Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  * See Shoshana Felman, “De Sophocle à Japrisot (via Freud), ou pourquoi le policier?” [From Sophocles to Japrisot (via Freud), or Why the Mystery Story?], Littérature, Larousse, 1983,No. 49.

  * See Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, translated by Carol Cosman, New York: The New Press, 2000.

  * To limit myself to just one more example, Sheppard is supposed to have killed Ackroyd because the latter was preparing to reveal that Sheppard had been for years blackmailing Ackroyd’s companion, who had gotten rid of her husband so that she could live with Ackroyd. This blackmail is revealed in a letter received by Ackroyd on the morning of his death, a letter that the police do not find in the room where the corpse is found; the murderer, presumably, has made off with it. But it’s Sheppard himself, when all the proofs have disappeared, who tells the police about the existence of this blackmail! Strange compulsion, really, on the part of a murderer, who seems at times to be doing all he can to help the police and get himself arrested.

  * See Pierre Bayard, Enquête sur Hamlet: Le Dialogue de sourds, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002.

  * An assertion that should be tempered, taking into account variations and rough drafts. On this separation between material closure and subjective closure, see also Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, op. cit., pp. 103–110.

  II

  The Plural Story

  DETECTIVE CRITICISM is suspicious by nature. While other readers, whose critical sense is less developed, quickly accept what is told them without asking questions, the practitioner of detective criticism pays close attention to the way the facts are presented, accepting no testimony without reservation and systematically calling into question everything that is reported to him.

  Attentive to the fact that he is always reading someone’s narration, and doubting in principle everything he is told, the detective critic sifts each bit of testimony, questioning the author, the circumstances in which he formulated the story, and the motives that led him to express himself. To put it another way: detective criticism draws the fullest consequences from the fact that many elements presented to us in a text as established truths are actually, when looked at carefully, only eyewitness accounts.

  The Sherlock Holmes adventures, particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles, offer one surprising characteristic reinforcing this point: the facts are communicated to us not by the author himself or by an omniscient narrator to whom a certain credibility is naturally due, but by a companion of the detective’s, Dr. Watson.

  There is nothing original about this narrative device; it is common for a character in a novel to take it upon himself to tell the story. It takes on a special interest, however, when one looks at one’s reading as a detective investigation, in which everything should be open to suspicion. From this perspective, The Hound of the Baskervilles does not relate the actions that occurred on the Devonshire moor or the investigation of Sherlock Holmes; it relates only these actions or this investigation as Dr. Watson perceived them.

  When a character can intervene in this way, we readers are never dealing with bare facts, but only with stories about facts, subjected to the prism of a subject—of a particular intelligence, sensibility, and memory—and therefore eminently problematic. Everything contained in this story, including Holmes’s conclusions, stems from an eyewitness account. True, the source of this account is peculiarly well informed and probably sincere, but he is nonetheless intimately involved in the affair, and therefore cannot claim to determine the truth of the reported events.

  Things become even more complicated when this narrator-character, already made questionable by his subjective involvement, is presented as a complete fool. The book in fact takes a malicious pleasure in displaying how little Watson understands of what is happening around him.

  The low opinion Holmes has of his friend’s intellectual capacities is no secret; it is demonstrated repeatedly throughout the accounts of his adventures. And it is stressed again at the very beginning of this book, in the conversation between the two friends before Dr. Mortimer’s first visit. Having asked Watson what reflections their client’s cane inspired, and having listened to Watson’s conclusions, Holmes replies:

  “Really, Watson, you excel yourself. [ . . . ] I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”30

  For a moment Watson delights in these compliments, which he was hardly expecting, given the way he is usually treated by the detective:

  He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval.31

  But Watson’s joy is short-lived; he soon understands where Holmes is leading him:

  He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

  “Interesting, though elementary,” said he, as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”

  “Has anything escaped me?” I asked, with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

  “I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”32

  To praise a friend for his help because he has led you to the truth through the accumulation of his mistakes is a dubious compliment. But that is the only way we can read Holmes’s definition of Watson as a “conductor of light.” His ability to stimulate Holmes’s thinking is proportional to his fundamental miscomprehension of reality.

  It is difficult to fault Holmes, though, when we watch Watson conduct his investigations throughout the novel. It is not just Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick that Watson fails to properly analyze; he misunderstands everything that occurs (at least from Holmes’s point of view).

  It is true that Watson, with Sir Henry’s help, shows himself capable of clearing up the mystery surrounding the curious behavior of the Barrymores, and manages to connect them with the convict Selden. But this is one of only a few successes Watson records in the entire book, and it is actually due to Mrs. Barrymore’s confession. Most of the time he misses the truth.

  For example, he proves incapable of guessing the identity of the mysterious person glimpsed on the moor—Holmes himself. And even with Frankland’s help in spotting and trailing him, he still allows himself to be identified by Holmes from his telltale cigarette stub before he can recognize Holmes.

  Watson shows himself equally inept at unraveling the relationships that link the characters living on the moor. He does not realize that the Stapletons are actually married, that there is a love affair between Laura Lyons and the naturalist, or that the latter is in fact a Baskerville.

  But Watson is not content merely to misunderstand everything that is happening around him; he also displays reprehensible negligence, which almost costs Sir Henry Baskerville his life. It is because Watson failed to keep watch over him that Sir Henry runs the risk—at least in Holmes’s reconstruction of the event—of being attacked by the hound, which, led astray by the scent on the clothing, finally pursues Selden.

  Watson’s constant errors of interpretation have the effect of continually confronting readers with passages they will later discover are based entirely on misperceptions.* So long as Watson continues to
be wrong, so long as he feeds the reader fallacies, it is difficult to believe the final account in which he implicitly affirms his friend’s conclusions.

  The question of the reliability of the narrator is all the more important in The Hound of the Baskervilles since Watson often entrusts the narration to other characters, allowing their voices to tell the story. But their statements are often not directly verifiable, even if their credibility can be supported in other ways.

  A characteristic example of this delegation of narration is the one offered at the beginning of the book to Dr. Mortimer. He is of course not the only person to have seen the corpse of Sir Charles Baskerville, but he is the only one to have discovered a dog’s footprints nearby, which he curiously deemed it wise not to mention to the police investigators:

  There was a thrill in the doctor’s voice which showed that he was himself deeply moved by that which he told us. Holmes leaned forward in his excitement, and his eyes had the hard, dry glitter which shot from them when he was keenly interested.

  “You saw this?”

  “As clearly as I see you.”

  “And you said nothing?”

  “What was the use?”

  “How was it that no one else saw it?”

  “The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought. I don’t suppose I should have done so had I not known this legend.”33

  Mortimer then loses the narrator’s role, which he has occupied only for a few pages. But his story is decisive for the whole case, since it is he who introduces the hypothesis of the dog and, at the same time, of murder. Holmes’s entire investigation and the results he arrives at depend on the veracity of this initial testimony. If Mortimer, for whatever reason, has given an inexact version—for instance by mistaking the prints of some other animal for a dog’s—then the detective’s whole solution collapses. Here again, the fact that we’re dealing with eyewitness accounts has considerable consequences.

  The problem is that these doubts about Dr. Mortimer also apply to the other important characters in the case, all of whom are in the position of telling part of the story at one time or another, with the notable exceptions of Selden, who never appears directly, and the dog.

  We have to take Sir Henry Baskerville at his word, then, about the life he led before he arrived in Devonshire. We have to trust the Barrymores in their judgment of Selden’s personality, and the Stapletons on their life before they moved close to the Hall. We have to believe Laura Lyons about the circumstances in which her meeting with Sir Charles Baskerville was arranged, and Frankland about his reasons for refusing to see Laura Lyons.

  Even Sherlock Holmes’s narratives must be questioned when we recognize (as we do many times in just this one novel) that he makes mistakes. We learn about the investigations he claims to have been conducting in London while his friend was attending to Sir Henry Baskerville’s protection only from his own testimony, which shouldn’t necessarily be given a higher status than the testimonies of other characters.

  Despite his intelligence and his successes, Sherlock Holmes remains one character among many, and his vision of events, as it is communicated to us in his final analysis of the case, can only be one point of view—an interesting one, to be sure, because of his participation in the investigation, but one that does not preclude other, equally legitimate points of view.

  These constant delegations of narration do not absolve Watson of his initial responsibility, since each character’s narration is taken up—and necessarily revised—by him. But they tend to make his testimony more fragile, and therefore even less credible.

  The final result is that the reader who wants to form his own opinion has to deal with a multitude of uncertain accounts, some of which we may think are willfully falsified and all of which have been passed through the sieve of the main narration, Watson’s, which has been discredited from the very beginning. Faced with this patchwork narrative, only blind faith could impel a reader to accept without reservations the official truth about the tragic events that bloodied the Devonshire moor—the account that has been imposed on us for more than a century, even though it goes against common sense.

  * Like this one about the man on the tor: “But I had my own experience for a guide, since it had shown me the man himself standing upon the summit of the black tor. That, then, should be the centre of my search. From there I should explore every hut upon the moor until I lighted upon the right one. If this man were inside it I should find out from his own lips, at the point of my revolver if necessary, who he was and why he had dogged us so long. He might slip away from us in the crowd of Regent Street, but it would puzzle him to do so upon the lonely moor. On the other hand, if I should find the hut, and its tenant should not be within it, I must remain there, however long the vigil, until he returned. Holmes had missed him in London. It would indeed be a triumph for me if I could run him to earth where my master had failed.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 862)

  III

  In Defense of the Dog

  THE RECEIVED IMAGE of The Hound of the Baskervilles—an image that has gained strength from the film adaptations of the novel, all of which have confirmed the official version—is that of a somewhat fantastical tale in which a monstrous hound spreads terror on the English moor, driving its victims to death through fear or violence.

  Distrustful on principle, the detective critic cannot subscribe to such a simplistic view. Although the existence of a huge dog is attested to in the final scene, with several witnesses present, the dog’s responsibility for the various deaths is not at all as obvious as Holmes seems to think. An attentive examination of the three scenes in which it is supposed to have committed its murders should arouse our suspicion.

  Let us consider these scenes calmly, one by one, trying to dispel the fantastic atmosphere in which the story tries to immerse us and keeping to the facts alone.

  The circumstances of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death do indeed suggest that an extremely large dog has been on the scene. It is true that for most of our story, our only evidence of the dog’s existence is the testimony of Dr. Mortimer, but the dog will indeed appear in the final scene of the novel. It is not unlikely, then, that it was also at the scene of Sir Charles’s death. Is admitting that it was present enough to make it a murderer, or a murderer’s accomplice?

  While we may concede that any large dog is a potential murderer, the case against this particular dog is limited to a mere sighting as it ran by. On that basis, the charges against this animal should be reduced. But beyond that, the version presented by the doctor, and confirmed by Holmes, contains a whole series of improbabilities that should suffice to have it thrown out.

  These improbabilities arise when Holmes struggles to make two contradictory facts agree: the dog’s presence on the scene and the dog’s absence of aggressiveness. In fact, the victim bears no trace of bites, which would be highly unusual if the large, aggressive animal had been led to the scene with criminal intent.

  To solve this problem, Holmes presents the argument that if the dog caused Baskerville to die of fear, it didn’t subsequently approach the body, because hounds will not eat dead bodies. This assertion is backed neither by the actuality of the animal’s behavior nor by literary fictions, which, from Athalie’s dream* to “A Woman’s Revenge” by Barbey d’Aurevilly,* describe dogs devouring corpses without the slightest hesitation.

  But no hypothesis should be disregarded, and we can allow the supposition that this particular dog prefers only living flesh. Even so, herein lies the most complete improbability in the book, one that borders on material impossibility: the speed with which the action is supposed to have taken place. According to an examination of its footprints, the dog was about twenty yards away from its victim; at a full run, it was only a few seconds away from reaching him. How can we think that in such a brief time Sir Charles Baskerville could suffer a heart attack and die, leaving the dog time to make a precise enough diagnosis to decide, in the in
terest of its dietary preferences, to cease its efforts before reaching the body?

  As we will see farther on, the fact that the dog ran toward Baskerville and then abruptly stopped running can be explained much more simply. But Holmes is so locked into his scenario of the murderer-with-the-dog that none of the other hypotheses worthy of being examined is allowed across the threshold of his famous mind.

  The fantasy scenario of the murderer-with-the-dog so occupies Holmes’s imagination that it can function even in the dog’s absence. And that is just what happens at Selden’s death.

  Having taken refuge on the moor, where he lives in fear of being caught by the police and the army who have organized searches, the escaped convict falls off a cliff on a gloomy night and dies. Though there is nothing especially surprising about the manner of his death, Holmes detects the dog’s presence here too.

  It is true that, just before the body is discovered, Holmes and Watson hear cries coming from the moor, along with barking. But the cries can be readily explained if Selden, starting to fall and grabbing onto a bush or a rock for support, was crying for help. As for the barking, we imagine it is frequent in the countryside; furthermore it is heard at other times throughout the book, all of them apparently unconnected to murder.

  The first bit of evidence against the hypothesis of the dog is the absence of traces left by the animal, either on Selden’s body or on the ground around it. Yet the moor surrounds the rocky slope from which Selden fell, and an enormous animal of this sort would have left tracks that could be easily read.