Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  The murderer’s whole purpose in the book consists precisely of transforming the initial ordinary scene of an accident into a scene of a murder, by stressing both the nature of the death and the general atmosphere of tragedy. Or, if you prefer, he commits a murder by making us believe that there was a murder.

  To change the nature of Baskerville’s death is not only to make us believe in a murder where there was simply an accident; it is to invent, out of whole cloth, a murderer with a dog. It is to resurrect the monstrous creature of legend, by persuading a detective in love with abominable crimes that terror reigns on the moor, a terror that cries out for his presence and by doing so justifies his existence.

  All the events of this story, even the most harmless, in fact are subtly transformed by the murderer’s brush. Once we understand that the existence of the murder depends on the way certain facts are narrated, on the insistence on certain details, on the choice of certain images, we begin to grasp the trickery that has allowed the murderer to achieve his goals.

  In this sense, one could say that the murder recounted in The Hound of the Baskervilles is a murder by literature. It is the literary talent of the murderer that allows him to carry out the murder, a murder all the more cunning since the narrative that constructs it is murmured into the ears of dupes. A murder that culminates in a simple sentence, but that could not be perpetrated if it were not supported by the immense storytelling talent of the murderer, who manages to make us steadily see reality as something other than it is.

  This transformation manages to trick both the investigators and the reader, but it is its foremost addressee, Sherlock Holmes, whose credulity is the very motor of this story. It is a story invented and written for him, predicting before the start his very subtlest reactions.

  To say that Holmes is the addressee of this story is not only to observe that he is its main witness, since he himself leads the investigation; it is to assert that his presence in that role essentially creates the murder, which could not have taken place in his absence. The murderer needed Holmes in order to perpetrate the crime, for the detective is its centerpiece.

  Several times in the book, Holmes brags about not believing in the theory of the murderous hound—only to be convinced by the murderer of a different legend, that of the killer with the hound who executes his victims by heart attack:

  “I told you in London, Watson, and I tell you now again, that we have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel. [ . . . ] We could prove nothing against him. There’s the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a human agent we could get some evidence, but if we were to drag this great dog to the light of day it would not help us in putting a rope round the neck of its master.”98

  Several centuries after the primordial scene of Hugo Baskerville’s death, Holmes dotingly encourages a very similar legend, even though he is convinced that he has abandoned the original myth. The dog is indeed accompanied this time by its master, but it is nonetheless the same mythical creature.

  Holmes ends up being so taken in by this legend that he willingly promotes it to his companions. It becomes possible to regard him as the co-narrator of this unlikely story, embroidering the tapestry the murderer obligingly holds out to him, never realizing that he is being manipulated.

  It is not just Holmes’s predictable reactions that fulfill the murderer’s expectations; it is also Holmes’s thinking and his suggestions. When we listen, we hear a voice other than Holmes’s own, one that is expressed through him to lure listeners and readers away from the truth.

  Thus Holmes is co-narrator and even in a way accomplice to murder; not only could the murder not be realized in his absence, but he actually aids in its perpetration throughout the book—without being aware of it, but nonetheless with a good deal of persistence.

  If Holmes is indeed the unconscious coauthor of this story, it remains for us to identify his accomplice. Among all the narrators who succeed each other in this novel, which is the guilty one? Which is the one who, by subtly instilling the legend of the murderer-with-the-dog in the minds of characters and readers alike, hijacks their perception of reality in the service of his own criminal interests?

  * Even why he threatened Laura Lyons (“He frightened me into remaining silent” [The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit., p. 883]). But, if he did kill Sir Charles Baskerville, how are we to explain that he left the young woman alive and capable of accusing him at any moment?

  II

  Death Invisible

  A LOGICAL ANALYSIS of the facts, freed of the obsessive need to find murder whether it’s there or not, leads to the plausible hypothesis that the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville was really an accident. But this hypothesis does not clear up all the unresolved problems, nor does it reduce our story to a simple news item.

  If the opening scene is not a murder but the scene of an accident, it does not necessarily follow that The Hound of the Baskervilles involves no murders at all. But this first clarification was necessary, so that we can stop seeing the whole of this story through the eyes of Holmes and of the person who deliberately suggested a biased interpretation to him, and so that we can try to understand what actually occurred, more than a century ago now, on the Devon moors.

  Furthermore, the idea that Baskerville’s death was an accident—whether or not the doctor lied—does not mean that The Hound of the Baskervilles is not a criminal affair; quite the contrary.

  The general atmosphere in which the story unfolds gives us the first impression that obscure forces are at work on the moor and that a malignant intelligence reigns in the shadows, even more pernicious than the one Holmes naively thinks he has unmasked.

  And it is hard not to notice that a lot of people die in this book. No less than three people—Sir Charles Baskerville, Selden, and Stapleton—die in a short time on the Devonshire moor, and two others—Henry Baskerville and Beryl Stapleton—come close to dying. A simple statistical evaluation leads us to think that the mortality rate is abnormally high in the neighborhood of Baskerville Hall.

  Still, if the accident hypothesis allows us to solve the mystery of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, it leaves a number of mysteries unsolved. Who is the mysterious bearded character who shadows Henry and Dr. Mortimer in London, and why is he so intent on drawing the detective’s attention to him by calling himself Sherlock Holmes? Who sent the letter warning of danger to Henry Baskerville? Who tied up Beryl Stapleton, and why? And how are we to explain the shoe so opportunely forgotten by the side of the path?

  So how is it possible for The Hound of the Baskervilles, constructed around the story of an accident, still to be a murder story? The question contains its own answer: by forming a hypothesis that there is another murder in the book. Such a murder could be easily carried out while the unsuspecting reader and investigators are focused on the hound, whose sheer presence in the story prevents us from seeing the rest.

  In most detective novels, the murderer tries to outsmart the sleuth by making certain that no evidence suggests his guilt. He creates an alibi for himself, or conceals the motive that led him to act, or else arranges for suspicions to come to rest on another suspect.

  This period of the investigation is delicate for the murderer; even if another suspect has been arrested he remains under permanent threat that the investigation will one day be reopened. This attempt to conceal evidence is obviously the weak point in criminal undertakings, and it often leads to the arrest of the guilty party.

  For the murderer wishing to conceal his crime, there is an important principle to remember: a murder will be investigated if and only if it is recognized as a murder. In order to elude investigation, then, he needs only to suppress the murder itself, so that no investigation happens at all.

  This clever sort of evasion has not escaped specialists in crime. In one of her best novels, Towards Zero, Agatha Christie tells how a murderer tries to escape justice by ensuring that the murder is never recognized.

  The hero of the book, Neville
Strange, a professional tennis player, kills his old aunt, Lady Tressilian, by using a tennis racket weighted with lead. He then plants two sets of clues in the house where the crime took place. The first series tends to implicate him in the murder, but in such an obvious way that the police, made suspicious by the clues’ clumsiness, come to suppose that the real murderer has planted the clues to frame Neville Strange.

  The police are then seduced into following a second, subtler series of clues, which this time implicate Neville Strange’s ex-wife, Audrey. She is arrested and accused—not only of the first murder, but of trying to frame Strange. Unless the investigators do their jobs brilliantly, she will be condemned to death and hanged.

  This delights the murderer, Neville Strange, because he killed his aunt expressly to have Audrey executed; she has left him and he wants revenge. The first murder—the one committed with a tennis racket, of which Lady Tressilian is the victim—has in fact no importance in the eyes of the murderer. Its only function is to conceal the second one, the attempt to have Audrey hanged:

  “You mean that Lady Tressilian’s death was the culmination of a long train of circumstances?”

  “No, Miss Aldin, not Lady Tressilian’s death. Lady Tressilian’s death was only incidental to the main object of the murderer. The murder I am talking of is the murder of Audrey Strange.”* 99

  Thus the real murder of Towards Zero passes completely unperceived by both the police and the reader. Just as a magician diverts the audience’s attention from the place where the trick is really being performed, Strange focuses all the attention on the murder of the old woman. Wasting their time and energy in clearing it up, the investigators fail to realize that another murder is in progress under their eyes, hidden from sight by the first one.

  I am convinced that it is a contrivance of this sort that we are witnessing in The Hound of the Baskervilles. With his story of a murderer with a dog, the criminal manages to completely divert both investigators and readers from the true murder scene, so that it ceases to exist as a murder and thus assures its author complete impunity.

  It is a murder that, as in Towards Zero, does not appear at a precise moment in time—even if the physical death of the victim can be precisely situated—but instead takes place through the entire story and before the very eyes of the reader, who witnesses a slow execution without realizing it. From this perspective, the book is not the story of an investigation, but a secret narrative of an interminable killing of which the reader is the unconscious voyeur and accomplice.

  But there are two major differences between the two stories. The first is that the murderer in The Hound of the Baskervilles has no need to commit a first murder to carry out the second. It is enough for him to profit cleverly from the accident that befalls Sir Charles Baskerville by transforming it into a murder. In this sense, his crime is much more successful than the one recounted by Agatha Christie; it doesn’t even require him to dirty his hands.

  And this success is made even sweeter—and this is the major difference between the two stories—by the fact that the murderer in The Hound of the Baskervilles achieves his ends where Neville Strange fails. While Audrey Strange is saved from hanging by the sagacity of the police, the victim in Conan Doyle’s book is executed with the complicity of Holmes, and without the true murderer ever being bothered.

  As soon as the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles is posed in these terms and the notion of the invisible murder is presented, the solution comes swiftly; there are, after all, only three deaths in the book. We have seen that all the evidence suggest that Sir Charles Baskerville’s death was an accident, even though the detective’s interpretation of this accident contributes to the real murder.

  The same seems to be true for the convict Selden. Although his death suits a lot of people, especially his family, it is hard to imagine, given the circumstances, that it was the result of a knowingly premeditated conspiracy; it would have been enough for those close to him to indicate his whereabouts to the police to get rid of him for good.

  Which leads us to the third death, which is never questioned, and which goes completely unnoticed even though it certainly poses a number of questions: the murder of the man we have previously proven innocent of murder, Jack Stapleton.

  * Emphasis in original.

  III

  The Truth

  IT IS NOT at all surprising that Stapleton’s death goes unnoticed, since the murderer has been working toward that aim since the beginning of the story. As obsessed as the investigators with the so-called crimes of the mysterious killer-with-a-dog, the reader—like the writer—pays no attention to the only murder that matters to the murderer. And lacking a murder to investigate, he cannot undertake a search for the truth.

  The few allusions to the death of Stapleton, scattered throughout the book, portray it as a nonevent—more a disappearance than a death—and therefore unworthy of special commentary.

  The first allusion to this death comes in the passage where Holmes and Watson free Beryl. When the two men ask what has become of her husband, the young woman replies that he could only have fled to one place, the island in the heart of the great mire where he hid his dog. Seeing the density of the fog, Holmes notes that no one could find his way in it, and the young woman confirms that Stapleton would have had no chance of finding his path.100 In this exchange death isn’t even mentioned directly, but simply suggested by Beryl, without arousing any suspicion about the cause of Stapleton’s demise.

  The same is true for the passage, set on the next day, in which this death is announced. The fog having lifted, Holmes and Watson let themselves be guided by Beryl through the mire. Thanks to her, they discover the shoe theoretically abandoned by Stapleton, a find that proves, Holmes says, that the naturalist reached this spot alive.101 But the actual conditions of death remain vague:

  But more than that we were never destined to know, though there was much which we might surmise. There was no chance of finding footsteps in the mire, for the rising mud oozed swiftly in upon them, but as we at last reached firmer ground beyond the morass we all looked eagerly for them. But no slightest sign of them ever met our eyes. If the earth told a true story, then Stapleton never reached that island of refuge towards which he struggled through the fog upon that last night. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.102

  There could be no better way to nullify a man’s death than by claiming that it lacks a location and that it is not even possible to be sure that it actually has occurred.

  Stapleton’s death is a nonevent, given no place or date; it is totally erased from the story and thus unable to stir even a cursory investigation. His murderer has managed to make his crime disappear, and, by the same gesture, to vanish himself.

  If we accept the premise that The Hound of the Baskervilles actually narrates the slow execution of Stapleton, we must deduce from this that the mistake of the investigators lay in their inability to grasp the murderer’s motive, which is not money, but hatred. Conan Doyle’s novel doesn’t just disclose the hatred of the writer for his detective; it also recounts another story of hatred, and everything about Stapleton’s death, shown clearly to the reader’s eyes through the whole book, expresses this feeling in the murderer.

  We can suppose that the humdrum existence Stapleton offered Beryl, this Costa Rican beauty, counted for something in her original desire to get rid of her husband. But it was the discovery of Stapleton’s affair with Laura Lyons that was probably the decisive element. Sherlock Holmes comes very close to the truth several times, as if he had unconsciously perceived it.

  The instant he “frees” the young woman, she heaps insults on her husband, whom she calls “this villain,”103 producing a remark from Holmes of a profundity that no doubt escapes him: “You bear him no good will, madam.”104

  A little later, the detective comes even closer to the truth. Summarizin
g the affair for Watson’s benefit, with the aid of Beryl’s testimony, Holmes tells how the couple’s relations had degenerated after Sir Charles’s death (of which Beryl accused her husband), and how a furious scene set them against each other, until Stapleton was forced to tie her up:

  “Her fidelity turned in an instant to bitter hatred, and he saw that she would betray him. He tied her up, therefore, that she might have no chance of warning Sir Henry, and he hoped, no doubt, that when the whole countryside put down the baronet’s death to the curse of his family, as they certainly would do, he could win his wife back to accept an accomplished fact and to keep silent upon what she knew. In this I fancy that in any case he made a miscalculation, and that, if we had not been there, his doom would none the less have been sealed. A woman of Spanish blood does not condone such an injury so lightly.”105

  An excellent analysis—except that it doesn’t apply to what Holmes thinks might have occurred, but to what actually took place: Beryl Stapleton—to say the least—had not forgiven the offense to which she had been subjected.

  To suggest that Stapleton was not a murderer, but himself the victim of a carefully plotted crime, by no means implies that he was a model of virtue. It is altogether possible that he was guilty of embezzlement when he was headmaster of the school from which he had to flee, even if it is more likely, given what we know about his character, that the problems had more to do with his absent-mindedness and inability to manage business affairs.