When one speaks of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, visions of foggy London streets, hansom cabs, the Diogenes Club and the dim-witted bobbies from Scotland Yard come to mind. You don’t think of psychic investigations. Holmes forthrightly declared no belief in the supernatural, confining his methods to the natural. Still, Doyle couldn’t resist presenting many of the Holmes stories with a ghostly air. Doyle had the gift for that scary bit inside a story that makes your eyes widen a little, the skin on the back of your neck tighten, what Graham Greene called “genuine spine-creeping melodrama”.
No stranger to the ghost story, Doyle’s best work includes several suspense or actual horror stories. Classics like “The Ring of Thoth” (1890), “Lot 249” (1892), and “The Terror of Blue John Gap” (1910) demonstrate that Conan Doyle could tell a chiller without Holmes and Watson. Other stories (many of which are collected in By the Fire Tales (1904) utilize non-supernatural means to give the reader a jolt. The suspense classic “The Brazilian Cat” describes an unwitting heir who is thrust into a cage with a jaguar and his harrowing escape and revenge.
When people do recall that Doyle could write horrifically they usually think of his masterwork The Hound of the Baskervilles (August 1901 – April 1902) containing such creepy passages as “…there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.” but Doyle used more than just false monsters to create a thrill.
The cult held a fascination for Doyle, especially groups originating in America. Though none of these groups ever worshipped Yog-Sothoth they still generated plenty of fear. In his first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, John Ferrier and his adopted daughter are surrounded by hostile Mormons. Their failed escape is some of the best suspense writing Doyle ever did. Though Doyle inaccurately portrays the Mormons, he is able to make them appear sinister and alien.
Conan Doyle repeated the cult device many times in later tales like “The Final Problem” (December 1893), with Moriarty’s ring of criminals, “The Dancing Men” (December 1903), has Abe Slaney of the Chicago Mafia, “The Red Circle” (March – April 1911) and its Sicilian-style organization, and the Scrowers from the final novel, The Valley of Fear. (September 1914-May 1915).
Perhaps the best known cult story is “The Five Orange Pips.”(November 1891) which features the KKK and a deadly message from the American South, five orange seeds sent to each man about to die. Not even Holmes can save the Openshaw family from the long reach of the KKK. For the author the mere crimes of such organizations were meat enough to wrap a story around, for Sherlock does not succeed in preventing the deaths of the Openshaws, nor does he catch the villains.
The Sign of Four (Feb. 1890) features a secret group led by Jonathon Small, the one-legged man who steals back the Agra treasure from Major Sholto’s twins. Small terrifies their father to his grave, appearing in windows like a phantom. But it is the cripple’s companion who is the more famous villain in the novel. The mysterious, Tonga, whose diminutive size and agility make him seem an evil dwarf worthy of Le Fanu. The little murderer’s grisly work is glimpsed through the key-hole by Watson:
I stooped to the hole, and recoiled in horror. Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face — the very face of our companion Thaddeus … The features were set, however, in a horrible smile, a fixed and unnatural grin, which in that still moonlit room was more jarring to the nerves than any scowl or contortion …
Chapter Ten, “The End of the Islander”, is a classic chase scene with Holmes and Watson pursuing Jonathon Small down the Thames. The hideous Tonga has only been glimpsed vaguely and never encountered until Watson perceives him on the deck of the Aurora as a “huddled bulk”:
It straightened itself into a little black man — the smallest I have ever seen — with a great misshapen head and a shock of tangled, disheveled hair … He was wrapped in some sort of a dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed; but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half-animal fury.”
The savage Islander is shot from the ship’s deck, plunging into the river to die. But not all of Tonga’s horrors are finished. Holmes’ advice of “Fire if he raises his hand.” shows a close and deadly result:
“See here,” said Holmes, pointing to the wooden hatchway … There, sure enough, just behind where we had been standing, stuck one of the murderous darts which we knew so well. It must have whizzed between us at the instant we fired. Holmes smiled at it and shrugged his shoulder in his easy fashion, but I confess it turned me sick to think of the horrible death which had passed so close to us that night.
The Sign of Four and many other stories feature a Poe-esque specter of guilt that haunts the wrong-doers until vengeance arrives in the form of a crippled or angry visitor, much like the doppleganger in “William Wilson”. Similar to Coleridge’s mariner, the wicked wear their crimes like an albatross. Holmes’ job is merely to explain them, not absolve them.
Many Holmes stories have the appearance of supernatural encounters. The false monster story is almost as old as the Gothic itself. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) wrote lengthy novels on the Walpolian model which featured strained but logical explanations for her horrific visitants. Of all the Holmes “pseudo-horror” tales the false monsters are the most common. Some prove innocent enough like the small black child in “The Yellow Face” (February 1893) while others are the omens of murder. In some cases, a classic horror novel or story can be seen as an inspiration for Doyle’s outre creations.
Mood created by Doyle’s descriptions sometimes create a sense of danger and even supernatural threat. Using the kind of landscape description which made The Hound of the Baskervilles so successful, “The Devil’s Foot” (December 1910), depicts the Cornish landscape and sets the mood for an adventure that might pit Holmes against the Devil himself!
On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monstrous monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained burned ashes of the dead, and curious earth-works which hinted at prehistoric strife …
Unfortunately Lucifer never shows up. The Tregennis family appears to have been scared to death, though the actual killer is radix pedis diaboli, a West African poisonous root, administered by Mortimer Tregennis.
Again turning to Poe for inspiration, this time “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Doyle uses description to add tension to the crypt sequence in “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” (April 1927). The greedy Sir Robert Norberton inters his sister’s remains in the family crypt in a Roderick Usher-like fashion. Unlike Madeliene, Lady Falder does not rise again.
… Striking a match, he illuminated the melancholy place — dismal and evil-smelling, with ancient crumbling walls of rough-hewn stone, extending upon one side right up to the arched and groined roof which lost itself in the shadows above our heads. Holmes had lit his lantern, which shot a tiny tunnel of vivid yellow light upon the mournful scene. Its rays were reflected back from the coffin-plates, many of them adorned with the griffin and coronet of this old family which carried its honour even to the gate of Death.
The investigators are interrupted in their illicit business:
… A light streamed down the stairs, and an instant later the man who bore it was framed in the Gothic archway. He was a terrible figure, huge in stature and fierce in manner. A large stable-lantern which held in front of him shone upward upon a strong, heavily moustached face and angry eyes, which glared round him into every recess of the vault, finally fixing themselves with a dead stare upon my companion and myself.
In “The Greek Interpreter” (September 1893) Doyle creates horror by describing Paul Kratides who is being held captive and has had his face concealed:
… As he came into the circle of dim light which enabled me to see him more clearly, I was thrilled with horror at his appearance. He was deadly pale and terribly emaciated, with protruding, brilliant eyes of a man whose weakness was that his face was grotesquely criss-crossed with sticking-paster, and that one large pad of it was fastened over his mouth.
“The Speckled Band” (February 1892) offers some of Holmes’ best loved scary moments. The opening of the story is patterned after of a typical Victorian ghost story, while the situation is as old as The Castle of Otranto, in which the evil Manfred imprisons the Gothic heroine in a spooky castle. Dr. Grimesby Roylett does the same with the tragic Stoner sisters. In this passage, Watson (and the reader) are not sure what horror lurks in the bedroom of Helen Stoner. It may be supernatural:
“… For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then suddenly another sound, like that of a small kettle. The instant that we heard it, Holmes sprang from the bed, struck a match and lashed furiously with his cane at the bell-pull.
‘You see it, Watson?’ he yelled. ‘You see it?'”
Later we discover what the terrible creatures was that went by the name of the “Speckled Band” and the fate of its owner:
“… I took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat diamond-shaped head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.
“It is a swamp adder!” cried Holmes — “the deadliest snake in India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten …”
Doyle’s admiration for his friend Bram Stoker can be seen in the story of the much-wronged Mrs. Ferguson in “The Sussex Vampire” (January 1924), though it contains few scenes of horror. The only one is in the set up of the story, as the frustrated husband, tells Holmes of his wife’s vampirism:
…This was a small matter, however, compared with her conduct to her own child, a dear boy just under one year of age. On one occasion about a month ago this child had been left by its nurse for a few minutes. A loud cry from the baby, as of pain, called the nurse back. As she ran into the room she saw her employer, the lady, leaning over the baby and apparently biting his neck. There was a small wound in the neck from which a stream of blood had escaped …
As unearthly as Mrs. Ferguson sounds, the solution is natural enough. The mother is not sucking the baby’s blood but the poison from a Peruvian dart, an attack perpetuated by her jealous step-son. Doyle used two hot-blooded Latin woman in The Casebook, Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Gibson from “The Problem of Thor Bridge”(March 1922). In both cases he uses their nationality to explain acts of extreme emotionalism.
The science fictional experiments of Professor Presbury in “The Creeping Man” (March 1923) lead to some chilling scenes as the doctor peers into his daughter’s room through her window on the second floor, without a ladder, his face presses up against the glass(a Doyle favorite):
…It happened that the blind was up in my window, and there was bright moonlight outside. As I lay with my eyes fixed upon the square of light, listening to the frenzied barkings of the dog, I was amazed to see my father’s face looking at me … I nearly died of surprise and horror. There it was pressed against the window-pane, and one hand seemed to be raised as if to push up the window. If that window had opened, I think I should have gone mad …
Mr. Bennet, the doctor’s secretary, also has an unpleasant run-in with the oddly-altered researcher, prompting him to seek Holmes’ help:
It was a really terrifying experience, Mr. Holmes. I think that I am as strong-nerved as my neighbours, but I was shaken by what I saw. The passage was dark save that one window halfway along it threw a patch of light. I could see that something was coming along the passage, something dark and crouching. Then suddenly it emerged into the light, and I saw that it was he. He was crawling, Mr. Holmes — crawling! He was not quite on his hands and knees. I should rather say on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands. Yet he seemed to move with ease. I was so paralyzed by the sight that it was not until he had reached my door that I was able to step forward and ask if I could assist him. His answer was extraordinary. He sprang up, spat out some atrocious word at me, and hurried on past me, and down the staircase.
“The Creeping Man” is more than a little reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.(1886) as Presbury injects himself every nine days with the “Hyde-producing” chemical, an extract of Langur monkeys. Doyle based the story, in part, on actual research.
An interesting feature of this tale is that in other false monster stories, men like Roylett, Stapleton and Rucastle use animals for the purposes of murder (another ploy Doyle exploited time and again, and was copied by names as famous as Sax Rohmer and Ian Fleming), but in Presbury’s case, he is the animal!
The odd story of “The Blanched Soldier”(November 1926), told by Holmes himself, seems not so much a mystery (as the clues are vague and shadowy) but a horror tale disguise as a Holmes adventure. Doyle does a couple of masterful strokes in this tale, first describing the missing man, Godfrey Emsworth, like a phantom from the grave:
He was outside the window, Mr. Holmes, with his face pressed against the glass … He was deadly pale — never have I seen a man so white. I reckon ghosts may look like that; but his eyes met mine, and they were the eyes of a living man … There was something shocking about the man … It wasn’t merely that ghastly face glimmering as white as cheese in the darkness. It was more subtle than that — something slinking, something furtive, something guilty — something very unlike the frank, manly lad that I had known. It left a feeling of horror in my mind.
The hideous face pressed against the glass was used in The Sign of Four and “The Creeping Man”, but this gruesome specter of Godfrey is nothing compared to the story the man tells after Holmes cleverly divines his secret. While in South Africa fighting the Boers, Godfrey and two others get separated from their unit. The two companions are killed but Emsworth takes an elephant gun bullet to the shoulder and staggers on to find help. He collapses in a building, after finding one of several beds. He awakes:
… it seemed to me that instead of coming out into a world of sanity I had emerged into some extraordinary nightmare. The African sun flooded through the big curtainless windows, and every detail of the great bare, whitewashed dormitory stood out hard and clear. In front of me was standing a small, dwarf-like man with a huge, bulbous head, who was jabbering excitedly in Dutch, waving two horrible hands which looked to me like brown sponges. Behind him stood a group of people who seemed to be intensely amused by the situation, but a chill came over me as I looked at them. Not one of them was a normal human being. Every one was twisted or swollen or disfigured in some strange way. the laughter of these strange monstrosities was a dreadful thing to hear.
Godfrey is saved from the angry monsters by a Dutch-speaking doctor, who announces with some of Greene’s “spine-creeping melodrama” that “‘… You are in a Leper Hospital, and you have slept in a leper’s bed.'”
The horror the reader experiences is natural, instinctive, and very deliberate on Doyle’s part. He softens the blow by having Sherlock revealing his secret guest, a mysterious friend who has accompanied him from London, as a specialist in dermatology, Sir James Saunders, who pronounces Emsworth case as “pseudo-leprosy or ichthyosis”.
That Doyle knew his classics of horror, there can be no doubt, and so it is fitting that he should write one as well, with The Hound of the Baskervilles. The images of Holmes and Watson’s final showdown with the phantom hound are as worthy to stand in the Horror Hall of Fame as any passage from Frankenstein or Dracula:
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 downwards upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hands grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed 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. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flames. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
The false monster stories beg the question: is the monster real? Is there really a phantom hound, a vampire in Sussex, an ape creature in East London? The answer is eventually, NO. Sherlock, unlike his creator, always sides with logic and non-supernatural explanations. In “The Sussex Vampire” Holmes declares: “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” Doyle later in life was a fervent believer in the other-worldly, though after he wrote the majority of the Holmes stories.
Conan Doyle did use two real monsters. In “The Lion’s Mane”(December 1926) — unlike The Hound of the Baskervilles, where the appearance of the occult is perpetuated by a human villain — features a natural but uncommon enemy that kills Fitzroy McPherson, the school teacher. An avid swimmer, the man climbs the chalky cliffs to drop dead at Holmes’ feet, whispering “The Lion’s Mane”. (Curiously, this tale, like “The Blanched Soldier” is narrated by Holmes himself, after his retirement to bee-keeping.) The dead man has been gruesomely injured:
…His back was covered with dark red lines as though he had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge. The instrument with which this punishment had been inflicted was clearly flexible, for the long, angry weals curved around his shoulders and ribs. There was blood dripping down his chin, for he had bitten through his lower lip in the paroxysm of his agony. His drawn and distorted face told how terrible that agony had been.
Though Doyle throws much suspicion on the nasty Bellamys, brother and father of the beautiful Maude, as well as the daunted suitor, Ian Murdoch, the killer proves to be a sea creature, Cyanea capillata, or “The Lion’s Mane”, a deadly, stinging jelly-fish. The monster claims McPherson, his dog, and almost finishes off Murdoch as well before Holmes and his substitute Watson, Stackhurst, kill it with a boulder.
Doyle created many memorable baddies, Moriarty and Col. Sebastion Moran are two of the best known. But Baron Gruner in “The Illustrious Client”(February – March 1925) is a true psychopath, taking pleasure in disfigure women with acid, and the only villain to successfully thrash Holmes (something even Moriarty and Moran failed to do). Like a character from a Robert Bloch thriller he keeps a book with a record of all the women he has destroyed:
“… this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything about them. It was a beastly book — a book no man, even if he had come from the gutter, could have put together …”
The villain gets a taste of his own medicine though at the hands of one of his victims, Kitty Winter:
… I knelt by the injured man and turned that awful face to the light of the lamp. The vitriol was eating into it everywhere and dripping from the ears and the chin. One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed. The features which I had admired a few minutes before were now like some beautiful painting over which the artist has passed a wet and foul sponge. They were blurred, discoloured, inhuman, terrible.
Two influences come immediately to mind with this passage: Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray and Poe’s dissolving Mr. Valdemar in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. Doyle uses poetic justice to heighten the horror, for Adelbert Gruner was ” … certainly a remarkably handsome man. His European reputation for beauty was fully deserved.” Watson tells us this when he visits the Baron in a poorly conceived ruse, posing as an antique buyer. The scene is one of Watson’s most dire, as Gruner easily uncovers that he is spying for Holmes. Only the fortuitous arrival of Holmes and Kitty Winter and her vial of acid saves the good doctor.
Doyle’s first ambition was to present a difficult puzzle. After that was accomplished he allowed Watson and the reader those tense moments that make attractive reading. Though Holmes never came face to face with any true supernatural events or creatures, he did set the pattern for all who came after. Not the first “psychic detective”, Holmes is certainly the most famous “detective”. Hodgson’s Carnacki and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin are more than half in debt to Holmes. Both men had cases where the monsters proved as false as Stapleton’s hound. Doyle legitimized the false monster genre, begun by Anne Radcliffe a hundred earlier. The pairing of Holmes’ abilities with Dr. Van Helsing’s knowledge of the occult has given the horror genre its greatest heroes, the psychic investigators.
This article originally appeared in The Mystery Review.
