Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (4 page)

Two facts come in to reinforce the detective’s theory, however. The first is the discovery, soon afterward, of a curious resemblance
between Stapleton and a portrait of Hugo Baskerville that hangs in Baskerville Hall. Holmes is convinced that Stapleton is
actually a Baskerville, and hence has the motive for murder: the naturalist wants to eliminate everyone who stands between
him and the succession to title and estate.

Holmes then interviews Laura Lyons, to whom he reveals, to the young woman’s stupefaction, that Stapleton is married. She
then acknowledges that the letter asking Sir Charles Baskerville to go to the yew alley was dictated to her by Stapleton,
and that Stapleton went to the meeting place in her stead. After Baskerville’s death, he asked her to keep silent.

Despite all these convergent facts, Holmes is still unable to prove Stapleton’s guilt, and so he decides to lay a trap. He
tells Stapleton that he and Watson are returning to London and suggests to Sir Henry that he accept an invitation to dine
with the Stapletons, a dinner to which the heir will go alone.

Holmes and Watson then take up their post near the Stapletons’ house. Through a thick fog, the two men witness Stapleton and
Baskerville at table; Beryl is absent from the room. Then they see Stapleton head toward an outbuilding near the house from
which mysterious noises emanate.

When Sir Henry leaves the house, he is watched over from afar by the two men, tracking him through the fog. Suddenly they
hear the sound of footsteps and see an enormous hound rushing toward them, its eyes glowing, its muzzle and hackles outlined
in streaks of fire. Overcoming their fear, Holmes and Watson open fire on the animal. Wounded, the beast keeps running and
hurls itself onto Sir Henry, seizing him by the neck. Holmes empties his revolver into the dog, and it topples over dead.

Pursuing Stapleton, Holmes and Watson reach his house. The man is not there, but they hear sounds upstairs and discover, in
a locked room, Beryl gagged and tied to a post, her body wrapped in towels and sheets. Freed, the young woman collapses. She
says that Stapleton has probably fled into the marsh.

The two men start off after him, but in the darkness and the mire, the search seems hopeless. Yet Holmes sees on a tussock
of grass one of the shoes the naturalist had stolen from Baskerville. Later on they discover traces left by the dog on an
island in the middle of the mire, where Stapleton kept it confined between his excursions.

The final pages of the book allow Holmes to suggest a complete explanation of the tragedy to Watson. According to him, it
was Stapleton who organized everything, with the passive complicity of his terrorized wife. Stapleton is the son of Rodger
Baskerville, Sir Charles Baskerville’s younger brother, who died abroad and had been believed to be unmarried. The son lived
in South America, where he married Beryl, one of the beauties of Costa Rica, and, after stealing some money, changed his name
to Vandeleur. He then founded a school in the north of England, and, after it “sank from disrepute into infamy,”
¹⁵
changed his name again to Stapleton. He then settled in Devonshire, where he indulged his taste for entomology, a field in
which he had become an eminent authority.

Stapleton discovered that only two lives stood between him and a considerable fortune. At the time he had formed no definite
notion of how he might get hold of it, but, having settled near the home of his ancestors, he undertook to cultivate Sir Charles
Baskerville’s friendship. Realizing that Sir Charles was terrified of the legend about the hound, he decided to use this fear
to commit his first murder. He procured in London a giant hound that he hid in the mire as he waited for a favorable occasion.
But before the right time presented itself, he learned that Sir Charles was on the point of leaving the Hall, so he convinced
Laura Lyons to ask him for a meeting on the eve of his departure.

After painting his dog with phosphorus, he took it to the meeting place and stood near the wicket-gate giving onto the moor.
The hound, incited by its master, leapt over the fence and rushed at Sir Charles:

In that gloomy tunnel it must indeed have been a dreadful sight to see that huge black creature, with its flaming jaws and
blazing eyes, bounding after its victim. He fell dead at the end of the alley from heart disease and terror. The hound had
kept upon the grassy border while the baronet had run down the path, so that no track but the man’s was visible. On seeing
him lying still the creature had probably approached to sniff at him, but finding him dead had turned away again. It was then
that it left the print which was actually observed by Dr. Mortimer. The hound was called off and hurried away to its lair
in the Grimpen Mire.
¹⁶

Stapleton then turns his attention to the second person who stands in his path to fortune: Henry Baskerville. Accompanied
by his wife, he sets out to keep watch on him as soon as he arrives in London. Stapleton locks Beryl into a hotel room, and
disguises himself with a fake beard as he shadows Dr. Mortimer. The vital thing for him is to procure some piece of clothing
belonging to Henry. Stapleton’s wife, terrified, doesn’t dare write directly to Henry; instead she resorts to an anonymous
letter in hopes of putting him on his guard.

With the help of the shoe stolen in the hotel, Stapleton can carry out the second murder by putting the hound onto the scent
of the new heir. This time it will be less a matter of provoking a heart attack than of weakening him psychologically, to
put him at the monster’s mercy. The death of the second Baskerville would open his way to the fortune.

With the double disappearance of the animal and its master, the riddle of the Hound of the Baskervilles is resolved, at least
in Holmes’s mind, and the detective, triumphant and completely free of doubt, can declare the mystery solved and the case
closed.

* After arriving in Devonshire, Watson tries without success to find out if the telegram was hand-delivered to Barrymore.

III
The Holmes Method

T
HE METHOD USED by Sherlock Holmes in the four novels and fifty-six stories Conan Doyle devoted to him is the primary reason
that these texts have become famous. But not only that: The method itself had such success that it is often referred to, well
beyond the realm of literature, as a model of intelligence and rigorous thinking.

Even though Holmes appears only rarely in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, his method pervades the book: it is this that allows him to arrive at the truth, or to what he regards as the truth. Thus
it is fitting to point out a few of the method’s guiding principles before looking into the way it is applied in Conan Doyle’s
masterpiece. Then we can form our own conclusions.

Holmes’s method is revealed, in both theory and practice, in the detective’s first case,
A Study in Scarlet
, which provides a kind of working outline for all the other texts to come.

It is during this investigation that Watson meets Holmes. The doctor is looking for someone with whom to share the rent on
a London flat; having heard of a scientist with a similar wish, he presents himself at his flat, accompanied by a mutual friend:

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

  “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit.

  “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

  “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.
¹⁷

Watson will have to live with Holmes for several weeks before the detective explains the analytic method that allowed him
to guess at his sojourn in Afghanistan:

“You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”

  “You were told, no doubt.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I
knew
you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion
without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman
of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for
his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness,
as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the
tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train
of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”
¹⁸

Although this is far from the most interesting of Holmes’s analyses, even in
A Study in Scarlet
, the first of the detective’s deductions—or more precisely the first to appear in print—does include in miniature all the
elements of his method. And it is all the more interesting because it is accompanied by an explanation of this method by Holmes
himself.

Holmes had explained his method only after Watson, having read an article in a magazine lying on their table, reproached the
author of the article for being “some arm-chair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his
own study,”
¹⁹
but whose ideas are impractical—someone who, locked up in a subway compartment in the Underground, would be unable to guess
the professions of his traveling companions:

“I would lay a thousand to one against him.”

  “You would lose your money,” Sherlock Holmes remarked calmly. “As for the article I wrote it myself.”

  “You!”

  “Yes, I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to
you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”
²⁰

Observation and deduction: revealed for the first time here but repeated throughout all the stories, these are the two keys
to Holmes’s method, the ones that allow him to carry out his investigations successfully. We must study each of these two
operations attentively if we want to form a correct idea of the method created by Sherlock Holmes, and to evaluate its validity.

Let us begin, then, with observation—which is to say,
searching for clues
. Clues can take many different forms, but they can be sorted into two main categories: material elements and psychological
behavior.

The category of
material elements
is undoubtedly the one that has most contributed to making Holmes’s method known. It is this material search that has popularized
the image of a detective, magnifying glass in hand, in search of minute clues that let him reconstruct a whole chain of disparate
facts. These elements may be divided into several types, many of which are present in one form or another in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

A first type is what we could call the identifying sign: the various physical elements that allow us to recognize an individual.
It is resorted to twice in the novel. During the London episode, it is this sort of sign that Holmes uses to try to identify
the man who has been shadowing Baskerville. Further, it is the physical similarity between Stapleton and Hugo Baskerville
that, at the end of the novel, provides the detective with the missing element he needs to arrive at the truth.

A second type of clue, one of the best-known, is the print, or the trace left directly by the body of the criminal. A particularly
common trace is the footprint, human or animal. Both of these types of prints can be found in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(left by the hound and by Sir Charles Baskerville) and in fact play a determining role in the case; it is by deciphering
these prints that Holmes is able to analyze Sir Charles’s death.

A third type of clue is the indirect trace left by the criminal. One of them is tobacco, on which the detective, the author
of a monograph on the subject, is an expert. His interpretation of the cigar ash allows him to feel certain that Sir Charles,
just before his death, stood for some while in front of the wicket-gate giving onto the moor. In a more anecdotal way, a cigarette
stub allows Holmes, when he comes back to his moorland hiding place, to guess that his visitor is Watson.
^*

A fourth kind of clue is the written document. This type comes in at two essential points in the investigation. In the beginning
of the book, the examination of the anonymous letter urging Henry Baskerville not to go to the moor allows Holmes to affirm
that it was written in a hotel using a
Times
editorial. At the end of the book, the study of the fragment of a letter written by Laura Lyons leads the investigators to
guess that this letter was intended to lure Sir Charles Baskerville into a trap.

A fifth type of clue concerns objects. For Holmes, objects have their own life and thus are capable of giving valuable information
about their owner; they have the same value as written documents. This “reading” of objects is present in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, even though it is used only for anecdotal purposes. The study of the cane left by Dr. Mortimer in Holmes’s flat at the beginning
of the story helps the detective and his friend form a precise picture of its owner and of the circumstances in which the
object was presented to him. What’s more, the examination of Watson’s clothes, in the same opening scene, allows Holmes to
guess that he spent the day at his club.

But observation of clues is not restricted to the study of material elements. It also concerns
psychological behavior
, which according to Holmes can be reconstructed with as much precision as actions that produced material clues. Just as matter
itself is legible, the way individuals behave also constitutes a source of instruction, whether or not the detective was actually
there to observe that behavior.

This study of behavior is alluded to in the scientific monograph, written by Holmes, that forms the occasion for his conversation
with Watson in
A Study in Scarlet
: “The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.”
²¹

Psychology here should be taken in its broader sense; it is not just mental operations that are in question, but the totality
of ways in which living beings react and express themselves without realizing it. Thus in the scene in which Holmes meets
Watson, it is Watson’s general demeanor that allows Holmes, at one glance, to guess that he is by profession an army doctor.

This second series of clues is just as important as the first in the solution that Holmes proposes at the end of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. At the outset of his investigation, he pays attention to the behavior of the murdered Sir Charles Baskerville, and especially
to the fact that he decided to wait in front of the gate giving onto the moor, then began walking on tiptoe as he moved away
from his house. In this instance, the material clue is reinforced by a psychological clue.

Attention to human behavior also drives the accusations Holmes will make against Stapleton, whose psychological reactions
he carefully studies. In the middle of the story, the naturalist fails to show disappointment when he discovers that the man
fallen on the moor was not Sir Henry Baskerville, but the convict Selden. This is Holmes’s comment:

“What a nerve the fellow has! How he pulled himself together in the face of what must have been a paralyzing shock when he
found that the wrong man had fallen a victim to his plot.”
²²

Note that this second category of clues can be applied not just to human beings but also to animals. This sort, although rarer
^*
in Conan Doyle’s work than the human variety, is central to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Its protagonist—and perhaps the murderer—is an animal, and the hypotheses Holmes forms about the animal’s behavior during
Sir Charles Baskerville’s death are decisive in his solution of the mystery. So it is not only human psychology but also animal
psychology that should interest us here.