Staff Pick - Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles by Pierre Bayard

[Brian Bess]

A short book with a thin premise

This is a short book. It would be even shorter without the first 30 pages or so, which consists of a lengthy but well-written summary of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles.’ While this recap is not really necessary to the audience for this book—for how many people would care to read this book without having first read the original?—it may serve useful for readers wishing to refresh their memories of the novel. I had just read ‘The Hound…’ and I read it, although I did not know that it would take up such a large portion of the book.

My first reservation concerns Bayard’s interpretation of this novel as a simple police procedural, a mystery containing an obvious solution in the manner of most of the stories that preceded it in the series. ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ however, is as much an atmospheric fantasy as it is a detective story. It owes as much to ‘Wuthering Heights’ or the frenzied stories of Edgar Allan Poe as it does to any previous detective fiction written by Doyle or anyone else. What Bayard interprets as Doyle ‘stacking the deck’ to make us believe the family legend of the Baskervilles as well as the possibility that it might be being reenacted in the novel’s present time I see as missing much of the force of the novel. In a Poe story, one doesn’t question the existence of Roderick Usher’s dead but zombie-like sister or whether the initial narrator of ‘Wuthering Heights’ REALLY perceives the ghost of Cathy trying to enter his room. Bayard carefully picks apart Doyle’s, through Watson’s, word choices—“running desperately,” “crazed with fear,” “the desolate, lifeless moor” He claims that these phrases deliberately manipulate the reader into accepting the pseudo supernatural explanation of seemingly bizarre events. I would counter, however, that this is word painting and mood setting, as any good storyteller and fiction writer would do. Poe, Lovecraft, and dozens of other writers have built entire careers on such techniques and Doyle is venturing into that territory and largely leaving realistic detective fiction behind, at least on this occasion.

Bayard also makes entirely too much of Doyle’s ‘hatred’ of his greatest creation. His explanation of how Doyle tried to kill off his hero and then reluctantly brought him back to life while resisting giving him full freedom to ‘live’ within the pages distorts his interpretation of the mystery while being oblivious to the other factors such as the aforementioned gothic mood setting as well as the broadening of his scope to encompass not only Watson’s experience but the effect of these ‘desolate, lifeless moors’ on its disturbed inhabitants. While he cites accurate instances of inconsistencies where the clues do not add up and even uses the analogy of the master magician focusing the audience’s attention elsewhere when he performs his real tricks, he fails to realize that he himself is duped by Doyle’s magic and pursues an alternate path to lead to the ‘real’ murderer, or rather, murderess. He attributes far too many qualities of a diabolical murderer to Beryl Stapleton than any of her actions warrant. While he makes some plausible points—the mysterious figure that trails Mortimer, Holmes and Henry Baskerville in London could quite possibly be Beryl—he follows a path to a conclusion that makes less sense than any conclusion accepted by Holmes, Watson or legions of readers for over a hundred years. Just to take one example, he simply states that Beryl tied herself up. How can one tie herself up, much less inflict bruises upon herself with the strength of a man? This statement alone is utterly absurd but Bayard fails to even provide a plausible explanation of the result.

This is a short book; therefore, this is a short review, which ends here.