The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

After the first twelve stories ran in the
Strand
, they were collected into a book entitled
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. It has been in print ever since. With this big success behind him, Conan Doyle felt confident enough as a writer to venture into other areas that interested him more than these trifling detective stories. He wanted to be known for his historical novels, on which he lavished far more preparation and writing time than he did on the Holmes stories. He would devour book after book about some particular historical epoch, claiming in some cases to have read more than a hundred books as background. He did no research at all for the Holmes stories, which is no doubt one reason he undervalued them. But after the success of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, the
Strand
wanted another twelve stories. Once again Conan Doyle set what he thought an arbitrarily high price, £1,000 for the series, that he was convinced the magazine wouldn’t meet, but once again they jumped at the deal.

The first in the series, “Silver Blaze,” pleased Conan Doyle so much that he bet his wife a shilling she couldn’t solve the mystery. The story has some of the most brilliant writing in the Holmes canon, particularly what is probably the most famous of all Holmes’s deductions: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (p. 413), which has come to be known by the prosaic phrase “the dog that didn’t bark.” In polls of various Holmes Societies around the world, it regularly rates as one of the top ten stories. But “Silver Blaze” also illustrates the degree to which Conan Doyle could write complete nonsense and get away with it. In his autobiography,
Memories and Adventures
, Conan Doyle confessed, “My ignorance cried aloud to heaven. I read . . . a very disparaging criticism of the story . . . written clearly by a man who
did
know, in which he explained the exact penalties which would come upon everyone concerned if they had acted as I described. Half would have been sent to gaol and the other half ruled off the turf forever.” Conan Doyle admitted that he knew little about “the turf,” the English term for the racetrack, and simply wrote what he thought would pass without complaint in the excitement of the reading moment.

“The Yellow Face,” on the other hand, is notable for almost the opposite reasons. The two stories make an instructive contrast. “The Yellow Face” is often voted as one of the ten least-good stories. (There are no bad Holmes stories, mind you, so Holmes devotees never call such lists the “ten worst stories.”) Infidelity is a theme in both stories, but in contrast to John Straker in “Silver Blaze,” who carried on an adulterous affair with a woman who had “a strong partiality for expensive dresses,” in “The Yellow Face” Grant Munro’s suspicion of his wife’s adulterous involvement is only hinted at. He turns out to be so completely at one with her that he lovingly embraces her black American daughter from her previous marriage. This was no small commitment for an Englishman of his time. Our feelings toward the couple are influenced by Watson’s reaction, unique among all the Holmes stories, to Munro’s acceptance of his new reality. “When his answer came it was one of which I love to think.” As virtue is never as exciting as vice, this may be one reason “The Yellow Face” is never highly rated by Sherlockians.

A stronger reason is no doubt that Holmes makes no brilliant deductions at all in “The Yellow Face.” In fact, he embraces an erroneous hypothesis in the beginning and is completely fooled by the outcome. Again, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes’s presence makes no difference to the outcome of the case. In comparison to the silly plot of “Silver Blaze,” which falls apart at even the merest scrutiny, “The Yellow Face” is one of the more moving tributes to racial tolerance in all British literature. But because it is part of the Holmes canon, readers bring expectations to it that it doesn’t meet.

Conan Doyle came to his racial sensitivity as a result of his meeting with Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a black antislavery leader, then U.S. minister to Liberia, when Conan Doyle was ship’s surgeon on the
Mayumba
in 1882. Garnet was aboard for three days, during which time he impressed Conan Doyle with his intelligence and seriousness. Conan Doyle remained deeply committed to racial justice for the rest of his life.

One last reflection about “The Yellow Face”: Conan Doyle chose the name Grant Munro for this most sympathetic character. Munro is also the name he chose for himself in his autobiographical fiction
The Stark Munro Letters
. It is tempting to see here an attempt to put himself in a situation that called for tolerance, understanding, and compassion, then imagining to himself how he would like to think he would react.

When he began writing the stories for this second series, Conan Doyle made a fateful decision. He would exercise the ultimate godlike power in his created world. He had given life and now he would take it away: Sherlock Holmes would meet his end. So when he began writing the first of what he thought would be the final twelve adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he had the ending already in mind. Just before starting the series, during a trip to Switzerland with his wife, Conan Doyle visited Reichenbach Falls. Its grandeur impressed him so much that he concluded it was the perfect setting for the finale. He wrote that the Falls “would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him” (
Memories and Adventures
, p. 92).

That ending included one last character who has also achieved immortality: Dr. Moriarty. Conan Doyle waited until what he thought would be the final Holmes story to introduce him. It seems a natural idea that Holmes should meet his mirror opposite, his doppelgänger, somewhere in the stories. The trouble with this conception is that Moriarty’s presence can’t be sustained for very long: Either Holmes catches him, and he’s put away or killed, or he escapes by outwitting Holmes. Since the latter can’t be allowed, Moriarty is going to have to make a one-time appearance. So the final story is the right time to unveil the master criminal. Moriarty serves a further purpose by providing Holmes with a worthy adversary for his final bow. You don’t want just any old crook to do in the world’s greatest detective.

So before introducing Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle did something curious in the stories leading up to it. Knowing that the Professor was due to appear at the end of the second series of twelve Holmes stories, Conan Doyle included the following passage in the second story, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”:
^a
“He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime.” Then in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle describes Moriarty in this passage: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans” (p. 559). These passages are quite similar. It’s clear that the being at the source of the outstretched filaments, though undescribed, must be a spider; the second passage only makes more explicit what was already implied in the first one. The first passage, I neglected to state, describes Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle could hardly make an explicit link between Holmes and so repulsive a creature as a spider, but his language has made that link despite his reticence. This is the first in a series of parallels Conan Doyle set up between Holmes and his nemesis. It was necessary for Moriarty to have as exalted a stature in the criminal world as Holmes has in his. Holmes himself says, “I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal” (p. 560). When Holmes continues, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill” (p. 560), he expresses more than just respect for an adversary. His admiration is a kind of self-approval as well. When Holmes contemplates Moriarty, he sees an image of himself reflected in a perverse mirror. First, they look alike: Moriarty, like Holmes, is “extremely tall and thin” (p. 560). They share a taste for French painting. In a later novel,
The Valley of Fear
, we are told that Moriarty owns a work by Jean Greuze, paid for, it is implied, with ill-gotten wealth. Holmes expresses throughout the stories a decided preference for Gallic art, no doubt because his grandmother was the sister of French painter Emile Vernet (1789-1863). Holmes refers to the Professor as “the Napoleon of crime” (p. 559). Setting aside for the moment that such a phrase would be redundant for many an Englishman at the time, the only other reference Holmes makes to Napoleon is in the later story “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” where he compares himself to the Little Corsican. Except for the “criminal strain” that “ran in his blood” (p. 559), Moriarty might have become a highly esteemed colleague or even a soul mate.

Although on the simplest plot level, Holmes and Moriarty exist as two separate figures, on another level we are invited to see them as two sides of a single coin, like Milton’s “knowledge of good and evil,” “two twins cleaving together, leap[ing] into the world” or, in this case, out of this world. Europe’s greatest detective and its greatest criminal locked arm in arm, tumbling together into eternity over a vast abyss, form as powerful an image of the mysterious duality of good and evil as the framework of these stories allows. It recalls the structure of Shakespearean tragedy, where the expulsion of evil always requires the sacrifice of some human good.

It is probably impossible today to gauge the effect this final scene had on readers. Now every reader knows that Holmes did not meet his end at Reichenbach Falls, if only because of the huge number of pages still to read after “The Final Problem.” Even if we were momentarily deluded, we would soon find out that Mr. Sherlock Holmes returned from Switzerland, resumed his crime-fighting career, and finally retired to a country farm in Sussex, where he tended bees. This sheds a completely different light over our feelings for him. Instead of a tragic hero whose final sacrifice redeemed his society, he has faded into what Conan Doyle called in the Preface to
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
that “fairy kingdom of romance,” existing forever in the secure confines of an impossibly safe world.

At the time, Holmes’s death made an enormous impact on the reading public. Bank clerks and shopkeepers wore black armbands in mourning for the late consulting detective, and storms of letters poured into the
Strand
and to Conan Doyle himself, urging the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle writes of one woman who sent him a letter beginning “You brute!” But Conan Doyle was adamant in his refusal even to consider taking up his pen to revive his fallen hero.

So from 1893 until 1901 the reading public had to accept the idea that they had read the last of the remarkable sleuth. But then a young friend of Conan Doyle named Fletcher Robinson told him about an old legend from Dartmoor in England’s West Country, near Robinson’s boyhood home. The tale involved a spectral hound that haunted one of the local families. Conan Doyle and Robinson hatched out a plot together, which Conan Doyle then turned into a book. He saw right away that to solve the mystery at the heart of this legend, he would need to revive Sherlock Holmes. He wrote letters to his mother telling her he was writing “a real creeper” in which “Holmes is at his very best.” So in August 1901 the
Strand
printed the first installment of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Much advertised in advance, that issue of the magazine sold 30,000 extra copies. People lined up for blocks around the printer’s building on Southampton Street in order to get their copy of the magazine before it was shipped to their local newsstand or bookstore.

They weren’t disappointed, and few readers since have been either.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
is to my mind the best of all the Holmes stories. Most readers will agree with Conan Doyle that Holmes is at his best here. Watson, too, was never better: He acquits himself well in all the tasks Holmes gives him, even to the point of getting Holmes’s unqualified approval. The minor characters are for the most part well drawn, and the plot is skillfully paced. Conan Doyle wonderfully sustained a mood of danger and dread that hangs over the story until the very end. He also created perhaps the most dramatic line in all the Holmes stories. What reader hasn’t felt a tingle along the spine upon reading Dr. Mortimer’s hushed confession: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” When first published in the
Strand
, that line ended one of the monthly installments. Readers had a whole month to savor the salutary thrill of that horror. I imagine thousands of them reading the line over and over, recapturing that pleasurable shudder before they bought the next chapter the following month. I confess to indulging in that guilty pleasure myself.

Most impressive of all is the masterful way in which Conan Doyle uses language to create symbols that reverberate throughout the novel. The short stories provide little opportunity for any sort of symbolic development, and nothing in either of the two earlier novels could be said to rise to any symbolic level. But
The Hound of the Baskervilles
contains several symbols. The hound is as much a symbol of an implacable force that punishes human sins as it is a flesh-and-blood creature. As a character in the Baskerville legend, the hound is an instrument for retributive justice, haunting only the heirs of Hugo Baskerville, but as symbol it extends its baleful sphere to all of us. Like Moby Dick, it’s a reminder of an evil that lies at the center of existence, with which humans must eternally wrestle.

The story also makes the moor a character in itself, having as much effect on the action as any of the living beings. Exactly what it symbolizes isn’t easy to say, as it’s in the nature of symbols to defy easy summary, but Stapleton gives an indication. “You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious” (p. 662). Watson goes further: “Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track” (p. 627).