Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

by Pierre Bayard

  What’s more, Stapleton did secretly buy an enormous dog, with which, we can suppose, he took a certain pleasure in terrorizing the credulous country-folk of the region.

  But demonstrating carelessness in the management of business matters and taking pleasure in dubious hobbies does not make one a murderer. Stapleton’s guilt seems impossible to believe, unless we suppose that he would choose to commit a murder by ridiculous means and for no apparent benefit, and then do everything he could to get himself noticed, even after the police decided it was an accident.

  When Holmes mentions Beryl’s criminal potential, it is because he senses that the strong one in this couple is the woman, not her vapid husband, terrified of his wife, taking refuge in the world of his research. It is she, and not her weak companion, who is the source of that threat we feel in the background of the entire book.*

  Though Beryl had contemplated ridding herself of her husband for a long time, two events solidify her wish for murder and hasten the attempt. The first is Sir Charles Baskerville’s accident.

  Did she learn of it from her husband, or did she guess what happened? Whatever the case, Beryl immediately begins to devote all her energy to transforming the accident into a murder by creating around it an atmosphere of evil—and by effectively creating the character of the murderer with the dog. The entire London sojourn bears the mark of this literary production of a legend, where a pernicious hand rewrites the most ordinary events in the language of mystery.

  We have only Beryl’s word for it that she was locked up by her husband in their hotel room in London. It must be a rather unusual hotel where the rooms are never cleaned by the staff, since the first visit from a cleaning lady would give the captive the means to escape. It is more likely to suppose that rather than being kept a prisoner—a fantasy we will return to later on—the young woman prudently advised her husband not to let her be seen and took things in hand herself.

  We know that it is she who writes the threatening letter to Henry (how could she send it if she were locked up?) as a way of adding mystery to the atmosphere and whetting the detective’s appetite. But it is also she who follows Henry and Dr. Mortimer around in London. Two points in the description of the mysterious occupant of the hansom cab support the theory that the passenger is none other than Beryl disguised.

  The first has to do with the size of the passenger, described thus by the driver:

  I’d put him at forty years of age, and he was of a middle height, two or three inches shorter than you, sir.106

  The person is described as average in relation to Sherlock Holmes. Since the detective is traditionally described as a tall man, we can think that the unknown person is at least average height, probably somewhat tall. But this characteristic does not correspond at all to Stapleton, who is presented as a short man:

  He was a small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and leanjawed, between thirty and forty years of age.107

  On the other hand, the driver’s description could match Beryl’s height:

  There could not have been a greater contrast between brother and sister, for Stapleton was neutral-tinted, with light hair and grey eyes, while she was darker than any brunette whom I have seen in England—slim, elegant, and tall. She had a proud, finely cut face, so regular that it might have seemed impassive were it not for the sensitive mouth and the beautiful dark, eager eyes.108

  Especially if one takes into account the fact that a woman considered tall is generally less tall than a man, Beryl seems to fit perfectly the height of the figure glimpsed in the hansom cab.

  But another point of description attracts our attention, this time having to do with the mysterious person’s eyes. Whereas there is nothing unique about Stapleton’s eyes, Beryl’s are called “beautiful dark, eager eyes,” which again corresponds to Watson’s image of the unknown person in the cab:

  I was aware of a bushy black beard and a pair of piercing eyes turned upon us through the side window of the cab.109

  Though the two expressions (“dark, eager eyes” and “piercing eyes”) are not identical, they emphasize the same quality of this gaze, its intensity, a quality that Stapleton’s gaze singularly lacks.

  It is regrettable that Holmes, who devoted a lot of time at the beginning of his investigation to trying to identify the occupant of the hansom cab, then completely loses interest in that problem. Although it is not absolutely decisive (if anything is more subjective than a judgment about someone’s height, it is a judgment of the intensity of someone’s gaze), the obvious fact that Stapleton seems not to resemble the passenger and Beryl does cannot be ignored—especially because the passenger takes care to say very little, as if afraid the voice would betray the gender.

  The taciturn occupant of the hansom cab is nonetheless careful to specify his profession and name to the driver, as if it were of the greatest importance that he take note of the message and transmit it to Sherlock Holmes.

  It is hard to understand what would impel Stapleton to this double stratagem, which runs completely counter to his interests. If he is indeed responsible for the murder, he is not well served by attracting the attention of a detective as perceptive as Sherlock Holmes to a crime no one has yet thought to question.* Having succeeded at transforming Baskerville’s murder into an accident, it would be senseless to risk arousing the detective’s suspicions.

  On the other hand, the assertion of identity becomes only sensible if we suppose that the occupant of the cab is Beryl. She, in fact, does need Sherlock Holmes, not to solve the investigation, but so that there will be an investigation, and thus a murder.

  And what could be more perfect, to produce this investigation, than the interest of Sherlock Holmes? By his presence alone, the investigator of all investigators arouses mystery; with his suspicious disposition and his assurance of infallibility, he is capable of transforming any event—particularly a fatal accident—into a criminal matter.

  The Stapletons’ journey to London, plotted by Beryl,† is thus the centerpiece in the murder of the naturalist. It allows the construction of an ingenious arrangement in which Sherlock Holmes occupies the central role of a guarantor—or even creator—of a nonexistent murder. And it is this ersatz murder that permits, with Holmes’s blind complicity, the carrying out of the real murder.

  If Sir Charles Baskerville’s accident is the first trigger for Beryl’s decision to commit murder, the second is the young woman’s meeting with Henry. She sees the heir in London during her surveillance, but she actually meets him on the moor. And not only is Henry a handsome man, and rich, but he soon shows his willingness to court her.

  The opportunity is unhoped-for. The tentative plan for murder is now decided upon once and for all. Clearly, it is hatred that it is the motive, and by itself is enough to explain the crime. But that the murder will also make the murderess extremely wealthy is certainly no discouragement. These two reasons make her plan a perfect murder, not only because of its financial benefits, but also by virtue of its elegance and simplicity.

  * In our hypothesis, it is Beryl who, furious at finding that she has been deceived, refuses Stapleton, perhaps after an initial escapade, the right to appear publicly as her husband.

  * That is also the weak point in the theory suggested by Christophe Gelly in Le Chien des Baskerville: Poétique du roman policier chez Conan Doyle, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2005. Following the track of my Who Killed Roger Ack-royd?, Christophe Gelly playfully suggests that Dr. Mortimer could have been Stapleton’s accomplice (pp. 112–116). The hypothesis of a collusion between the two men was recently taken up by François Hoff in “Le chien des Baskerville: une erreur judiciaire?” in Le Carnet d’Ecrou: Revue d’études holmésiennes et autres, Section strasbourgeoise des Évadés de Dartmoor,No. 5, January 2006. It comes up against the major argument that if Mortimer is an accomplice, he has no interest—quite the contrary—in attracting Sherlock Holmes’s attention to this murder. Unless we think as François Hoff does, which does
not completely convince us, that Jupiter first makes mad those he wishes to destroy.

  † We can suppose that, for weeks on end, she had pressured Dr. Mortimer, directly or through Stapleton, so that he would ask for Sherlock Holmes’s help, a pressure all the more effective since the doctor is obsessed by the hound.

  IV

  And Nothing but the Truth

  AS SOON AS the investigators are in Devon, Beryl continues on the same course she had begun in London. Everyone is convinced that the death of Sir Charles Baskerville was murder. Her goal is now to continue to arouse the same atmosphere of anxiety around the story, abetted by the presence of Holmes and his passion for mystery.

  It is with this in mind that Beryl confides her fears to Watson, whom she pretends to mistake for Sir Henry Baskerville. Having seen them both in London, she is quite capable of telling them apart. But she knows that Watson is best positioned to serve as a messenger to Holmes. Properly primed, he can make the detective believe in the legend of the murderer-with-the-dog, and more to the point can help make the clues converge on her innocent husband.

  Whenever she appears, Beryl plays the same role with tenacity, both through her statements and by her physical attitudes: that of a heroine terrorized by the man with whom she lives. Her aim is simple: to make her husband, a character of scant charisma, seem to be a potential murderer.

  In her criminal undertaking Beryl Stapleton will benefit from a stroke of luck, the death of Selden. While there isn’t the slightest trace of dog around the corpse, the fantastical tension created by the young woman is such that Holmes, indefatigable creator of intrigues, immediately chalks this accident up to the monstrous hound prowling the moor.

  Though it is likely that Selden had a deadly fall, his death cannot be considered purely accidental. Pursued by the police and the army, the convict is marked for death from the beginning of the book. Though she can’t know exactly what will happen, Beryl can legitimately hope to benefit shortly from a second corpse.

  That corpse does not fail to appear. Her fantastical rewriting of the story not only reorganizes reality, it also produces events. The anxiety Beryl has managed to arouse in all the actors in the drama is conducive to the continual creation of tragedies, as well as to an opportune reading of the “facts.”

  Now comes the murder itself. If great criminals, like chess players, are recognized by the simplicity of their solutions, there is little doubt that Beryl Stapleton can be counted a master. There have been few murders in all those that detective criticism has identified that require such meager means for such profitable results.

  What really makes this murder possible is Stapleton’s attachment to his dog; along with his passion for entomology, it is the key to this absent-minded scholar’s character. With this in mind, we will see how the murderer needs nothing more than a gesture and a phrase to rid herself of her victim—in a way so brilliantly constructed as to be risk-free, since it is murder-free.

  Beryl has every reason to sense, on the fatal night, that Holmes and Watson have lingered in the vicinity and are keeping watch over the house. But the arrangement will function just as well if Sir Henry reaches his home without surveillance. She does take a certain number of precautions in case the house is being watched, however, including not being present at the meal with Sir Henry and Stapleton: with the excuse that she isn’t feeling well, she preserves her alibi.

  Everything happens very quickly once Sir Henry leaves the house. Watson, who has come in close in the moments before Henry leaves, sees Stapleton go into a shed and hears suspicious noises, but doesn’t see him free the dog. He has in fact no reason to do so.* It’s not until a few minutes later, when Sir Henry has made his exit, that Beryl goes to the shed and sets the animal free.

  By doing this, she doesn’t put Sir Henry at risk; the dog, for all its great size, is not aggressive, and the likelihood is strong that Holmes is still keeping an eye on the heir. It is impossible to entirely predict the animal’s reactions, but there is every reason to think that it will follow Baskerville, or, at the very least, will move away from the house, which is enough for her plan to succeed.

  All Beryl has to do is run to Stapleton and tell him the dog has gotten loose and fled toward the marsh; it is this brief announcement that constitutes the murder. Frantic with worry about his pet, Stapleton runs toward the path from which Beryl has removed—or more likely altered—the trail markers, a strategy she coolly admits to considering at the end of the book:

  The fog-bank lay like white wool against the window. Holmes held the lamp towards it.

  “See,” said he. “No one could find his way into the Grimpen Mire tonight.”

  She laughed and clapped her hands. Her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment.

  “He may find his way in, but never out,” she cried. “How can he see the guiding wands tonight? We planted them together, he and I, to mark the pathway through the mire. Oh, if I could only have plucked them out today. Then indeed you would have had him at your mercy!”110

  The shoe had been placed in full view a few hours earlier. All that’s left is for Beryl, in case Holmes and Watson continued their surveillance, to transform herself into one of those heroines in the melodramas Holmes so appreciates. After locking the door to the room from within, she will tie herself up, offering the detective a spectacle of suffering femininity that cannot fail to move him to pity.*

  Once Stapleton has disappeared, Beryl at last becomes the true mistress of the story. Most of the evidence of Stapleton’s guilt is conveyed by his wife with no corroboration at all. After her husband’s death, she becomes the narrator of a text that she had already secretly controlled.

  A number of pieces of evidence missing from Holmes’s version are in fact provided by Beryl and incorporated by the detective into his final explanation. Holmes seems unperturbed that his story rests completely on Beryl’s allegations. Under the sway of the young woman, he has obviously lost all critical sense:

  “I have had the advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything which has remained a secret to us.”111

  We don’t doubt for an instant that these two conversations with the murderer allow Holmes to reach a satisfying version of the facts. But unfortunately the skeptical reader recognizes that this version is supported at many points only by Beryl’s unverifiable testimony.

  We are thus reduced to relying on her word about the events preceding the couple’s arrival in Devonshire. Likewise the life she and her husband led in Costa Rica, where he supposedly “purloined a considerable sum of public money,”112 as well as some of the mysterious circumstances that led them to leave the school he headed (“the school which had begun well sank from disrepute into infamy”113), are known only thanks to Beryl, who is at ease in her role as witness for the prosecution since her husband is not there to take issue.*

  Our information about the recent past and the preparations for murder relies mostly on Beryl. The reconstruction of the Stapletons’ stay in London depends wholly on the young woman’s testimony. And it is because Holmes trusts her blindly that he can believe in the unlikely myth of Stapleton’s outdoing himself to attract attention by shadowing Baskerville, claiming to be Sherlock Holmes himself, and twice stealing a shoe from the hotel.

  But Beryl is only making public a function she had secretly been fulfilling all along. The official version of the facts she relates to Holmes at the conclusion is only the shadow of the more secret narrative she has woven throughout the book, ensnaring the reader and all the characters.

  Although everything in this story depends on Beryl’s narration, she does not confine herself to the final summary. She begins her co-narration of The Hound of the Baskervilles long before, as early as the episode in London. In her desire to captivate the detective, she begins to drag the story toward melodrama and never relents.

  It is to her we owe the oppressive atmosphere that ac
companies Henry Baskerville’s arrival in London, since she sends the anonymous letter, makes the shoes disappear, and organizes his shadowing. There is nothing puzzling about the fact that a criminal should allow her acts to be so conspicuous; conspicuousness is precisely her goal. Beryl’s narrative begins even before her arrival on the scene, and each of its elements aims at seducing and intriguing its special target, the man who will make the murder possible: Sherlock Holmes.

  But it is also to Beryl that we owe the love affair with Baskerville and the imaginary story Holmes makes of it. Although it is proven that Stapleton has lost interest in Laura Lyons, Beryl manages to represent him as a jealous man incapable of tolerating her budding relationship with Sir Henry; thus she justifies the suspicions of ill treatment that hang over her husband, which certainly adds insult to injury when we know that she is plotting his murder!*

  Scheherazade told stories to save her life, but Beryl* uses an identical method to kill and grow rich. A murder without a weapon, without a threat, without an insult, where the victim puts himself to death while the other characters applaud—it would be hard to find a finer triumph in the annals of crime.