two moorland farmhouses, High Tor and Foul-mire. Then fourteen miles away the great convict prison of Princetown. Between and around these scattered points extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then, is the stage upon which tragedy has been played, and upon which we may help to play it again.”43

  The description is factually objective, since it is based on a map, but we can see that several terms (“the desolate, lifeless moor”) already evince belief in a supernatural atmosphere conducive to somber tragedies and mysterious crimes.

  The same subtle transformation of reality by writing is at work in the first reconstruction that Holmes offers of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville:

  “Why should a man walk on tiptoe down the alley?”

  “What then?”

  “He was running, Watson—running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face.”

  “Running from what?”

  “There lies our problem. There are indications that the man was crazed with fear before ever he began to run.”44

  Here again, it is the choice of each word (he was “running desperately,” “crazed with fear”), and even the construction of the sentences (with the panting repetition of “running”)—or, if you like, the writing of the scene—that transposes the tale of Baskerville’s death into the domain of fantastic literature.

  What is set in place at the beginning of the investigation continues throughout the novel. Watson, making himself the deputy for Holmes’s vision, keeps perceiving the “facts” through the prism of their shared interpretation and transmitting his anxiety to the principal witness, Dr. Mortimer. The tone is struck in the first report to Holmes:

  My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.45

  Not only in his reports to Holmes but in the notes he keeps for himself, Watson lets himself be mastered by Holmes’s anxiety, as this extract from his diary reveals:

  October 16th. A dull and foggy day, with a drizzle of rain. The house is banked in with rolling clouds, which rise now and then to show the dreary curves of the moor, with thin, silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces. It is melancholy outside and in. The baronet is in a black reaction after the excitements of the night. I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever-present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.46

  When our heroic investigators have allowed themselves to be so caught up in this supernatural atmosphere that they are terrified themselves, it is not that the truth is difficult to grasp. To find the truth would involve liberating words themselves from the burden of the conventional ideas that keep them from coming close to recreating what’s real.

  Thus the representations of the evil hound and the fantasies it gives birth to in this book are only the first sign of a more general distortion in the narrative. Even as they try to defend themselves against it, our investigators are caught in the teeth of the genre of fantasy, forced to abandon common sense—even though it is their business to unravel lies and illusions.

  It is in fact impossible to disprove Holmes’s theory of a triple attack by the hound. We have no choice, however, but to think that the three scenes in which the dog appears—whether they have no surviving witness, as in the first two, or are observed by several people, as in the third—are so infiltrated by a stereotyped imagination that it becomes extremely difficult for the rational investigator to know what actually occurred out on the Devonshire moor.

  * At the end of the famous dream, Athalie sees her mother’s corpse torn apart by dogs: “But I could find nothing but a horrible mixture/ Of bones and bruised flesh dragged in the mud,/ Bloody strips of flesh and frightful limbs/ That starving dogs squabbled over” (Racine, Athalie, v. 503–506).

  * In the story by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, the cuckolded duke gives his wife’s lover’s heart to the dogs to eat, in front of his adulterous wife: “But the sight of such a love made the duke fiercely implacable. His dogs devoured Esteban’s heart in front of me. I fought over it with them; I struggled with those dogs. I could not tear it from them. They covered me with terrible bites, and dragged and wiped their bloody muzzles on my clothes” (Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques, Paris: Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 1981, p. 1037).

  IV

  Stapleton’s Defense

  ONCE THE GUILT of the hound of the Baskervilles has been called into question, we are free to ask ourselves what remains of the accusations made by Holmes against the prime suspect, Stapleton. Apart from all the improbabilities that make the animal’s participation in the murders scarcely credible, the culpability of the naturalist seems obvious at first—especially when he is regarded from Holmes’s point of view. But it grows drastically less so when we rigorously examine all the evidence in the case, when we try at all costs not to bend reality to fit the fixed idea that Stapleton is a murderer.

  Even if psychoanalysis allows us to justify the strangest behavior by finding its hidden motives, it is rather difficult for the reader to make what he knows of Stapleton’s personality coincide with that of a serial killer whose entire life is determined by the lust for money.

  The only real passion of this bland character, attested by everyone who knows him, is his passion for scientific research, especially entomology. At the end of the book we learn that he is a well-known authority on the subject, and that he has even given his name to “certain moth which he had, in his Yorkshire days, been the first to describe.”47

  Of course, the passion for entomology does not necessarily preclude a love of money. But it does seem that up to now Stapleton has not organized his existence according to financial interests. (He was, after all, the headmaster of a school.) It is strange that Holmes never wonders about the duality of a character whose motivation in life is supposedly split between scientific research and the yearning for affluence.

  Although it is true that one can be simultaneously a scholar passionate about one’s field and an unscrupulous criminal, Stapleton seems to show a certain absentmindedness in the performance of his crimes. Thus Holmes is the first to acknowledge that the scholar might not have known about the existence of an heir in Canada,* which is clearly the sign of a singular lack of curiosity; it seems safe to say that most motivated criminals, in similar circumstances, would have taken the trouble to make inquiries.

  Even if we leave aside the suspect’s personality, even if we suppose that Stapleton is guilty, the unfolding of the action itself allows quite a number of improbabilities to appear.

  The first scene with the dog again poses problems. Without reprising Holmes’s unlikely explanation for the animal’s abrupt halt, the very choice of this method of
doing away with Sir Charles Baskerville is hard to understand.

  In Holmes’s vision, Stapleton, wanting to inherit from Sir Charles and knowing about his weak heart, has quietly provided himself with an enormous hound, with the intention of provoking a heart attack in the owner of the Hall.

  It can’t be said that this would be an easy method for Stapleton to reach his ends. Even on a moor as deserted as the one in Devon, there is a strong risk that the dog will be spotted—as it is—or that Stapleton, at some point or other, will be seen with it. For someone who intends to promptly apply for the inheritance of a man he intends to murder, a minimum of discretion seems in order.

  But above all, the choice of a dog as the murder weapon is absurd. Whatever Baskerville’s physical state, whatever the shock of his encounter with a giant hound might be, the result of such an encounter is by no means certain. Baskerville might not have a heart attack. Or he might have one that isn’t fatal. He would then be called to testify. How would Stapleton, if he had been seen, justify his presence on the moor in the company of a giant dog coated with phosphorus?

  What’s more, if Baskerville is actually bitten by the dog, whether or not he dies, an investigation will be opened and the police will inevitably discover the animal’s trail, by questioning either the inhabitants of the moor or the keepers of the specialty shops in London, as Holmes does with some ease when he sets out to prove that Stapleton had bought a dog. In short, Stapleton has chosen an extremely complicated—not to mention risky—path to the intended result of getting rid of Sir Charles Baskerville.