Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  Although the idea that it could be the criminal doesn’t yet occur to Watson, the way Holmes is described (“the very spirit of that terrible place”) links him with the evil forces he is in the process of fighting.

  This suspicion directed at the person who will henceforth be called “the man upon the tor” is intensified in the second passage, where Watson mentions the existence of the unknown man and advances the theory that he must be the same mysterious character who was shadowing Henry Baskerville in London:

  A stranger then is still dogging us, just as a stranger had dogged us in London. We have never shaken him off. If I could lay my hands upon that man, then at last we might find ourselves at the end of all our difficulties. To this one purpose I must now devote all my energies.86

  The linkage between Holmes and the forces of evil is restated in other terms by Watson in a later scene. Here, having reached the abandoned hut in which the man on the tor hides out, he discovers a note with these words: “Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.”

  For a minute I stood there with the paper in my hands thinking out the meaning of this curt message. It was I, then, and not Sir Henry, who was being dogged by this secret man. He had not followed me himself, but he had set an agent—the boy, perhaps—upon my track, and this was his report. Possibly I had taken no step since I had been upon the moor which had not been observed and repeated. Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realized that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.87

  In short, even though the ambiguity is removed by the discovery of the unknown man’s true identity,Watson’s perplexity causes the detective to be serially associated with a whole set of pejorative characterizations. These, we can suppose, unconsciously express the writer’s innermost feelings.

  Holmes’s arrival in the hut obviously brings an end to Watson’s questions about the occupant’s intentions (“Was he our malignant enemy, or was he by chance our guardian angel?”88), but it is not enough to completely dissipate the aura of evil clinging to the detective.

  This will appear in another form with the confusion, not this time of the detective with the murderer, but of the detective with the hound. Curiously, the text several times suggests that though the detective and the hound are supposed to be adversaries, they in fact resemble each other in various ways.

  The comparison between a detective-story sleuth and a hound predates Conan Doyle’s work. It is suggested in the books of one of the writers who inspired him, Émile Gaboriau. This comparison does not aim to diminish or caricature the detective, but rests on a network of implicit metaphors for tracking and hunting, metaphors that tend to liken the policeman’s activity to that of a bloodhound.

  It also stems, more simply, from the nature of the clues being sought, both in Gaboriau and in Conan Doyle. To find the subtle or minute clue, it is often necessary for the detective to bend or crouch down. Clues can also be of an olfactory order. Gathering them, the detective must assume physical postures in which he is liable to resemble a dog.

  This comparison of the detective with a hound is repeated throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories. It appears as early as A Study in Scarlet, the first of the detective’s adventures penned by Watson, who discovers his character and paints his first portrait:

  As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.* 89

  In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” commenting on a change in his friend’s physiognomy, Watson notes:

  His eager face still wore that expression of intense and high-strung energy, which showed me that some novel and suggestive circumstance had opened up a stimulating line of thought. See the foxhound with hanging ears and drooping tail as it lolls about the kennels, and compare it with the same hound as, with gleaming eyes and straining muscles, it runs upon a breast-high scent—such was the change in Holmes since the morning. He was a different man from the limp and lounging figure in the mouse-coloured dressing-gown who had prowled so restlessly only a few hours before round the fog-girt room.90

  Though not always so elaborate, the comparison of Holmes with a hound is frequent. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” Watson describes Holmes sitting up in his chair “like an old hound who hears the view-halloo.”91 A few pages later, the comparison is stressed:

  One realized the red-hot energy which underlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior when one saw the sudden change which came over him from the moment that he entered the fatal apartment. In an instant he was tense and alert, his eyes shining, his face set, his limbs quivering with eager activity. He was out on the lawn, in through the window, round the room, and up into the bedroom, for all the world like a dashing foxhound drawing a cover.92

  Long before Conan Doyle wrote the famous story with the hound at its center, he installed in his detective secret affinities with this animal. These old ambivalences of the writer toward his creation will take on their full importance in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  In the book, the comparison of Holmes with the hound appears in their first confrontation, at the exact instant the hound rises up out of the night to rush at Sir Henry:

  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 gleamed like a wolf’s. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement.* 93

  This comparison of the detective to a wolf is even more striking if we note that the hound, in the same scene, is conversely described on the model of the detective:

  With long bounds the huge black creature was leaping down the track, following hard upon the footsteps of our friend.† 94

  This resemblance between the two antithetical figures of the book, Holmes and the hound, is accentuated all the more since the hound is associated with light. After killing him, Holmes and Watson realize he has been smeared with phosphorus, the source of his terrifying, luminous aspect. Light is explicitly associated with Holmes in the beginning of the book, when he reproaches Watson for being a simple conductor of light, and not, unlike himself, truly luminous.

  That Holmes has a wolf’s eyes and that the hound evokes the pursuing detective shows the blurring of identities in this final scene, and marks how significant the fantasy of executing Holmes remains in Conan Doyle’s imagination, infiltrating even the climax of the book.

  Additional proof of this may be found in the strange resemblance between the name Baskerville and the name of the famous street where Holmes lives: Baker Street. Note the similarity between the two place names, as if Conan Doyle had unconsciously wanted, in the title of the book, to describe Holmes as the Hound of Baker Street.

  These points of resemblance do not amount to accusing Holmes of the murder; they merely serve to call attention to the profound ambivalence of the writer toward his creation and the effects of that ambivalence on the plot. The attempts to symbolically murder the detective influence how the other murder in The Hound of the Baskervilles—the one that succeeds—is to be interpreted.

  Conan Doyle, victim of the Holmes complex, seems doubly mastered by his fictional creations. The
hatred he feels for his character has two consequences. First, it has the result of focusing the writer’s attention on the hound. (Although, as we’ve seen, its responsibility for the murder is doubtful, to say the least.) This fixation stems from his own mental displacement from the abhorred detective to the animal.

  What’s more, the weakening of the character of Holmes throughout the book, as his dynamism is exhausted in the struggle with his creator, has the result of assigning the greatest autonomy to the evil creature who organizes the events in The Hound of the Baskervilles and strikes without the slightest scruple to achieve his ends.

  Absorbed by his rivalry with Holmes, continually wounding him without knowing it, Conan Doyle does not realize that Holmes lacks the strength to carry out the investigation effectively and stand up to the murderous will of another character. Devoured by his hatred for his creation, he ignores the second story that the book tells, just as the reader does. With both writer and reader distracted, the field is left free for the criminal activities of a golem more discreet, but much more terrifying, than his detective.

  * A resurrection, what’s more, that’s partial—as if Conan Doyle, here again, couldn’t make up his mind about it—since the events in The Hound of the Baskervilles are supposed to have taken place before Holmes’s death, and the story to have been found after the fact. The real resurrection will take place in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” published in 1903.

  * In the same foundational text, Holmes compares himself to a dog: “I am one of the hounds” (A Study in Scarlet, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, op. cit., p. 27).

  * Emphasis added. Conan Doyle’s actual text has “his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight”; Bayard is working from a French translation which renders this as “his eyes gleamed like a wolf’s.”—Trans.

  † Here again, the likeness between hound and detective is clearer in the French, which renders “following hard upon the footsteps of our friend” as le nez sur la piste des pas de notre ami, or, “its nose on the track of our friend’s footsteps.”—Trans.

  Reality

  I

  Murder by Literature

  THERE ARE TWO WAYS to solve the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The first is to find an entirely different point of view from which to read the story—a wholesale reinterpretation in which all the events take on a different meaning the moment we stop observing them with the gaze imposed by the unknown murderer. But this sort of shift is difficult to make; experience shows that it is possible to reread the same text for years before being able to glimpse it from the correct angle.

  The second way is to proceed logically through the story, starting from the opening scene of the murder with all its improbabilities. To reach a solution by this technique, we have only to apply Holmes’s own method but with more rigor, and connect the deductions with one another. If we are diligent and resist the distractions of sensationalism, we will see that all the clues inevitably converge upon one single person.

  Let us return, then, to the scene of the initial murder. The crime described here, with its striking echoes of the 1742 document retelling the legend of the hound, will be the very driving force of Holmes’s investigation. It poses a simple problem—a problem that has an equally simple solution, but will nonetheless unleash a chain of remarkable consequences.

  The problem, as we’ve seen, is that of the contradictory actions of the hound, which both hurls itself toward Sir Charles Baskerville and also halts its charge. Faced with this confusing movement, Holmes abandons common sense and elaborates a sophistic theory: the animal doesn’t like corpses and, having instantaneously grasped that his potential meal has had a fatal heart attack, decides to turn back.

  The fact that generations of readers, even Holmes specialists, have been able to accept this interpretation without batting an eyelash can only leave us baffled at the extent of human credulity. At the very least, it demonstrates the narrative power of the murderer, who manages to weave the most commonplace facts into a legend that both investigators and readers cling to, even as it defies all probability.

  This is all the more surprising since the scene poses hardly any problems of interpretation, especially for those familiar with dogs. If Stapleton’s dog at first runs toward Baskerville and then stops short, it is because it has run away from its master, who then calls it back. This simple explanation is the only one that accounts for the series of clues left at the crime scene—the interrupted prints first among them—provided, of course, we allow ourselves to see the reality of the scene, rather than insisting on turning it into a fantasy.

  This first deduction leads immediately to another, which may be disappointing to the imagination but cannot be discarded: the logical conclusion of this reading of the scene of the crime is that there was no murder, just an accident.

  This is, in fact, the conclusion already reached by the police, which Holmes questions based on Dr. Mortimer’s testimony. But that testimony tends to support the accident theory by providing the missing evidence—the cause for the heart attack, which until then had been unexplained:

  No signs of violence were to be discovered upon Sir Charles’s person, and though the doctor’s evidence pointed to an almost incredible facial distortion—so great that Dr. Mortimer refused at first to believe that it was indeed his friend and patient who lay before him—it was explained that that is a symptom which is not unusual in cases of dyspnoea and death from cardiac exhaustion. This explanation was borne out by the post-mortem examination, which showed long-standing organic disease, and the coroner’s jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence. 95

  Starting from the new clues the doctor brings him—the traces left by a giant hound—Holmes makes the mistake of immediately skewing the interpretation of facts toward murder. He has thus created a drama from elements that lead more naturally to the rather dull hypothesis of an accident provoked by a terrifying spectacle. The strange distortion of Baskerville’s face is plausibly explained in the doctor’s testimony as the effect of the appearance of a terrifying dog; there is, however, nothing to suggest that this appearance was deliberate.

  There is a third option, an alternative to the police solution—Baskerville was the victim of a sudden and unmotivated heart attack—and Holmes’s solution, by which the victim died after an attack by a hound, arranged with criminal intent. In this third hypothesis, the hound did indeed begin to attack—the prints attest to it—but as the interruption of the tracks shows, it did not carry the attack to its completion and thus was not involved in a criminal act.

  If we follow this path, we must suppose that Stapleton himself went to the meeting with Sir Charles Baskerville, to ask him to help his mistress. As he always did when walking at night, he took along his dog. The dog, whether or not it was on a leash, suddenly got loose and rushed toward Baskerville. Its master immediately called it back—the most likely way to explain the dog and its prints—but was unable to prevent Baskerville’s quite unforeseen heart attack. Under these conditions, we can understand why Stapleton would conceal his presence at the Hall that night* without regarding him as a murderer.

  As the story unfolds, it is strange to see how the investigators, and the reader with them, are systematically diverted from simple explanations toward fantastical ones—interpretations of fact that, no matter how attractive to the soul, are simply not very likely.

  A case in point is the phosphorescence that clings to the hound, another feature in which Holmes very quickly sees homicidal intent. This odd glow has been noted by several passersby on the moor and has done much to create the legend of the resurrection of the diabolical animal. And, in fact, during the final scene the hound does give off a kind of light:

  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.96

  Leaving aside Watson
’s grandiloquent style, it is inarguable that the dog is coated with a substance that makes it glow. Nor is there any reason to doubt Holmes’s analysis, that the substance in question is phosphorus.97 But the conclusions he draws from this are to say the least hasty.

  It is impossible to rule out that Stapleton, consciously or not, enjoyed walking at night on the moor with a big dog that frightened the locals and thus assured his solitude. Nor can we dismiss the hypothesis that this idea was given him by someone who had an interest in maintaining the legend of a murderer with a hound. But intellectual rigor requires that all hypotheses be examined, beginning with the simplest, before choosing among them.

  Consider the case of a scientist who is passionate about his dog and wishes to walk with it at night, on a deserted moor without any lights, often plunged into thick fog, where the marshes offer mortal risk to any living being who strays from the path. For such a person, the act of coating his dog with a luminous substance so it can be seen from afar and thus found more quickly if it gets caught in the mire is not a sign of criminal intent but a proof of attachment.

  We can understand, however, why Holmes does not accept the accident hypothesis—does not even entertain it, even though it follows logically from the circumstances of Baskerville’s death and the nature of the prints, and even though it is the only one that allows us to account for all these elements. He does not pursue this theory because it does not jibe with his vision of the world and his desire to find murderers. It is just too commonplace for a man who dreams of grandiose crimes committed on deep, dark nights under tragic circumstances.