Top Ten Monsters of Arthur Conan Doyle

The Top Ten Monsters of Arthur Conan Doyle offer us a nice mix of supernatural and natural fiends and terrors. It is well known that ACD was a strong proponent of Spiritualism. As a believer in spirits, you would think he would have come up with a brilliant ghost story or two. This isn’t often the case. It is as Science Fiction writer he most often succeeds, making him far more like H. G. Wells than M. R. James.

It should surprise no one that a goodly amount of these stories appeared in The Strand Magazine, home to Sherlock Holmes. Despite that, I have not included any of my favorite Holmesian creepy-crawlies like the snake in “The Speckled Band” or the apish doctor in “The Creeping Man”. The good news: you still get Sidney Paget!  For more on Holmesian supernormal adventures go here. The best, of course, is The Hound of the Baskervilles, even though it proves to be a fake.

Ten

“The Brazilian Cat” (The Strand Magazine, December 1898) reprinted in Round the Fire Stories (1908).

It appeared, however, to be rather curious than angry. With a sleek ripple of its long, black back it rose, stretched itself, and then rearing itself on its hind legs, with one forepaw against the wall, it raised the other, and drew its claws across the wire meshes beneath me. One sharp, white hook tore through my trousers – for I may mention that I was still in evening dress – and dug a furrow in my knee. It was not meant as an attack, but rather as an experiment, for upon my giving a sharp cry of pain he dropped down again, and springing lightly into the room, he began walking swiftly round it, looking up every now and again in my direction. For my part I shuffled backwards until I lay with my back against the wall, screwing myself into the smallest space possible. The farther I got the more difficult it was for him to attack me.

A man is foolish enough to put himself in the hands of his rival for a fortune. The method of getting rid of pesky heirs: feed them to the panther in the zoological gardens. Doyle does a masterful job of describing this encounter between man and beast. This is not a supernatural tale but a terrifying adventure. I have talked before on the different levels of montrousness here.

Nine

“Playing With Fire” (The Strand, March 1900) reprinted in Round the Fire Stories (1908).

He flung open the door and we rushed in. She was there on the ground amidst the splinters of her chair. We seized her and dragged her swiftly out, and as we gained the door I looked over my shoulder into the darkness. There were two strange eyes glowing at us, a rattle of hoofs, and I had just time to slam the door when there came a crash upon it which split it from top to bottom.

The spirit proves to be a unicorn drawn from the nether realms. This is ACD’s Spiritualism story that we all expect. He leaves the question of whether it is real or hoax open for the reader to decide. Here we have the supernatural creature, not a natural one with horrible claws. Doyle suggests the danger is not only physical but psychical.

Eight

“The Parasite” (Harper’s Weely Magazine, November 10-December 1, 1894) reprinted book form in 1895.

Any one less like my idea of a West Indian could not be imagined. She was a small, frail creature, well over forty, I should say, with a pale, peaky face, and hair of a very light shade of chestnut. Her presence was insignificant and her manner retiring. In any group of ten women she would have been the last whom one would have picked out. Her eyes were perhaps her most remarkable, and also, I am compelled to say, her least pleasant, feature. They were gray in color,—gray with a shade of green,—and their expression struck me as being decidedly furtive. I wonder if furtive is the word, or should I have said fierce? On second thoughts, feline would have expressed it better. A crutch leaning against the wall told me what was painfully evident when she rose: that one of her legs was crippled.

Again, not a monster in the icky-blob sense, but a very evil person, Miss Penclosa. The woman herself is not threatening but her powers to control minds is. Imagine doing things you would never do, and being unable to stop. The mesmerist tales predate Doyle (who wrote this story the same year as George duMaurier’s classic Trilby.) as well as post-dates him, with L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s “Sorceress of the Strand” being a popular one. For more on mind-readers and mesmerists, go here.

Seven

“The Brown Hand” (The Strand Magazine, May 1899) reprinted in Round the Fire Stories (1908).

…At first I could see nothing, presently, as my eyes became accustomed to the faint light, I was aware, with a thrill which all my scientific absorption could not entirely prevent, that something was moving slowly along the line of the wall. A gentle, shuffling sound, as of soft slippers, came to my ears, and I dimly discerned a human figure walking stealthily from the direction of the door. As it emerged into the patch of moonlight I saw very clearly what it was and how it was employed. It was a man, short and squat, dressed in some sort of dark-grey gown, which hung straight from his shoulders to his feet. The moon shone upon the side of his face, and I saw that it was chocolate-brown in colour, with a ball of black hair like a woman’s at the back of his head. He walked slowly, and his eyes were cast upwards towards the line of bottles which contained those gruesome remnants of humanity. He seemed to examine each jar with attention, and then to pass on to the next. When he had come to the end of the line, immediately opposite my bed, he stopped, faced me, threw up his hands with a gesture of despair, and vanished from my sight.

Doyle’s Brown hand has a very real ghost looking for it. In this way he has two monsters for the price of one: the hand acts alone and the ghost searching for its missing limb. More on severed hand stories here.

Six

“The American’s Tale” (London Society, Christmas Number 1880) The story appears in My Friend the Murderer (1893).

…This here gulch was a marshy gloomy place, lonely enough during the day even; for it were always a creepy sort o’ thing to see the great eight- and ten-foot leaves snapping up if aught touched them; but at night there were never a soul near. Some parts of the marsh, too, were soft and deep, and a body thrown in would be gone by the morning. I could see Alabama Joe crouchin’ under the leaves of the great Flytrap in the darkest part of the gulch, with a scowl on his face and a revolver in his hand; I could see it, sirs, as plain as with my two eyes.

Doyle’s giant man-eating plant is from his second tale ever written. The first had a fake monster. This second is a real one. The way ACD tells the story through slangy American dialect works to hide much of the monster’s detail but we still Audrey II by the end.  I have written about the history of Plant Monsters here.

Five

The Lost World (1912)

Looking up, we could see them waving their arms from the rocks above and beckoning to us to join them in their refuge. We had both seized our magazine rifles and ran out to see what the danger could be. Suddenly from the near belt of trees there broke forth a group of twelve or fifteen Indians, running for their lives, and at their very heels two of those frightful monsters which had disturbed our camp and pursued me upon my solitary journey. In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant. We had never before seen them save at night, and indeed they are nocturnal animals save when disturbed in their lairs, as these had been. We now stood amazed at the sight, for their blotched and warty skins were of a curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved…Their slow reptilian natures cared nothing for wounds, and the springs of their lives, with no special brain center but scattered throughout their spinal cords, could not be tapped by any modern weapons.

There are plenty of monsters in this novel, including cavemen, pterodactyls and the dinosaurs in this climatic scene. Doyle gave us a way to combine cavemen and dinosaurs. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs exploded with dino SF after Doyle’s book. The various illustrators of the magazines and newspapers that carried the story had a field day. The illustrators of The Lost World are here.

Four

The Maracot Deep (1929)

Against one of the pillars of the hall a man was leaning, his arms folded upon his chest, and his malevolent eyes fixed with a threatening glare upon ourselves. I have called him a man, but he was unlike any man whom I have ever seen, and the fact that he both breathed and talked as no man could breathe or talk, and made his voice carry as no human voice could carry, told us that he had that in him which made him very different from ourselves. Outwardly he was a magnificent creature, not less than seven feet in height and built upon the lines of a perfect athlete, which was more noticeable as he wore a costume which fitted tightly upon his figure, and seemed to consist of black glazed leather. His face was that of a bronze statue—a statue wrought by some master craftsman in order to depict all the power and also all the evil which the human features could portray. It was not bloated or sensual, for such characteristics would have meant weakness and there was no trace of weakness there. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily clean-cut and aquiline, with an eagle nose, dark bristling brows, and smouldering black eyes which flashed and glowed with an inner fire. It was those remorseless, malignant eyes, and the beautiful but cruel straight hard-lipped mouth, set like fate, which gave the terror to his face. One felt, as one looked at him, that magnificent as he was in his person, he was evil to the very marrow, his glance a threat, his smile a sneer, his laugh a mockery…

This later novel features The Lord of the Dark Face, a sinister villain on the level of Satan. He led the Atlanteans to their doom. The hero of the novel defeats him by being filled with the spirit of another god, Warda. Doyle is channeling all kinds of H. Rider Haggard vibes, creating some thing that reads like an A. Merritt novel.

Three

“Lot No. 249” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1892) and was collected in Round the Red Lamp (1910).

In the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table, littered with papers, bottles, and the dried leaves of some graceful, palmlike plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration.

“Lot No. 249” feels like a bit of a redress for me. Doyle’s earlier Egyptian tale, “The Ring of Thoth” has resurrected Egyptians but no good mummy monsters. This story does have one. I have written about mummies at length here.

Two

“The Horror of the Heights” (The Strand Magazine, November 1913) was collected in Danger! and Other Stories (1918).

“But a more terrible experience was in store for me. Floating downwards from a great height there came a purplish patch of vapour, small as I saw it first, but rapidly enlarging as it approached me, until it appeared to be hundreds of square feet in size. Though fashioned of some transparent, jelly- like substance, it was none the less of much more definite outline and solid consistence than anything which I had seen before. There were more traces, too, of a physical organization, especially two vast, shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture.

This monster has suffered the fate of technological advance. We know there aren’t any weightless air serpents bothering airplanes. Still, a great tale. Not the first, but certainly the better told. I have written about air serpents at length here.

One

“The Terror of Blue John Gap” (The Strand Magazine, August 1910) was collected in The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales (1911). 

That picture, seen in the brilliant white light of the lantern, is etched for ever upon my brain. He had reared up on his hind legs as a bear would do, and stood above me, enormous, menacing—such a creature as no nightmare had ever brought to my imagination. I have said that he reared like a bear, and there was something bear-like—if one could conceive a bear which was ten-fold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth—in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs with their ivory-white claws, in his rugged skin, and in his red, gaping mouth, fringed with monstrous fangs. Only in one point did he differ from the bear, or from any other creature which walks the earth, and even at that supreme moment a shudder of horror passed over me as I observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great paws swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my broken lantern crashed to the earth, and I remember no more.

My favorite Doyle beastie is just that, a subterranean survival from another age. Doyle uses the senses so well in this tale, restricting sight until the very end. It is a master-class on how to write a monster story. I have written on this story at length here.

Conclusion

The Top Ten Monsters of Arthur Conan Doyle are a nice mix of supernatural and super-normal beasties. The Scottish writer knew more than just how to write a great detective story. He also knew how to create a good monster. It’s easy to rank him up there with his friends and Victorian contemporaries: H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and of course, H. G. Wells. Unlike these others, Doyle wanted to believe in such creatures as his The Coming of the Fairies (1922) showed. The Cottingley Fairies proved to be a hoax but Doyle never gave up on his Spiritualist beliefs.

There is a question (that I looked at elsewhere) whether a believer is a better writer of ghost stories than a non-believer? Arthur Conan Doyle may be the only believer who could tell a psychic story well. Algernon Blackwood was another but he scarred some good stories with psychical talk. Dion Fortune, Sax Rohmer, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, none was as good at it as Arthur Conan Doyle.

Thanks to The Arthur Doyle Encyclopedia for artwork.