CONTINUED

Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Sheldon Goldfarb

For instance, the Hound of the Baskervilles. There’s a creature surrounded by superstitious lore, much like what Hardcastle hears of “the Terror that lives in the Blue John Cave.” Sherlock Holmes, however, is dismissive of the “fairy tales” surrounding the Hound, and the story itself bears him out: the Hound is not a supernatural or primeval being, just a hound that has been tarted up with phosphorus to make it look more terrifying.

Similarly with the Sussex Vampire in another Sherlock Holmes story: despite the rumors, there is no vampire in this story, just a desperate mother. The Sherlock Holmes stories avoid the supernatural except for throwaway lines about the Giant Rat of Sumatra and “a remarkable worm” that drove a journalist mad. Elsewhere, however, Conan Doyle does not shrink from the supernatural or at least the preternatural, things outside the realm of what we usually accept as scientific and rational.

For instance, there is the unicorn that is summoned forth during a seance in the story “Playing with Fire.” There is the ghost that keeps looking for its missing hand in “The Brown Hand.” There is the murderous mummy in “Lot No. 249” and the immortality potion in “The Ring of Thoth.” Perhaps most notable are the dinosaurs and “ape-men” in The Lost World. Conan Doyle the Spiritualist at times felt able to venture past “the veil of the eternal” (to quote the narrator of “Playing with Fire”), but he restrained himself in the Sherlock Holmes stories, where the whole aim is to stay anchored in everyday life and to explain things naturally. “No ghosts need apply,” as Holmes says in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”

But more than that. There is something very much rooted in the natural and the social in the Holmes stories. The aim after all is to solve crimes, or at least puzzles, not leave us gasping in wonder. The idea is to reassure, unlike the conjuring of a unicorn. And even when Doyle ventures beyond the natural, sometimes the idea is to bring order. What could be more ordering than the zoological expedition in The Lost World, with its scientists attempting to classify the new flora and fauna they discover on the lost Brazilian plateau?

Some categorization of our own is perhaps in order. There are stories that venture beyond what science currently accepts but which do so in an almost Sherlockian way, as in The Lost World, which despite occasional dangers, especially from the ape-men, is largely a scientific exploration or even a tourist trip into a land of strange beasts, a visit to a menagerie. “The Brown Hand” is similarly a sort of detective story, to understand what is bringing the mutilated ghost to visit, and told from the point of view of a detached observer.

Much different is a story like “The Horror of the Heights,” a story very similar to “Blue John Gap” in being an account of an individual’s encounter with something weird, the strange jellyfish, the air snakes, and the dangerous purple jelly monsters that reside above 40,000 feet. And in the same category perhaps, despite not being supernatural, is “The Brazilian Cat,” about an individual’s fight against a large but not impossibly large tiger or puma or the like. This is a different genre than Sherlockian detection to protect society; it is a man alone confronting the horrifying or unthinkable, without even a Watson at his side.

Of course, there are stories that defy categorization, or are perhaps simply in a different category, such as “The American’s Tale,” about a man-eating plant that swallows a villain. We are not with the villain confronting the unspeakable; if anything we are on the plant’s side. “Lot No. 249” involves a struggle against a murderous supernatural being, yet in a much more social setting; the hero has supporters, companions; there is something much more social about it, as there is in the story of confronting the boxing ghost in “The Bully of Brocas Court” and also in the story of the killer python in “The Fiend of the Cooperage.”

“The Terror of Blue John Gap” is different from those “social” stories; as with “The Horror of the Heights” and “The Brazilian Cat,” it is a depiction of the lone man against terrors, like some of Poe’s horror stories, but not like his detective Dupin, and not like Sherlock Holmes.

WHO IS SHELDON?

Sheldon Goldfarb is the president of the Sherlock Holmes society in Vancouver, also known as the Stormy Petrels of British Columbia, and is the author of Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories (MX Press, 2019). He serves as the archivist for the student society at the University of British Columbia, and is the author of The Hundred-Year Trek: A History of Student Life at UBC (Heritage House, 2017). He has also published an award-nominated murder mystery (Remember, Remember; UKA Press, 2005). He has a PhD in English from UBC and has published two books on William Makepeace Thackeray.