Putting up my pistol, I performed as bidden. I had no sooner placed my own shoulder against the door than my friend left it and dashed to Jekyll’s worktable, which was heaped high with papers bearing notes and chemical symbols written in a close hand. He glanced at them briefly, then gathered them up in his arms and dumped them into a steel basin at his elbow. He then snatched up a bottle labeled ‘Alcohol,’ unstopped it, sniffed it to verify the contents, and upended it over the papers, soaking them thoroughly.
‘Hurry, Holmes!’ said I. A third party had joined Utterson and Poole on the other side of the door, and holding it against their combined efforts was taxing both my strength and the lock.
The detective stood back, struck a match, and tossed it into the bowl. Immediately the papers were engulfed in a sheet of flame that reached almost to the ceiling.
‘And with Jekyll’s notes go the chances of anyone ever repeating his diabolical experiments,’ said he, watching the conflagration as it consumed the hopes and dreams of that misguided unfortunate, Henry Jekyll. ‘You may come away from the door now, Watson.’
His final words were all but drowned out as the heavy door splintered beneath the blow of an axe.
Twenty
ADVICE FOR MR. STEVENSON
One day towards the close of spring I returned to Baker Street after a morning spent over the billiard table at my club to find Sherlock Holmes deep in conversation with a man whose features I could not see, seated as he was with his back to the door. Excusing myself, I was backing out to leave them in peace when Holmes hailed me and waved me back inside.
‘You might wish to meet our visitor, Watson,’ said he, rising. ‘As fellow writers, you have much in common. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, allow me to present Dr. Watson.’
I gazed with interest at the man who rose and turned to face me, extending his hand. I would have placed his age at forty, but in fact he was several years younger. Slight of build, he wore his black hair long and parted to one side and sported a drooping moustache which concealed the corners of pallid lips. His eyes were deep-set and melancholy, his face gaunt as that of my fellow-lodger and nearly as pale. He seemed sickly, and though his grip was firm I received the impression that he was not naturally robust. The black frockcoat he wore served only to heighten the funereal effect of his appearance.
‘You are familiar with the name of Stevenson,’ said Holmes with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. ‘He is the man who penned that story from which you enthusiastically read extracts for my benefit some months ago, the one about pirates and pieces of eight.’
‘Treasure Island!’ I cried, and fell to pumping our astonished visitor’s hand until his sallow cheeks flushed with embarrassment. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, of course! My congratulations upon a fine example of storytelling. When Jim Hawkins encounters Ben Gunn —’
‘Enough, Watson, enough!’ chuckled Holmes. ‘It’s plain that you are causing our guest discomfort. He has come not to talk of past triumphs but to lay the groundwork for his next literary effort. I have been filling him in upon the details of our recent adventure with the late Henry Jekyll and his unlamented companion, Edward Hyde.’
‘That is correct,’ said our visitor, in whose cultured speech I thought that I detected a trace of an American accent. He indicated a notebook lying open upon the arm of the chair in which he had seen sitting, its pages filled with closely-written script. ‘After substantial argument I have persuaded Mr. Holmes to provide me with a fairly complete account of the affair. I hope to publish it in the form of a case history after I have spoken with one or two of the other principals involved.’
I looked at Holmes in reproach. He shrugged.
‘My dear fellow, do not be disheartened. I have betrayed no trust which has not already been betrayed. Too many at Whitehall were privy to the secret. It was bound to be leaked by someone sooner or later. I have been unable to convince Mr. Stevenson that he knew quite as much about the affair as I did when he arrived.’
‘Concerning the facts, yes.’ agreed the other. ‘But the personal slant was missing. Mr. Holmes has been gracious enough to supply that essential ingredient. I have nearly enough now to begin writing.’
‘A most bizarre episode,’ I commented, repressing a shudder at the memory of recent events. The newspapers had only just ceased carrying eulogies for the departed Henry Jekyll, who was interred late in March following a simple service over his closed casket. At the time, it was said, pallbearers had commented upon the surprising lightness of the receptacle as they were carrying it down the steps of the church.
‘I quite agree. Mr. Holmes’s version of the story proved most enlightening. He is a remarkable man. Do you know that he divined without my telling him that I had spent a great deal of time in the American West, particularly round San Francisco? Something about my speech. I think that I shall have no difficulty making him the hero of my account.’
Holmes held up a hand. ‘I am afraid that I cannot allow you to do that, Mr. Stevenson. No, no — hear me out. There is a serious possibility that the law, particularly a certain Scotland Yard Inspector of my acquaintance, will accuse me of withholding evidence if my name is allowed to appear in any active capacity. There is also the little matter of my having killed a man, and self-defence or no, I am far too busy at the moment to waste my time engaging in idle banter with some barrister at the Assizes. Newcomen was angry enough when I did not make good on my promise to provide him with a solution by the end of March; I would rather not rub salt into wounds which are still raw. I have your own reputation in mind as well, for any mention of Dr. Watson or myself would automatically establish yours as an account of an actual event, and I have already decided that no-one is going to believe you. You would spare yourself much pain if you published it as fiction and left us out of it. The tale is entertaining enough to assure you a permanent place in literature, but as a documentary it rings much too fancifully and could expose you to ridicule. I commend to you, sir, the writing of a thriller which will captivate the world, but to let what is past remain in the past. You would be doing both the world and yourself a very great favour.’
Throughout this monologue, Stevenson’s expression changed from one of bewilderment to protest, from protest to dismay, and finally as the validity of Sherlock Holmes’s argument became clear, to grudging acquiescence.
‘But how shall I go about it?’ he demanded. ‘I can alter the facts to say that Jekyll fulfilled his intention to poison himself, but that is only one problem among many. What shall I tell my readers when they ask me where I got my inspiration?’
The detective smiled, and again the mischievous light danced in his grey eyes. ‘You are the writer; use your imagination. Tell them you dreamt it.’
Robert Louis Stevenson forgot himself so far as to smile at this pleasantry, but it was evident by the thoughtful look upon his face that his imaginative brain was already at work. And when, some months later, his account swept the reading public by storm and it came time to explain to a curious world where he obtained such an intriguing idea, I was not very much surprised to learn that he had not forgotten the advice which Sherlock Holmes had given him.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If we are to accept the evidence of recent book lists, which fairly shudder beneath the weight of “newly discovered” titles by John H. Watson, M.D., it would appear that the good doctor wrote a great deal more than he published, and was in fact one of the most prolific authors of his or any other time. The very limits of human nature insist that he could not have penned all of them, and it naturally follows that many are forgeries, a situation that has made the going difficult for those few which, for lack of evidence to the contrary, must be considered genuine. Such was the case with Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: Or the Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, and I harbor no illusions that the present volume does not face a journey equally as demanding.
Thus it became doubly important that I check and crosscheck each of the manuscript’s dubious points as it
arose, that I might arm myself against the brickbats that the unbelieving would hurl my way as surely as Tonga the Andamanese spat poison-tipped darts at Holmes, Watson, and Athelney Jones during the chase sequence in The Sign of Four. I am therefore indebted to the following works for their safe and sure guidance through the mine field of Sherlockiana and Victoriana: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, by William S. Baring-Gould; Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, also by Baring-Gould; In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison; The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, by Vincent Starrett; The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, by Jack Tracy; and Naked Is the Best Disguise, by Samuel Rosenberg, the last of which was of no practical help at all in authenticating the manuscript, but whose out-landishly entertaining leaps to various conclusions concerning the relationship of Watson’s writing to the private and political opinions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his literary agent, helped keep aflame my interest in things Sherlockian.
For those who wish to delve further into the events contained between these covers, I heartily recommend The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. As a tale of terror, mystery, and tragedy it is hard to beat, and is one to which Hollywood has yet to do justice.
Finally, many thanks are due once again to William B. Thompson, a friend of long standing, for his spiritual support, the Arcadia Mixture, Ann Arbor scion of the Baker Street Irregulars, for comic relief, and to Sherlockians everywhere, latent and overt, for their continuing interest in the exploits of the world’s first consulting detective, and, as always, my family, because they are my family.
DR. JEKYLL’S “CASE OF IDENTITY”: A WORD AFTER BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
This is the one Hollywood didn’t like.
Too cerebral, they said; not at all like its predecessor, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count. (Never mind that they didn’t make that one, either.) Not enough slam-bang action, no midnight crypt visits, no caped vampires carrying off swooning females in diaphanous negligees, and only one special effect. Nothing that would translate into big box-office, like Ben’s trained rats or the pea-soup projectile vomiting of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Just Robert Louis Stevenson’s original vision restored, along with his subtextual commentary on late-Victorian hypocrisy, with the greatest detective who never lived folded into the mixture.
I wasn’t disappointed. Movie action on Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula had stalled, thanks mostly to the difficult people who were then representing the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate and who had insisted on entertainment negotiation rights and a whopping share of the proceeds therefrom; it was clear that if there was to be a motion picture about Holmes and Dracula, it would not be based on my book. Since
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes had received its sanction on the same terms, I wasn’t investing in sun block and a ticket to the Coast.
The reaction from the studios did, however, teach me something about the philosophy of film. Screenwriting is a limited art, circumscribed by the writer’s inability to climb inside the minds of his characters. Barring the creaky, overused technique of the voiceover, a character’s personality can be revealed only through action: Man kicks dog — villain; man rescues kitten — hero. The sight of Dracula sucking blood is not a positive character reference, but the tableau of Holmes advancing upon the vampire with crucifix in hand would qualify him for high office.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes would not play onscreen for the very reason that makes it unique in the world of the action-suspense yarn: it presents a man of intellect retracing the steps of another man of intellect through the labyrinth of the human mind. Bereft of physical evidence — telltale footprints, broken pen-points — Holmes is forced to track the vanished Jekyll’s movements through the books he studied in his quest for the cause and cure of personal evil. Andy Warhol may have contented himself with filming reel after reel of a man bent over a tome of science or philosophy, nothing moving but the pages and the smoke drifting up from the bowl of his pipe; Steven Spielberg (or more likely, Roger Corman or Joel Schumacher) may not. The greatest advantage enjoyed by the writer of fiction intended to be read is also the biggest roadblock to adaptation to the screen.
Stevenson presented The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a mystery, with Henry Jekyll’s lawyer, the dour Utterson, performing as detective. Until Edward Hyde’s suicide and the subsequent discovery of Hastie Lanyon’s posthumous narrative and Jekyll’s journal, the loathsome Hyde’s hold over respectable Henry Jekyll is kept from the reader. Time and the novella’s fame (people who have never read Stevenson and are unaware of the story and the many motion pictures that have been based upon it know immediately what is meant by the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde”) have rendered the mystery angle superfluous. As early as its first appearance on the Victorian stage, the tale was told in linear fashion, beginning with the medical man’s experiments and his first transformation and finishing with his demise. Every film version to date has followed that formula (appropriate word) as if the studios elected to option the deceased doctor’s journal over the Stevenson treatment.
But Sherlock Holmes is a detective. As such, his entry was dictated by convenience and reason to coincide with Utterson’s concern about the singular terms of his client’s will. All that follows is as Stevenson envisioned, albeit with a Doylesque twist and an ending more in keeping with the proactive role of the sleuth as hero. (More on that ending later; like the classic itself, the first incarnation bore little resemblance to the last.)
It’s been said that a trained researcher can deduce the nature of a pond by an examination of a single drop of water. Likewise a child of the twenty-first century, with no knowledge of the nineteenth, will someday be able to comprehend the surface and subterranean details of late-Victorian English society on the basis of a first-time reading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Only Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man came as close during the period to capturing the central angst of a civilization at odds with its own ideal.
All times are repressed. From the tyrannical Puritanism of Cromwell to the pressures exerted by the religious right and the politically correct left under Clinton, the artist has repeatedly been forced to fly in the face of a sanctimonious majority in the service of truth. The example of the widowed Queen Victoria demanded that drawing-room manners and public-school concepts of honor and fair play be exhibited on all occasions, while the evidence of her many children indicated a variety of pleasures in the bedchamber, courtesy of the late Prince Consort. The dream thus personified was to maintain one’s social standing without neglecting the baser appetites; to misbehave gloriously and with impunity. Let Dorian’s likeness display the physical signs of his debauchery to a sealed room while its original turned the unlined face of an angel to the world. Permit Jekyll to practice good works for the admiration of his colleagues, and Hyde to taste the smorgasbord of sordid delights to be found in the East End. It’s the wish-dream of every pubescent schoolboy who longs to be invisible so he can enter and exit the girls’ locker-room at will.
How natural, then, that the ultra-conservative John H. Watson — wounded war veteran, incorruptible physician, loyal companion — and the Bohemian Sherlock Holmes — student of human frailty, bemused cynic, abuser of drugs and alcohol — should find themselves drawn into the two halves of Jekyll’s world. The detective will not hesitate to follow the spoor through opium dens and brothels. The doctor will trail him reluctantly, but act with decision to snatch his friend back onto safe ground should his eagerness precipitate him over the edge of the abyss. It was not unique territory for this partnership: “A Case of Identity” and “The Man With the Twisted Lip” had profound things to say about double lives and subsumed personalities. And as they had been with Dracula’s invasion of Holmes’s London, the time and setting made the prospect of a summit inevitable.
First and foremost, I am an entertainer, not an academic. I’m incapable of allowing any tale to remain sedentary. The insertion of the f
renetic hansom cab chase in Chapter Eleven, with its toppling peddlers’ carts and mud-splattered policemen, earned favorable comments from reviewers — jaded by the influx of Sherlockian pastiches post-Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Percent Solution — for its humor and originality. I humbly accept the compliment of hilarity, but as for being a prime mover I must pass that credit on to the kings of silent comedy whose work inspired the scene. I suspect the maestri Keaton and Chaplin would have found an appreciative audience in both Holmes and Watson, one for the precision of the stunt direction, the other for the schtik.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes is not as well known as Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula; the latter remained in print without interruption for twenty years, and has appeared twice since, with only brief periods of unavailability. This publication marks the latter’s first solo appearance since the Penguin reissue in 1980. The difference has to do with the vast following claimed by Holmes and Dracula individually, while the Stevenson ménage has yet to achieve cult status. Yet I consider Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes the better book. It’s a more mature work, the Sherlockian rhythms are more faithful to the model, and the title is superior. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula still sounds too much like a film directed by Edward Wood, Jr. I only settled on it because I couldn’t think of a better way to get the names of both hot-button characters up front.
Not everyone at Doubleday & Co. agreed with me. One of the mental giants in sales and marketing wanted to call the book Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, on the theory that bred-in-the-bone Sherlockians looked up all pastiches under “S” in Books in Print. I ignored the twerp.
I placed more faith in the suggestion of my editor, Cathleen Jordan, that my original ending — Jekyll/Hyde committing suicide while Holmes and Watson look on — added nothing to Stevenson’s and relegated the detective and his amanuensis to the roles of passive witnesses. The present conclusion, in which the pitiable schizophrenic forces Holmes to put him out of his misery (or them out of their misery), preserves Jekyll’s tragic heroism while making Holmes’s part in it more dynamic. The only editorial complaint, as I recall, was that the new ending added twenty pages to the narrative. Consider it the author’s equivalent of a director’s cut.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes Page 19
