Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Not least, Holmes's second published case proffers the first iteration of what would become his best-known, and most repeated, aphorism: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth.” From this viewpoint, much of
The Sign of Four
certainly does seem improbable or even impossible, like the Muslim-Sikh name Mahomet Singh. But these cavils will occur to the reader only later. Once begun, there's no resisting the sheer rush, the nonstop narrative excitement of this dark and wondrous tale.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
AND
THE VALLEY OF FEAR

You might have thought that the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would have been greeted with huzzahs from a grateful public. No such luck.
The Sign of Four
proved only modestly successful. Conan Doyle was still pinning his publishing hopes on
The White Company
and other “serious” books. But having few patients for his new London medical practice and needing money, in
1891
he decided to submit some short stories to a recently established magazine called
The Strand
. The first was titled “A Scandal in Bohemia” and opened with the tantalizing sentence: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman.” In the resourceful and daring Irene Adler, the sleuth of Baker Street truly meets his match: she turns out to be far more than just “the daintiest thing under a bonnet.” In the following months, “The Red-Headed League,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Speckled Band” would finally make Conan Doyle famous and Sherlock Holmes immortal. As the grateful editor of
The
Strand
proclaimed, he had found “the greatest natural-born storyteller of the age.”

But fairly soon Conan Doyle began to tire of these trivial entertainments; they kept him from “better things.” Only the writer's formidable mother persuaded him to continue writing about Holmes and Watson for a while longer. In “The Greek Interpreter” he even doubled the narrative's star power by introducing Sherlock's lazy, corpulent, and smarter older brother Mycroft, whose specialty is “omniscience” and who sometimes “
is
the British government.” And then finally, inevitably, he introduced Holmes's most dangerous and implacable foe, the criminal genius Professor James Moriarty. When, despite the entreaties of friends, family, and editors, Conan Doyle irrevocably determined to kill off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” (
1893
), he arranged for the detective to confront the Napoleon of Crime on the treacherous paths high above Switzerland's Reichenbach Falls. The two enemies grappled and, to all appearances, tumbled into the gulf below. Having elected to sacrifice his life to preserve the world from evil, Holmes—once merely an inhuman calculating machine and bohemian aesthete—had now become, in Watson's words, “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”

Thereafter, among other projects, Conan Doyle took to chronicling the glorious and comic exploits of the Napoleonic soldier Etienne Gerard (in their way, they are as good as the Holmes stories), while
The Strand
ran a series of mysteries solved by Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt, the first of the so-called rivals of Sherlock Holmes. But the world wanted the one, the only. While on a golfing holiday Conan Doyle learned from a younger friend named Bertram Fletcher Robinson about the supernatural folklore of Dartmoor, including occasional sightings of a spectral dog of death. Together the two writers began to sketch out “a real creeper.” Before long, Conan Doyle concluded that this was a case for Sherlock Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles
(
1902
) deals with ancient terrors in a desolate landscape of moor and bog, where—to borrow some phrases from that devoted Sherlockian T. S. Eliot—the Grimpen Mire affords no secure foothold and the visitor is menaced by monsters and deadly enchantment. It is a tale, above all, about an aristocratic family haunted by a monstrous beast that brings terror and violent death. Conan Doyle dedicated the book to Robinson, who claimed he'd written parts of it and who sometimes called himself its joint author. No one will ever know for sure the extent of his probably minimal involvement. Still, only one thing really mattered: Holmes was back! Unfortunately, his creator hadn't actually resurrected the great detective. Instead Conan Doyle subtitled his book “Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” and set this chilling case sometime before the fatal encounter with Moriarty. Then Watson had memorialized his friend in words originally applied to Socrates in Plato's
Phaedo
. As
The Hound
opens, one can again hear echoes of Platonic dialogue in some of the detective's exchanges with his old friend:

“Is it then stretching our inference too far to say the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”

“It certainly seems probable.”

Humankind, as the philosophers tell us, swings between the bestial and the angelic, partaking of both flesh and spirit. Throughout
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Conan Doyle plays up the metaphysical, and practical, issues surrounding the relationship of the body and the soul. Holmes's informant Dr. Mortimer analyzes human skulls for “supra-orbital development” and indications of atavism. When the great detective meditates over a map of Devonshire, he claims to travel there “in spirit.” An escaped convict presents “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face . . . it might have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.” Another villainous character turns out to be “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” When an ominous-seeming figure is dimly glimpsed standing on the summit of a rocky tor, we are left wondering if it is just a passing hiker or the devil surveying this fallen world.

Despite Holmes's warning in
The Sign of Four
, Watson continues to judge people by their physiognomies and the good doctor is wrong in almost every instance. For example, he concludes, quite mistakenly, that the “dry glitter” in a servant's eyes and the “firm set of his thin lips” indicate “a positive and possibly harsh nature.” Throughout the novel people continually find themselves confused or deceived by appearances. That animal-like escaped prisoner is mistaken for the aristocratic Sir Henry Baskerville. Dr. Mortimer isn't sure which gentleman at
221
B is the sleuth and which his chronicler. A London cabman drives a bearded passenger who claims to be, but isn't, Sherlock Holmes. A young woman named Beryl Stapleton initially assumes that Dr. Watson must be Sir Henry. One of the novel's French commentators, Pierre Bayard, even argues that Holmes fails to identify the actual villain. And then there's the monstrous hound: Is it real or imagined? Out on the moor a shaken Watson hears a “long, low moan, indescribably sad. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again.” Could this be a spectral predator hot on the trail of Sir Henry Baskerville—or the whimper of a beast in pain?

The legend of the hound began with the kidnapping and intended rape of a local girl by the eighteenth-century Sir Hugo Baskerville. Continued violence against women—a crucial theme in
A Study in Scarlet
and many of the short stories—takes multiple forms here as the reader learns of unhappy marriages, thwarted love affairs, and abusive, even sadistic relationships. (Little wonder that Conan Doyle would become a leading voice in divorce law reform.) Yet this richly layered novel also turns on inheritance in multiple senses, whether of property and money, genetic traits, or a family curse. In its construction, the book nearly resembles a case file or murder dossier, since Conan Doyle assembles a panoply of documents: a tattered manuscript, newspaper reports, a warning message made from words cut from printed sentences, the account of a witness cross-examined in the manner of a trial lawyer, Watson's dispatches to Holmes, Watson's own journal, various telegrams, handwritten notes, and letters. One character is even a professional typist and her father obsessed with legal briefs. All this written documentation, so representative of modern order and rationality, is nonetheless eclipsed by the elemental forces of Nature at her most hostile and threatening.

While
The Hound of the Baskervilles
is both structurally more unified than the first two Holmes novels and compelling throughout, it does exhibit minor flaws. Besides the long absence of Holmes in the middle, we also learn the identity of the villain well before the novel's end. No matter. This isn't just a mystery, this is Mystery, a spiritual confrontation with sinister forces as fog rolls across an ancient and haunted terrain:

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. 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 paralysed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.

In some lights,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
could be categorized as a tragic regional novel, like Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights
or Thomas Hardy's
Return of the Native
: the desolate landscape—“the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky”—dominates the merely human characters. By contrast,
The Valley of Fear
(
1915
) presents itself as a modern novel about business, not just because its second half deals with management/worker clashes, but also because it focuses throughout on contracts, on pledges and oaths, on marital promises and other binding commitments.

John Dickson Carr, the grandmaster of the locked-room whodunit (or rather howdunit), once named
The Valley of Fear
as his favorite Sherlock Holmes novel and called it “a very nearly perfect piece of detective-story writing.” The critic Anthony Boucher seconded that judgment, maintaining, “Here is Holmes as the perfect thinking mind, in cryptanalysis, in observation, in deduction. And here, more than in any other Canonical story that comes to mind, is Holmes at his most completely charming. . . . There is, in fact, more overt humour here than is usual in the Canon; there is a certain fey quality in this Holmes.”

Humor? Holmes laughs regularly during his numerous exploits and he often slyly mocks his friend (“Really, Watson, you excel yourself”), but here, for once, it is the good doctor who temporarily triumphs. The scene opens at Baker Street with an encrypted message that needs to be deciphered, but is quickly followed by an extended discussion of a certain Napoleon of Crime:

“‘You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?'

“‘The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—'

“‘My blushes, Watson!' Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.

“‘I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.'

“‘A touch! A distinct touch!' cried Holmes. ‘You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson.'”

Note the allusion to the swordplay in
Hamlet
, first employed in
A Study in
Scarlet
but now part of the repartee between this prince of detectives and his Horatio. All this talk of Professor Moriarty, however, underscores that this novel, like the others, is set before the events chronicled in “The Final Problem.” Of course, by now contemporary readers had known for over a decade that Holmes was never really dead. Yielding to popular demand and substantial financial incentives, Conan Doyle had finally explained, in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (
1903
), how the great detective actually survived his meeting with Moriarty and what he had earlier called, with moving understatement, “the final discussion of those questions that lie between us.” After his “great hiatus” (spent partly in Tibet under the name Sigerson), Holmes eventually returned to solve numerous subsequent mysteries before retiring to keep bees on the Sussex Downs. Nonetheless, as here, Watson sometimes reaches back to record an older case.

By chapter
3
, Holmes, Watson, and two go-getting policemen have arrived at Birlstone Manor, where the master of the house has been found dead in the library. Apparently John Douglas was surprised by an intruder who used a sawed-off shotgun to blow away most of his face. There are, however, some puzzling elements to this apparently run-of-the-mill burglary turned homicide: What is the meaning of the strange mark branded on Douglas's arm? Why has one half of a set of dumbbells gone missing? And why does the oddly cheerful Mrs. Douglas speak so intimately with her husband's friend Cecil Barker? Inevitably, Holmes proclaims, “in all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study.” Of course, attentive readers will smile, remembering that he has made almost precisely the same assertion about the crimes in each of the other novels. For all his vaunted rationality, Holmes is susceptible to bursts of lyrical enthusiasm (for music, art, Nature), to melancholy observations about life, and to exclamatory hyperbole when in the middle of a case.

The Valley of Fear
is the most metafictional of the novels. It is a book filled with other books and carefully manufactured texts, where truth is stage-managed and nothing is natural. Police inspectors allude to Watson's published works and coyly remark, “when the time comes we'll all hope for a place in your book.” One important character refers to Watson as “the historian of this bunch” and then hands him a substantial manuscript with the air of a writing student soliciting the attention of a published author. The man even insists, “You've never had such a story as that pass through your hands before, and I'll lay my last dollar on that.” In part
2
Watson presents that gritty hard-boiled narrative, a third-person account of a rebellious young bravo's induction into a murderous Irish-American secret society called the Scowrers. Like some fearsome provincial Moriarty, its leader, “Bodymaster” McGinty, has spies everywhere and “every whisper goes back to him.” His word is law among the lawless.