The Hound of Baker Street

Every so often, I walk down one of Edinburgh’s steep hills to the Conan Doyle Medical Centre, so called because of its proximity to an old stone-built cottage. In the garden of this cottage there stands the sculpture of a howling dog – a second clue to the fact that this was one of the childhood homes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Each time I stop and stare, and inevitably another howling hound springs into my head and carries me all the way to Dartmoor, where one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous cases is set. It’s a long way too from the banalities of monthly medical prescriptions, though Conan Doyle was himself a medical practitioner, and an impecunious one, until he took up his pen and, instead of scribbling out a prescription, created his famous detective. Sherlock Holmes is beautifully conceived, with a number of convincing and fascinating facets, the most pronounced of which is his austerely unflinching rationalism, especially in the face of profound mystery, or even the supernatural, and there’s no more striking example of this conflict between the rational and the irrational than The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). The Dartmoor setting is dramatic, unsettling and as crucial to the story as the bleak Yorkshire moors of Emily Brontë to Wuthering Heights, or Egdon Heath to Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. In these cases, as with Dartmoor, the landscape is solitary, brooding, enduring and, in spite of its diurnal charms, somehow an enemy to reason and to civilization. Humanity is not in control here – something else is. You could call it time, which dwarfs man into insignificance, or you could call it something more disturbing. And so you enter the realm of the unknown, with all the fear and dread and horrors that go with it – gothic horrors that are intensified by the descriptions of the Great Grimpen Mire, a huge matted expanse of bog, awash with foul slime and rank weeds, filling the air with an odour of death and decay. Sufficiently creepy, you would think. But it’s more than that. Something else hangs heavily over the Mire – a lingering malignant melancholy, threatening danger and death. It’s as if the Mire is in fact a character in the novel, more powerful than the human protagonists. And it is this atmosphere that Dr James Mortimer brings with him when he arrives in the sober, logical world of Baker Street and the shared lodgings of Dr Watson and Mr Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is the ultimate antagonist of all this: not only is he the supreme rationalist, he is also a cool moralist with an intellectual determination to unmask crime and pursue the criminal to a fitting and sometimes grisly end that does not necessarily accord with police practice. Holmes is his own man, an individualist and an eccentric with absolutely no interest, Watson tells us, in whether the Earth moves round the sun or the other way about, so wholly focused is he on the human problems to which he must find the solution. And yet in startling contrast to these characteristics, he too is a hound, a powerful hound. In one of the many Sherlock Holmes stories Dr Watson is impressed by the sight of his detective friend down on all fours, sniffing after clues, and looking for all the world like an actual bloodhound, intent on the trail of evidence. In the case of the Baskerville narrative it’s the story of a relentless sleuth, a two-legged hound tracking down a horrible four-legged one, the ultimate hound of reason, one of the hounds of God, if you like. Holmes, assisted by Watson, is tasked with tracking down the murderer of Sir Charles Baskerville of Baskerville Hall, a victim, so seems, of the Baskerville family curse: a ghastly luminous hound with fire bursting from its jaws, its eyes glowing with a smouldering glare, and its savage hackles and dewlaps outlined in flickering flame. The hound did not tear out the throat of its gentlemanly prey, as it had in the case of Sir Charles’s ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, but it did pursue him screaming down the ghostly Yew Alley, where he’d been waiting to meet some mysterious person, until he finally dropped dead from the effects of terror on a weak heart. The hound’s gigantic footprints were found at the scene. Naturally Holmes doesn’t believe a word of this, but he accepts the case, convinced that the perpetrators are both human and canine, and encouraged to do so by the arrival in England from America of the new heir, the young Sir Henry Baskerville, come to enter into his inheritance, in spite of the overhanging curse. It doesn’t take Conan Doyle long to set us thinking and guessing as to certain events in the equation: why do two of Sir Henry’s boots go missing immediately after his arrival, and why is it only one boot each time from two different pairs, one new, one old? Who is the black-bearded man seen spying on him as soon as he arrives in London? Why do Mr and Mrs Barrymore, the Baskerville Hall servants, behave so oddly, especially at night, and why does Mrs Barrymore sob so bitterly during the hours of sleep? What is the relevance to the story of the murderous criminal recently escaped from the great granite prison on Dartmoor, and now at large in the vicinity? Who is the mysterious stranger spotted by Dr Watson out on the moor? And what of the apparently eccentric naturalist called Stapleton, who seeks out rare plants and chases butterflies sure-footed across the deadly Great Grimpen Mire, in which ponies are seen to perish, sucked to a horrible death? Then there is Stapleton’s sister, who like Mrs Barrymore seems to harbour some dark secret, and to whom the young Sir Henry quickly becomes attracted, much to Stapleton’s annoyance. And finally there is the Mire itself, the place where we are already beginning to feel everything must end, as indeed it does. Looming through the mysteries is one certainty: whether Holmes’s opponents are human, canine, supernatural, or all three, there is the fourth factor of the landscape. No matter how clever you are, how dedicated to logic and truth, you cannot reason with the Mire. Put one foot wrong and it will destroy you. And yet the author has established all these intriguing facts and fancies in just a few pages. His economy and audacity as a writer are remarkable. In fact Conan Doyle was a very clever man. Many another author of his era might have begun the novel with the gruesome tale of the Baskerville curse, the howling of the spectral hound, and the story of Sir Charles’s terrifying end. Instead, you are introduced to a couple of bachelors in their comfortably detached Baker Street rooms; the great detective and his duller but faithful companion and disciple, Dr Watson, who does his best to emulate the master’s deductive methods but is proved wrong at every turn. Rationalism, routine and calm prevail in the opening chapter, so brilliantly begun with this unremarkable sentence: ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.’ The apparently innocuous opening sentence tells you a lot about Holmes, Dr Watson and the relationship between them in their sedate residence, so that you are led on more readily to accept the melodramatic old-world document read out by Dr Mortimer, albeit with tongue in cheek, for the moment. Holmes on the other hand is so bored by it that he openly yawns and throws his fag-end into the fire.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Christopher Rush 2023