Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  Stapleton’s attitude after the supposed murder is just as incomprehensible. He acts as if he were motivated by an obsession to make himself noticed by Sherlock Holmes. Not only does he go to London—a journey that does not seem necessary if he is the murderer, since he just has to wait for his future victim to come to Baskerville Hall—but he does everything possible while there to attract the detective’s attention.

  He begins by shadowing the heir so clumsily that Holmes is able to see him. But he doesn’t stop there. Convinced that Holmes will end up identifying the hansom-cab driver, he asks the driver to convey his greetings to the detective. Surprising behavior, which Holmes tidily avoids explaining in his final account. Not of course that some criminals don’t take pleasure in boasting about their crimes, but Stapleton’s best interest obviously lies in not making himself noticed, since Sir Charles Baskerville is supposed to have died accidentally.

  Stapleton is scarcely more discreet when it comes to procuring a piece of Henry Baskerville’s clothing. While it would scarcely be difficult for someone familiar with the Hall to get hold of a piece of the new owner’s clothes once he’s settled into the premises, and while there are surely items of clothing less conspicuous than a shoe, Stapleton goes about things in such a way in London that he cannot fail to provoke the detective’s interest.

  The second murder attempt attributed to Stapleton also poses a problem. In Holmes’s reasoning, the first attack (by means of the dog) was aimed at provoking a heart attack. The same cannot be true for the second, which was directed at a healthy young man.

  It is Watson himself who points this out to Holmes at the end of the book, when Holmes has boasted of not leaving any essential point overlooked:

  “He could not hope to frighten Sir Henry to death as he had done the old uncle with his bogie hound.”48

  A sensible argument, which Holmes rebuts with these words:

  “The beast was savage and half-starved. If its appearance did not frighten its victim to death, at least it would paralyze the resistance which might be offered.”49

  If we grant (even in the absence of conclusive evidence) that the dog is aggressive, it makes attack-by-hound possibly acceptable as a technique for murder. But Holmes’s reply does not solve the problem of Stapleton’s choice of this technique. If a heart attack is unlikely in this case, a throat-rending is what he’s hoping for. Though this is certainly an effective way to get rid of the second Baskerville, it would also most likely prompt an investigation, and thus make it impossible to claim the inheritance.

  As we can see, the use of the same weapon—a menacing dog—to kill both Baskervilles poses a formidable problem of logic. The first murder would succeed only if the death appeared to be of an accidental heart attack. And if the second victim dies by having his throat bitten, there is every chance that the investigation of the first death would be reopened, nullifying the attempt to make it pass for an accident.

  Stapleton’s attitude when he is threatened with arrest is no clearer, and one element casts strong doubt on his guilt.

  Understanding that his murder attempt has failed, Staple-ton supposedly flees into the bogs, clutching the famous shoe that had let him lure the dog to the Baskervilles; sensibly, he has decided to get rid of this clue that has every chance of sending him to the gallows. Here comes what might be the most glaring improbability in Holmes’s “solution” in the entire novel.

  Let us put ourselves for a moment in Stapleton’s place and relive in our minds the situation in which he finds himself. He is running through the marshes, which stretch out as far as the eye can see. The reaction of any normal person, even in the full blush of panic, would be to get rid of the incriminating shoe by throwing it into the mire farthest from the path, where no one could recover it, or even see it.

  That is not at all Stapleton’s attitude; here again, his principal desire seems to be to help the police force. The shoe is found in a grassy spot by the side of the path, a place where it is visible to passersby—including Holmes, who does not fail to see it. The detective is jubilant at this new clue that points to Stapleton but is not surprised by the suspect’s obligingness.

  Stapleton’s entire behavior is odd from the beginning of the book. But the best is still to come. At the very end, Watson asks Holmes about the reasons that led Stapleton to commit two murders:

  “There only remains one difficulty. If Stapleton came into the succession, how could he explain the fact that he, the heir, had been living unannounced under another name so close to the property? How could he claim it without causing suspicion and inquiry?”50

  Faced with this sensible remark, Holmes keeps his composure:

  “It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it. The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”51

  This is an astonishing answer. It amounts to acknowledging, at the very moment the case is wrapped up and the story is ending, that in the absence of a clearly thought-out motive, it is hard to understand why Stapleton would have tried to kill both Baskervilles.

  Understanding that it is problematic to pin murders on someone who has no motive for them, Sherlock Holmes then discusses three hypotheses, although the multiplicity of solutions provide no reassurance from a logical point of view. First, he says, Stapleton could have claimed his inheritance from South America and enjoyed his fortune without appearing again in England. Second, he could have ed “an elaborate disguise” during the time he needed to appear in England. Finally, he could have sent an accomplice to claim the inheritance and had this accomplice send him an income.

  It is hard not to be surprised by these solutions, each one more far-fetched than the last. Unless we doubt the intelligence of the English police, none of those schemes has the slightest chance of working. How is it possible that after two suspicious deaths in close proximity the person who claims an immense fortune would not immediately become the object of an intense investigation? Or that a disguise would keep the claimant safe from suspicion?

  Seeming scarcely to believe in his own hypotheses, Holmes immediately brings the debate to a close by suggesting, in the last lines of the book, that he and Watson go see a performance of Les Huguenots:

  “We cannot doubt, from what we know of him, that he would have found some way out of the difficulty. And now, my dear Watson, we have had some weeks of severe work, and for one evening, I think, we may turn our thoughts into more pleasant channels. I have a box for Les Huguenots. Have you heard the De Reszkes? Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini’s for a little dinner on the way?”52

  Unlike Holmes, I find it difficult to imagine how after the second death of a Baskerville—the second occurring in circumstances that cast suspicion on the first—the police wouldn’t have said to themselves that people seem to die frequently in this family, and wouldn’t have found it curious that the inheritance was subsequently claimed by a neighbor of Baskerville Hall.

  To be fair, none of this proves Stapleton definitely innocent, and he wouldn’t be the first murderer to make a number of mistakes while unconsciously trying to get himself hanged. But such a succession of blunders poses some unresolved questions—questions that remain unresolved when Holmes, carried away by his own intelligence, utterly ignores them in his final explanation.

  Above all, it leads us to wonder: Is Stapleton, this clumsy figure of a murderer who occupies our attention from his first appearance, shouldering a crime too great for him? Is he hiding, without knowing it himself, one of the most diabolical murderers in the history of literature, the one lurking in the text for more than a century?

  * “It is possible that Stapleton did not know of the existence of an heir in Canada.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 895.)

  Fantasy

  I

  Does Sherlock Holmes Exist?

  THERE IS A TWOFOLD mystery in Th
e Hound of the Baskervilles, then. The first concerns the identity of the murderer; the second has to do with the circumstances around the book’s creation and the reasons why Conan Doyle allowed so many improbabilities to exist within it. In my opinion, we have to clear up this second mystery before we have any chance of solving the first.

  In order to grasp what is at play deep down in this book, that which has escaped the all-too-rational critics, we must try to understand the tormented relationships Conan Doyle shared with his characters—especially his greatest character, Sherlock Holmes. These relationships were tinged with madness, and, in the case of this novel, ended up influencing the plot to the point of making it indecipherable to the writer himself. It is as if, having lost control of his own work, Conan Doyle hid his own confusion behind that of his characters.

  We should not underestimate the bonds that can form between a creator and his characters, bonds whose fierceness makes us wonder to what extent these characters might possess a form of existence like our own. This question about the independent lives of literary characters is all the more acute for Sherlock Holmes; in fact, the celebrated Holmes is the best example we can point to of the difficulties, and at times dramatic consequences, inherent in separating real people from fictional beings.

  This tricky distinction is not the product of current criticism; rather, it is an idea readers have struggled with since ancient times. In his book Fictional Worlds,53 Thomas Pavel retraced the history of the schools of thought that, since antiquity, have reflected on the separations between the world of reality from the world of fiction, and on the intersections that might exist between them.*

  Commenting on an excerpt from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Pavel notes that although the reader knows perfectly well that Mr. Pickwick does not exist, he is still caught, while reading the passages devoted to him, with an irrepressible feeling of reality:

  The reader [ . . . ] experiences two contradictory intuitions: on the one hand he knows well that unlike the sun, whose actual existence is beyond doubt, Mr. Pick-wick and most of the human beings and states of affairs described in the novel do not and never did exist outside its pages. On the other hand, once Mr. Pickwick’s fictionality is acknowledged, happenings inside the novel are vividly felt as possessing some sort of reality of their own, and the reader can fully sympathize with the adventures and reflections of the characters.54

  All of us who try to define the status of fictional characters are confronted with this feeling of reality—which is also, in many respects, a feeling of unsettling strangeness. But the attempt to define a character’s status is indeed the heart of the problem. These characters do not precisely inhabit our world, but they unquestionably occupy a certain place in it, which is not so easy to define.

  In a book devoted to listing a full range of the possible theoretical stances, it is interesting that the character of Sherlock Holmes plays a large role; Pavel cites various authors who use the example of Holmes to question the degree of validity of statements concerning fictional beings. Thus Pavel quotes Saul Kripke stating that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, but noting that “in other states of affairs he would have existed.”55 Less hospitable, Robert Howell notes that if the character of Sherlock Holmes is made to achieve the geometric impossibility of drawing a square circle, his world stops being a possible world.56 And Pavel postulates that “there are worlds where Sherlock Holmes, while behaving as he does in Conan Doyle’s stories, is a secret but compulsive admirer of women.”57

  Other characters might occupy the same symbolic function: the names Hamlet and Anna Karenina turn up many times in Pavel’s work. But Holmes has become so famous that he takes on a special form of existence, one that blurs the boundaries between literature and fact. Sherlock Holmes seemed such a part of reality that when Conan Doyle tried to make his creation disappear, there arose among his readers a collective sense of trauma. Conan Doyle did not realize that for some readers the character was decidedly not a matter of fiction—that his elimination amounted to an actual murder.

  On this question of the boundaries between the real world and the fictional world there are essentially two contradictory positions, with a number of intermediate positions between them. At one pole are those Thomas Pavel describes as “segregationists”:

  Some theoreticians promote a segregationist view of these relations, characterizing the content of fictional texts as pure imagination without truth value.58

  In the opinion of the segregationists, a watertight barrier exists between these two worlds, thereby limiting the freedoms of fictional characters. For hard-line segregationists, statements concerning fictional characters must necessarily be void; they can carry no inkling of truth, since the things that they speak of do not exist.

  Pavel shows how segregationism has evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century and has become progressively more fluid, even though it remains fundamentally intolerant toward the creations of the writerly imagination. According to classic segregationists like Bertrand Russell, “there is no universe of discourse outside the real world. Existence [. . .] can be ascribed only to objects of the actual world.”59 But Russell is not content merely to question their right to existence; he also means to deny the possibility of truth in any statement made about them.60

  Some more broad-minded segregationists take each sort of potential argument into separate consideration. For example, a sentence like “The present king of France is wise” may either be subjected to true/false evaluation or simply rejected outright as absurd, depending on the circumstances under which it is uttered—particularly given the current political system in France.61 But segregationists are much more prudent in determining the truth of statements about beings like Sherlock Holmes, who exist only in the realm of fiction.

  By agreeing, however, that it is not possible to evaluate the truth of a statement without inquiring into the conditions in which it was made, segregationists open a breach. And through that breach scurries a brigade of theoreticians who are both more relativist in their view of the truth and more hospitable to alternate worlds and the creatures who inhabit them.

  Other critics are less closed to fictional worlds; for them, Pavel offers the term “integrationist”:

  [T]heir opponents adopt a tolerant, integrationist outlook, claiming that no genuine ontological difference can be found between fictional and nonfictional descriptions of the actual world.62

  The “integrationists,” who likewise form a group made up of varied sensibilities, are ready to recognize a certain form of existence both in fictional characters (they “assume that Mr. Pickwick enjoys an existence barely less substantial than the sun or England in 1827”63) and in the potential truth of statements made about them; they do not regard such things as inherently absurd speculations.

  On the other hand, for the same reason that integrationists grant fictional texts a status comparable to nonfiction, they tend to deny the latter its privileged place with regard to truth. Believing every statement obeys conventions, they are inclined to undercut the distinction between fiction and the other types of discourse.64

  Pavel seems to have placed himself in this more tolerant group when he notes (following the example of John R. Searle especially) that the fictional quality of a text can be changed according to the circumstances, and that “fictional texts enjoy a certain discursive unity: for their readers, the worlds they describe are not necessarily fractured along a fictive/actual line,.65 He means that fiction is only one particular form of the play of language, and a given text may seem fictional or actual depending on the context in which we encounter it. The same is true for oral performances. Pavel takes the example of a theatrical scene wherein an actor mimics the gestures of a priest and pretends to bless the audience. There is nothing effective about this blessing in most contexts, but it can become effective in certain circumstance: imagine, for example, a dictatorship in which religion is banned and in which a theater audience, having kept the old faith, exp
eriences the actor’s gesture as authentic, transforming this fictional scene into a scene of real life.66

  For partisans of integration of fictional characters, there’s no point in fortifying the borders between worlds, and denying these characters their existence. On the contrary: in a society that is increasingly inclusive of formerly sidelined groups, it seems preferable to also recognize fictional persons’ innate legitimacy, and to admit that they form part of our world, which implies, as it does for all its inhabitants, a certain number of duties, but also of rights.

  The difficulty in taking a stance on these debates, which can reach a high degree of philosophical or linguistic complexity, stems from the fact that the various authors, resorting to ideas as vague as “reality” or “truth,” do not always sound as if they’re talking about the same thing.

  In my opinion, however, there are two major arguments in favor of the theory of the integrationists and their tolerance toward fictional characters. The first is of a linguistic order. It comes down to noting that language does not allow us to make a separation between real beings and imaginary characters, and so the integration of characters is inevitable, whether one has an open mind or not.