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Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles

From the chamber where she has been locked for hours, the young woman hears shouts and laughter rising from the great dining hall below. As the evening advances and talk becomes more heated under the influence of alcohol, her anxiety mounts at the thought of the fate intended for her by the men she can hear carousing below. First among them, worst of them all, is the leader of the gang, Hugo Baskerville, corrupt owner of the manor house that bears his name.

For months Hugo had been hovering around the young country lass, whom he had tried to attract by every possible means, first by trying to seduce her, then by offering her father large sums of money if he would agree to further their relationship. But she found him vile, repulsive; she kept avoiding him. So Hugo and his men, on this Michaelmas, have resorted to violence. While the girl's father and brothers have been away, they have kidnapped her and brought her to Baskerville Hall.

When the bedroom door had first closed behind her, the girl had stayed motionless for a while, paralyzed by emotion. Now, overcoming her fear, she comes to herself and begins looking for a way to escape. First she tries to force the lock, but she soon abandons the idea. Made of metal and set into a massive oak, door, it would be impervious to her blows.

A quick look around the room reveals that aside from an inaccessible chimney flue there is only one available opening: a little window, just large enough for a slender person to climb through. But leaning out, she sees that the ground is far below; jumping would mean breaking a limb, even killing herself.

But this opening is the only one that lets the prisoner entertain a faint hope-provided she can show some nimbleness, and is willing to risk her life on one stroke of luck. There is ivy climbing the front of the house from the ground to the roof, and so she resolves, daring everything, to stretch out her arm, grab hold of it, and begin a perilous descent.

* * *

Having finally reached the ground, the young woman ignores her scratches and at once starts running away from the Hall and toward her father's house, whose lights three leagues across the moor she can more intuit than glimpse.

Despite her pain and anguish, her hope begins to rekindle as she gets farther from her prison. She fights off the terror of the darkness and the eerie noises from the moor, a world inhabited by supernatural creatures, in this era not yet civilized by science.

These indistinct noises are soon dominated by a stronger, more regular sound approaching quickly. The origin is easy to recognize. It is a horse galloping along the path at top speed, urged on with shouts by its rider, and there can be no doubt about its target.

But whoever attentively lends his ear to the sounds of the moor will hear even worse. More terrifying than the noise of galloping hooves is the howling of a pack of dogs, the barking closer and closer, as if they were outrunning the horse and had already left it far behind.

The young woman realizes now that her jailer has found her missing and is in hot pursuit. But he wasn't content to ride after her. He also set the pack of hounds that he uses for hunting on her trail, probably after having them sniff a piece of clothing of the prisoner who is now their quarry.

* * *

Dropping from fatigue, dying of fright, the young woman has no choice but to abandon the path and hurl herself into a broad ravine, a goyal, marked long ago by the inhabitants of the place with two tall stones. She knows she has no chance of escaping her kidnapper; all she can do is gain a few minutes' respite before she is discovered and torn apart by the hounds.

Crouching low to the ground and trying to catch her breath, she waits for the inevitable end, making her last resigned prayers. The end is not long in coming. Hugo Baskerville jumps down from his horse, not even taking the time to tie it to a tree, and bounds into the goyal.

But the pursuer does not look like the formidable man she was fearfully expecting to see leap from the shadows. His face is deformed not with the fury of the hunter who has allowed his prey to escape, but with a nameless terror. Hugo Baskerville, like his victim, is now reduced to the status of prey.

Behind him rises up the monstrous form of a giant black dog, so huge it defies imagining. With its bloodshot eyes, it seems to have come straight out of hell to the edge of the goyal. With a giant leap, it hurls itself onto Hugo, who rolls on the ground, shouting with horror. His shout is stifled in his throat at once as the monster sets his fangs into it, and the young man quickly loses consciousness.

Stunned by the sight, her nerves spent, the young woman collapses and dies of exhaustion and fear, so that when Hugo's companions reach the edge of the goyal there are two corpses for them to discover. So shocking is the spectacle that some of them-it would be said in the neighboring villages-die of fear and others go mad ever after.

* * *

What is the girl thinking about as she is dying? Although the texts that have come down to us remain silent on this point, we are not forbidden to use our imaginations. The thoughts of characters in literature are not forever locked up inside their creators. More alive than many living people, these characters spread themselves through those who read their authors' work, they impregnate the books that tell their tales, they cross centuries in search of a benevolent listener.

This is true for the young woman whose final moments at the bottom of a goyal on the Devonshire moor I have just related. Her last thoughts carry an encoded message, a message without which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work remains incomprehensible. It is to reconstruct these thoughts and their secret effects on the plot that this book has been undertaken-for this, and for the dead girl's memory.

To understand what she had to tell us, I have taken up in minute detail an investigation into the murders blamed on the Hound of the Baskervilles. In so doing, I have made a number of discoveries that, piece by piece, go far to cast doubt on the official verdict. After examining a series of convergent clues, I feel there is every reason to suppose that the generally acknowledged solution of the atrocious crimes that bloodied the Devonshire moors simply does not hold up, and that the real murderer escaped justice.

How could Conan Doyle be so mistaken about this? Faced with such a complex enigma, he probably lacked the tools of contemporary thought on the topic of literary characters. These characters are not, as we too often believe, creatures who exist only on paper, but living beings who lead an autonomous existence-sometimes going so far as to commit murders unbeknownst to the author. Failing to grasp his characters' independence, Conan Doyle did not realize that one of them had entirely escaped his control and was amusing himself by misleading his detective.

By undertaking a theoretical reflection on the nature of literary characters, their unsuspected abilities, and the rights they are entitled to claim, this book intends to reopen the file of The Hound of the Baskervilles and finally to solve Sherlock Holmes's incomplete investigation-and in so doing, to allow the young girl who died on bleak Dartmoor and has wandered for centuries since in one of those in-between worlds that surround literature, to find her rest at last.

Chapter Two Investigation

I

In London

One morning Sherlock Holmes is visited at his London flat in Baker Street by a country practitioner, Dr. Mortimer. He is carrying a document dated 1742, entrusted to him by his friend, Sir Charles Baskerville, who has died tragically three months earlier. This document, handed down from generation to generation, relates the legendary death of Hugo Baskerville, who was said to have been slain by an enormous hound of diabolical aspect as he was chasing a young woman who had escaped from the manor house where he had imprisoned her.

Sherlock Holmes shows little interest in Dr. Mortimer's document, which he deems interesting only "to a collector of fairy tales." But the doctor hasn't come only to tell about events long past. He has come to request Holmes's aid. He has been wondering if, more than two centuries after its first crime, the Hound of the Baskervilles hasn't just made its reappearance.

* * *

Dr. Mortimer then tells a strange tale, the story of the death of his friend and neighbor Sir Charles Baskerville, Hugo's descendant. Sir Charles had the habit of strolling every evening in a yew-tree alley on the grounds of his manor house. Three months before Dr. Mortimer's visit to London, Sir Charles went out one night as usual, but did not return. At midnight, his servant, Barrymore, finding the door unlocked, grew worried and went out in search of his master. He found him dead in the yew alley, without any mark of violence on his body but with his face profoundly distorted. Everything indicated that Sir Charles had been the victim of a heart attack, and that indeed was the conclusion of the police investigation.

Dr. Mortimer, however, is not satisfied with this conclusion. He believes that Sir Charles Baskerville's death cannot be separated from the legend of the evil hound. His friend had lived in dread, convinced that a curse had weighed over his family for centuries and that the monster was bound to reappear. This, Dr. Mortimer reasons, could not be unrelated to his friend's death.

But above all Dr. Mortimer's reasoning is built on his access to the scene of the murder. There he saw, about twenty yards from the body, the footprints of a gigantic hound. These prints were on the path itself, not on the grass borders to either side of it. The prints escaped the attention of the police who, since they were unaware of the legend of the Baskervilles, had no reason to be interested in marks of this sort.

But they immediately attract the attention of Holmes, who subjects Dr. Mortimer to close questioning about the murder scene. These questions elicit the importance of a wicket-gate opening from the yew alley onto the moor. The victim must have paused for some minutes in front of this gate; the fact that the ashes from his cigar fell twice testifies to this. It was as if he were waiting to meet someone.

Holmes also pays attention to the variations in the footprints left by Baskerville. According to the doctor's testimony, the prints changed their appearance as soon as Baskerville went past the gate giving onto the moor, as if he were "walking upon his toes." Holmes is careful not to neglect this detail and suggests a hypothesis to Watson early on:

"Mortimer said that the man had walked on tiptoe down that portion of the alley."

"He only repeated what some fool had said at the inquest. Why should a man walk on tiptoe down the alley?"

"What then?"

"He was running, Watson-running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face."

"Running from what?"

"There lies our problem. There are indications that the man was crazed with fear before ever he began to run."

To understand what happened, Dr. Mortimer comes close to resorting to a supernatural explanation. Before the event, at least three people have seen on the moor "a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral." Their testimonies agree perfectly, all suggesting that the legendary hound has reappeared.

* * *

Keenly interested in this story, Holmes asks Dr. Mortimer to go to the train station in London to greet Henry Baskerville, Sir Charles's nephew and heir to the fortune, who is arriving from abroad. He instructs him to come again the next morning, bringing the young man with him, leaving Holmes some time to think.

The next day, Henry Baskerville presents himself at the detective's flat and tells him of several mysterious occurrences that have befallen him since he arrived in England. First, he received that very morning in his hotel an envelope with an address written in rough characters, containing a sheet of paper with a single sentence formed of words cut out of the newspaper: As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor. Only the word "moor" is written in ink. This letter is all the stranger since no one could have known that Henry Baskerville was going to stay at this hotel; the decision had been made at the very last moment by Dr. Mortimer and Henry himself.

Reconstructing the way the letter was composed is child's play for Holmes. Asking Watson to hand him the previous day's Times, he finds all the words of the anonymous message in an article on free trade, except for the word "moor." Familiar with the characteristics of type in most of the major newspapers, and thus able to identify an editorial in the Times, Holmes easily guesses the source.

But he doesn't stop there. He also determines, by observing the shape of the letters, that the message was cut with short-bladed scissors. What's more, the fact that the pen spluttered twice in a single word and that the ink ran dry three times indicates to him that the letter was written in a hotel, a place where pens are of poor quality and inkwells seldom filled.

* * *

Receiving this anonymous letter is not the only peculiar thing that has happened to Henry Baskerville since he arrived in London. Urged by Holmes to tell him about even the most trifling incidents, he tells him that one of his shoes-he had put a pair of them outside his hotel room-disappeared during the night. Holmes at the time pays little attention to this.

But the detective shows more interest the next day when Baskerville tells him that not only was his shoe not returned to him, but that another one, belonging to a more well-worn pair, is now nowhere to be found. A hotel employee, when summoned, is incapable of explaining this series of disappearances.

This time Holmes seems much more concerned about Baskerville's revelations:

"Well, well, Mr. Holmes, you'll excuse my troubling you about such a trifle-"

"I think it's well worth troubling about."

"Why, you look very serious over it."

"How do you explain it?"

"I just don't attempt to explain it. It seems the very maddest, queerest thing that ever happened to me."

"The queerest perhaps-" said Holmes thoughtfully.

* * *

Strange occurrences seem to accumulate during Henry Baskerville's and Dr. Mortimer's stay in London. Just after this interview, Holmes and Watson follow the two men out and notice that they are being followed by a hansom cab. They rush toward it, but its driver spurs the horse on. Although they are unable to catch up with the cab, the two investigators glimpse "a bushy black beard and a pair of piercing eyes" staring at them through its side window.

Having taken down the number of the vehicle, Holmes summons the driver to his flat. The driver is unable to provide a precise description of his passenger; he can tell Holmes only that the man told him he was a detective and offered him two guineas to obey his orders without asking questions. The driver and the detective had followed Mortimer and Baskerville from the train station to Holmes's flat before taking flight when they were spotted.

At Waterloo Station, where he asked to be driven, the mysterious passenger paid the sum promised, then turned to the driver and said, "It might interest you to know that you have been driving Mr. Sherlock Holmes." The actual Holmes, laughing, obtains a rough, disappointing description of his passenger from the driver:

"And how would you describe Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"

The cabman scratched his head. "Well, he wasn't altogether such an easy gentleman to describe. I'd put him at forty years of age, and he was of a middle height, two or three inches shorter than you, sir. He was dressed like a toff, and he had a black beard, cut square at the end, and a pale face. I don't know as I could say more than that."

"Colour of his eyes?"

"No, I can't say that."

"Nothing more that you can remember?"

"No, sir; nothing."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard Copyright © 2008 by Les Editions de Minuit. Excerpted by permission.
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