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

The Pinkerton liaison came several years after Conan Doyle learned of a similar infiltration of lawless gangs. In 1892 Thomas Beach had published
Twenty-five Years in the Secret Service,
which detailed his penetration of a group of Irish revolutionaries in America, much like the Molly Maguires. Using the name Major Henri Le Caron, he gave evidence against them and then had to be guarded by the British government for years afterward for fear of reprisals. His death on April 1, 1894 had attracted Conan Doyle’s attention, for its announcement was much publicized and Le Caron was buried in Norwood, near where Conan Doyle was living at the time. The fact that the announcement came on April Fool’s Day gave rise to a rumor that the master spy’s demise was a ruse to throw killers off his trail, a feature Conan Doyle used in
The Valley of Fear
by having Douglas fake his own death for the same reason.

So there was historical precedence for the novel’s story. The new novel was originally written with a third-person narrator telling the entire story. By the time it was finally published in September 1915, Conan Doyle either had had second thoughts about the wisdom of that decision, or he was urged by someone to revise the work so that once again we have Watson as our trusty guide. As in
A Study in Scarlet,
the long flashback to experiences in America is written from a third-person point of view. We are told that Douglas presents Holmes and Watson with a manuscript explaining the provenance of the current situation. That manuscript is clearly the basis for the long flashback, but it isn’t clear whose words we are reading.

On first glance this would seem to be a step backward. After the awkward third-person flashback of
A Study in Scarlet,
Conan Doyle had gotten better and better about introducing the distant past into his novels.
The Sign of Four
lets two of the characters, Sholto and Small, each tell part of the previous story, so that no omniscient narrator obtrudes with testimony Watson couldn’t have heard.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
needs only a two-page letter about the history of the curse of the Baskervilles, read by Doctor Mortimer, to explain how the past is prologue to the present. Most readers don’t think of it as a flashback at all. At this point in his career, after reaching the peak of his ability to construct plots, why would Conan Doyle revert to a clumsy tactic of his youth?

A second glance—indeed, a long, hard stare, perhaps—reveals that Conan Doyle was trying something here that he couldn’t have begun to bring off in his younger days. We’re being asked to judge Douglas in a way that would be impossible if Watson were our guide. Watson is an admirable example of the dependable narrator. We believe what he says. The success of this story depends on our doubts about McMurdo/Edwards /Douglas. That doubt is first sown when Douglas reveals that an intruder, armed with a shotgun, was “accidentally” shot square in the face during a struggle. In view of the plan to use this accident to his advantage, one can’t help but wonder if in fact Douglas managed to capture Ted Baldwin, the intruder, and then cold-bloodedly execute him as the realization sank in that he would never be free from the retributive arm of the Scowrers. It seems a little too convenient for Baldwin’s face to be obliterated; and how exactly would an intruder get into a castle like Birlstone Manor, with a moat and a drawbridge, and then be surprised so quickly that he couldn’t get off a shot with a shotgun? It seems more likely that someone else with a gun got the drop on him. Part II convinces us that Baldwin was a killer who got just what was coming to him. But his premeditated killing, even if it saves Douglas’s life, would put Douglas in a morally ambiguous state. Our doubts about Douglas only grow when we note that Holmes doesn’t congratulate him for his escape. Holmes is strangely quiet, perhaps pondering this very ambiguity.

When we then read the story of Douglas’s career as secret agent, we have to wonder just how he managed to rise so high in an organization of killers, thieves, and scoundrels of all stripes without committing any crimes himself. The unknown narrator gives him plenty of attractive features, despite the reprehensible circumstances in which he finds himself, so that we like him, and we see that the best people in the town also like him. His ascendancy in the Scowrers occurs without any serious moral compromise on his part. It’s hard to believe that this group of hard-edged men would cede authority to someone from the outside without more of a test than we hear McMurdo has undergone. Because the seed of doubt about him was sown in the first part, we can’t read this account without wondering what it omits. We begin to mistrust the narrator. Although McMurdo’s ultimate goal was to put an end to the criminal enterprise that locks the valley in a grip of fear, to do so he must surely have been forced to commit some crimes to gain the trust of a show-me cadre of leaders. The entire flashback seems to avoid the question at its center: Just how much evil can one commit in the name of good and not become evil oneself? McMurdo/Edwards is surrounded by moral ambiguity. Some of this ambiguity is transferred to the narration itself, something new in the Holmes Canon.

Then there is the question of Moriarty. Right away we hear of the archvillain whom readers of the series would instantly remember as the man they thought had plunged their detective hero to his watery death twenty years before. But in that story, “The Final Problem,” Watson responds to Holmes’s question about the Professor by saying he had never heard of him. Here, in “the early days at the end of the ‘eighties,”’ well before the unpleasant incident at Reichenbach Falls, Watson knows all about him. This contradiction could be the result of negligence, but that seems unlikely. If we assume that Conan Doyle hadn’t forgotten what he had written earlier, he must have thought he had more to gain from the inclusion of Moriarty’s name than he would lose by the glaring inconsistency of Watson’s knowledge of him. What
The Valley of Fear
gained was a sense of menace supplied by the mere mention of the Napoleon of crime. If Holmes had never managed to connect Moriarty with a crime several years after the date of this story, the implication that Holmes won’t connect him this time must hang over this scene like a dark cloud. If Moriarty is out to get Douglas, we must fear that he will succeed, as in fact he does. Moriarty’s name is a guarantee of ultimate doom. It’s the beginning of fear, and a guarantee that its span stretches far past the valley in Pennsylvania.

After
The Valley of Fear
was published, Conan Doyle contributed one more story, “His Last Bow,” in ,1917 before collecting the series of tales written since The Return into a new volume entitled
His Last Bow.
When it was published in late 1917, its title implied once again that readers had seen the last of the remarkable consulting detective. But again, Conan Doyle, for whatever reason, had a change of heart. Over the next ten years he wrote a series of stories at odd intervals that was published in 1927 as
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.
This group presents a unique problem in Conan Doyle scholarship: The poor quality of many of them, the details that differ significantly from the earlier stories, and the erratic characterization of Holmes himself, all lead us to ask if all of these stories were actually written by Conan Doyle himself? A number of devoted Holmes critics have concluded that several stories are spurious. The evidence for such conclusions rests primarily on an examination of the texts themselves. What biographical support there is for this contention is very slender. What we know is that Conan Doyle was so hard up for plots for his detective stories that he suggested a public contest for ideas to turn into Holmes adventures. He wrote in his autobiography that “the difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story really needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do. One cannot without effort spin plots at such a rate. They are apt to become thin and break”
(Memories and
Adventures, pp. 91-92). The editor of the Oxford editions of all the stories, Owen Dudley Edwards, states that he hardly ever questioned changes editors suggested to him
(A Study in Scarlet,
p. viii), but that is disputed by Cameron Hollyer’s study of the letters between Conan Doyle and his publisher in “Author to Editor: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Correspondence with H. Greenhough Smith.” But on the other hand, when William Gillette, an American actor, first went on stage in New York with a play titled
Sherlock Holmes,
he asked Conan Doyle’s permission to allow Holmes to be married. Conan Doyle replied, “You may marry or murder or do what you like with him” (Howlett, “The Impersonators: Sherlock Holmes on Stage and Screen,”
Beyond Baker Street,
p. 188). Also he was careful in crafting the details of all his writing. The slapdash skid marks all over some of these stories are at great variance with the rest of his writing. All of these facts warrant at least the strong suspicion that many of these last stories were written by Conan Doyle but then changed, perhaps by someone much younger who may have thought the old-style Holmes stories weren’t sophisticated enough.

This supposition, however, is complicated by a couple of things we know about Conan Doyle. First, despite his reputation for hating Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle knew he would be best remembered for his remarkable sleuth; we can’t doubt that he was quietly proud of his creation. We wouldn’t think, therefore, that he would consent to letting a patently inferior work bear his name unless he produced it himself. And some very inferior stories have been in the canon now for nearly seventy-five years. Second, Conan Doyle has claimed he wrote the stories; he was an honorable man when honor meant something. We have the stories in his handwriting. For someone else to have written them, or even materially changed them, would mean that Conan Doyle conspired with someone whose identity has yet to be discovered to defraud the world about his involvement in what, for better or for worse, would be his chief legacy. In the absence of any hard facts to the contrary, it’s hard to believe that such a man would do this.

But it’s also hard to believe that such a conscientious writer produced the stylistic turn-around some of these stories represent. Take, for example, the story most at odds with all the facts about Holmes and Watson that Conan Doyle had established over nearly forty years, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” It was an adaptation of his earlier unpro duced play about Holmes,
The Crown Diamond.
When polls of various Holmes Societies are taken about the relative merit of the stories, it regularly places last. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. First, it’s one of only three stories in which neither Holmes nor Watson is the narrator. A third-person narrator works for many kinds of fiction, but not for these stories, which depend so much on their realism that many people thought Sherlock Holmes was alive, and societies now devoted to him self-consciously maintain that whimsical illusion. A narrator like the one in “The Mazarin Stone” accentuates the fictional quality of the story, most unwelcome to many Holmes admirers.

In addition, the story is a rehash of several plot elements that had previously appeared in the Saga. Watson reminds us that the decoy bust of Holmes, in case we’ve forgotten, appeared earlier in “The Empty House”: “We used something of the sort once before,” he says. There, it was used to fool Colonel Sebastian Moran, “the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced,” who carried a new weapon, the air-gun. In “The Mazarin Stone” the bust fools Sam Merton, about whom Holmes says, “Possibly you have heard of his reputation as a shooter of big game.” Sam, as Holmes refers to him several times (another un-Holmesian trait), has just bought an air-gun. Then at the story’s conclusion, Holmes slips the jewel into the pocket of Lord Cantlemere. This plot element of putting a stolen item under a client’s very nose for him to find was used in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” and again in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

This repetition of plot elements wouldn’t be so suspicious in itself. After all, in many of the stories since
The Return,
Conan Doyle had recycled plots. “The Mazarin Stone,” however, is also full of details inconsistent with all the other tales. Early in the story we hear of a waiting room and a second exit in the apartment at 221B Baker Street, things Conan Doyle had neglected to mention before. The choice of the name “Negretto Sylvius”—the Italian word for “black” and Latin for “woods”—happens to be the name of a rival magazine
(Blackwood’s)
that once accepted a submission by Conan Doyle but then never published it. This was not the sort of witty wordplay that Conan Doyle engaged in. The way Holmes talks in this story doesn’t sound at all like the dignified figure we’ve come to know over the previous fifty stories. He’s become a kind of jokester right out of the music halls. And when Holmes sends Watson to contact someone at Scotland Yard, he tells him to see Youghal, as if we’re supposed to know who he is, yet it’s a name we’ve never heard before.

In addition to all this, the plot is perhaps the weakest of all the Holmes stories. It depends on a number of accidents, rather than ingenious deductions or a carefully laid trap into which the criminal inevitably falls. Why, for instance, would any crooks who had stolen a world-famous gem worth a hundred thousand pounds bring it with them to the apartment of Sherlock Holmes, whose address was surely well known among members of the underworld? How could any but the dimmest of bulbs have mistaken one of those early gramophones for a real violin in the next room? Or have failed to notice Holmes exchanging places with the wax bust of himself in the same room? Or attempt to exchange the jewel in Holmes’s apartment, even if he were playing the violin in the next room? The whole thing is preposterous. We might say about this story what Samuel Johnson once said to a man who asked his opinion about a book the man had written: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

To give one more example, consider “The Adventure of the Three Gables.” There Holmes taunts a servant, whom he calls by her first name (“Oh, Susan! Language!” and “Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff”), two things a gentleman never does, and Holmes is every inch a gentleman. To make matters worse, he sarcastically refers to her as “the fair Susan.” He also twice insults a black man, whom he also calls by his first name, by claiming he has a peculiar smell. Most repugnant of all, a character in this story refers to the black man as “the big nigger”; it’s true that the term is spoken by a pompous and dim-witted policeman, but it seems inconceivable for the man who wrote the appeal for racial harmony in “The Yellow Face” and the indictment of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Five Orange Pips” to have penned this. In addition to obvious affronts like these, the prose style itself furnishes more subtle clues that an unseen hand may have been at work. After you’ve read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Conan Doyle’s prose, you become so accustomed to its rhythms, its diction, its tone, that sudden departures from his style jump out at you. Almost nothing about either of “The Mazarin Stone” or “The Three Gables” has the true ring of Conan Doyle’s style about them.