Books to Die For Read online

  I believe I was ten years old and in elementary school when I encountered “The Speckled Band,” that premier mystery, the eighth of twelve tales collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I might even have been eleven. An insatiable reader, quick as lightning, my literary needs proved a challenge to the school librarian. As soon as I finished one book, she hurriedly thrust another into my questing hands. Teen romances alternated with biographies of worthy or scandalous women. I read about society weddings, Napoleon’s Josephine, elopements, and Florence Nightingale.

  Then, in class, unexpectedly, “The Specked Band,” isolated from its fellows. After a week of sleepless nights, I petitioned for and received the full Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, each story a small revelation, a gift of plot structure, character, and language. From “A Scandal in Bohemia” to “The Copper Beeches” in one long gulp, then back to the beginning to reread, with many a stop along the way.

  “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.” So says Sherlock, according to the faithful Watson, in “The Red-Headed League,” the second adventure in the book, and what child raised in a cookie-cutter neighborhood would not echo his desire? “You share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life,” the master tells Watson, and I picture my younger self nodding, rapt and enthralled. “Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace,” Holmes states in “A Case of Identity,” adding for good measure, “The little things are infinitely the most important.” Sherlock inspired me to view my ordinary surroundings in a different way, to observe rather than see, to listen rather than hear, to take note of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

  “A man should possess all knowledge that is likely to be useful to him in his work,” Sherlock says in “The Five Orange Pips,” and Watson, eager to please, earnestly summarizes what Holmes terms “his limits”: “Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany, variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.” How Holmes’s eccentric knowledge must have intrigued and fascinated a bookish girl tethered to a rote curriculum. When I chose fencing as an elective, Holmes urged me on.

  “What a fool a builder must be to open a ventilator into another room, when, with the same trouble, he might have communicated with the outside air.” Surely it was extraordinary that the very room in which I slept would possess a small grille—a ventilator, I assumed, rather than a heating duct—that seemed to connect with the next room, the small study recently converted to my baby brother’s bedroom. True, there was no false bellpull that dangled down to my pillow, but the vent, the vital and perhaps deadly pathway to the next room, existed in fact. My bed was not bolted to the floor, but I could hardly move it without inciting speculation.

  My father would know that I suspected him.

  I had a slightly older sister; in my mind we counted as twins, just as Helen and Julia Stoner of “The Speckled Band” were twins. My father, I assumed, had wanted only two children, an unmatched set, one boy and one girl, and now that my mother had finally achieved the boy, I had become the extra child, the surplus girl; that, to my ten-year-old self, seemed a motive for my removal as clear and powerful as Grimesby Roylott’s desire to ensure his continued inheritance.

  “When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” My father was not a medical doctor, but he was a brilliant engineer. Like Roylott, he had nerve and knowledge. Like Roylott, he had served in the army. Like Roylott, he had traveled to distant lands and returned with exotic souvenirs. I listened to the silent and menacing night, to the even sigh of my sister’s breath.

  “Do not go to sleep; your very life may depend upon it.”

  What if? those stories said to me. What if? they whispered as they invited me into the realm of deductive reasoning, into a universe where I could, by the use of observation and imagination, emulate a hero.

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, being a collection of short stories rather than a novel, is, strictly speaking, outside the approved parameters of this collection. I chose it nonetheless, not only because it’s fun to break the rules, but because I consider it a shining example of the series mystery in miniature. Single mystery novels delight me. I yield to no one in my admiration of The Moonstone, Rebecca, and The Thin Man, but to my mind it is the series mystery that offers the ultimate in entertainment. The continuing series promises more than a single tale, more than a glimpse of a moment in time; it offers an ongoing conversation, a relationship with beloved and familiar characters. The impact of the series does not rest on any one particular tale but rather on a cumulative impression derived over a period of time. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a microcosm of that which I love best in detective fiction, a series of stories that provides the reader with the opportunity to experience the delineation, development, and flowering of character.

  In each story, another facet of Holmes’s personality glistens, another fact is learned, another doorway yawns. “A Scandal in Bohemia” gives us, in addition to a portrait of “the late Irene Adler of dubious and questionable memory,” Sherlock’s pride in his craft, his fallibility, and his continuing admiration of “The Woman” who defeats him. We find that failure does not stop him. “It is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all,” he says in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”

  In “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes’s client, John Openshaw, dies. “It becomes a personal matter with me now,” my hero states as he relentlessly hunts down the perpetrators. This is one of the hallmarks of a successful series: the detective, whether an amateur or the coolest of professionals, becomes personally involved. What could more personally involve Holmes than the unexpected visit of Grimesby Roylott to Baker Street, the evil doctor’s taunting reference to “Holmes, the meddler; Holmes, the busybody; Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-Office,” followed by his bending-the-iron-poker demonstration of brute strength and impending violence?

  Another joy of the series mystery is the cast of recurring characters that surrounds the protagonist. The Adventures, alas, does not include any of the Mycroft Holmes tales, but we do meet Sherlock’s foil, Lestrade, the ferret-like champion of the ordinary police force, and we encounter Watson again and again, as narrator, admirer, accomplice, and staunch companion.

  “The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside,” Holmes states in “The Copper Beeches,” and even as a child I knew that he spoke the truth, for crime was no stranger to my neighborhood. Years earlier, a body had been discovered on my front lawn, a teenaged boy shot to death by a former neighbor, a police officer. To this day, I don’t know the true facts of that case (“Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”), but I remain convinced that Holmes could have solved it. Sherlock sees beneath the surface. He reads the signs. He recognizes that there is always ample reason to fear.

  The detective series conquers fear, and conquers death, with an implicit promise: that the detective will not die. Holmes was, he is, and he will be. He has returned from the Reichenbach Falls, come back from the dead. Immortal, he continues to thrive, portrayed by Basil Rathbone, Nicol Williamson, and many others in the movies, by Jeremy Brett in the beloved British television series, by Benedict Cumberbatch in the contemporary BBC TV series Sherlock, and kept vibrantly active in the Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King. Other characters may have a story, but Holmes has a life so vivid that he endures forever.

  For a month, in the darkened bedroom of childhood, I slept with a yardstick concealed at my side, a poor substitute for the long thin cane with which Holmes beat back the deadly reptile. Then the terror broke like a fev
er and subsided as suddenly as it came.

  Born in Detroit, Michigan, Linda Barnes is an award-winning mystery writer. She has written two acclaimed Boston-set series of mystery novels, one featuring the sometime actor and private investigator Michael Spraggue, and the other centering on the six-one redheaded detective Carlotta Carlyle, the most recent of which is Lie Down with the Devil. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Visit her online at www.lindabarnes.com.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

  CAROL O’CONNELL

  * * *

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was one of the pivotal figures in mystery writing. A physician and writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he is best known as the creator of “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes and his faithful amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, although he also wrote a number of historical novels, and a series of adventure stories featuring the character of Professor Challenger, the best known of which remains The Lost World. He was friends for a time with the magician Harry Houdini, and became fascinated by Spiritualism in later life, a consequence of a series of bereavements that included the loss of his wife, Louisa, and his son Kingsley, leading Conan Doyle to seek proof of an existence beyond the grave.

  * * *

  Would Arthur Conan Doyle agree with even half of what’s been written about his iconic character, Sherlock Holmes?

  Does it matter?

  Not at all. Eye of the beholder holds sway, and you’re invited to pile on. There are fifty-six short stories, but I recommend Doyle’s finest of four novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles, to understand why Holmes’s story can never end, but extends from the horse-drawn-carriage era of 1887 into the twenty-first century—with fresh horses.

  This novel is rich in atmosphere, like the poisonous air of the detective’s Baker Street residence in London. As described by the narrator, Dr. Watson, “the room was so filled with smoke that the lamp upon the table was blurred by it.” The cause was “the acrid fumes of strong tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through the haze, I had a vague vision of Holmes in his dressing gown, coiled up in an armchair with his black clay pipe between his lips.”

  The smoking man is jazzed on nicotine chased with pots of caffeine, and the floor is littered with maps of a distant place he has never seen. Yet Holmes is immersed in that atmosphere as a visitor “in spirit,” imagining an isolated mansion, the wild landscape of the moors by night, and the family curse of a giant hound whose job it is to kill off generations of aristocrats—the Baskervilles.

  In an earlier work of 1893, “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle got rid of Holmes by tossing the detective down the Reichenbach Falls, presumably to his death, and then was surprised to find himself the most hated man in London as a consequence. Public outcry forced him to bring back Sherlock Holmes.4

  Now here’s where it gets eerie. Holmes would’ve found his own way back to life without any help from his creator. He’s not contained by Doyle’s stories: he’s alive. Spookier still, he cannot die, not one more time. Modern screenwriters, playwrights, and novelists have continued his saga, and none of them dares to kill him off. They’re all afraid of the rabble, the ugly mob that is us—the fans of Sherlock Holmes.

  So here we have a shining (blindingly so), original character for the ages, and he has tragic flaws aplenty (though the ancient Greeks mandated only one). And yet, on May 3, 1902, the New York Times had to defend this book against the mockery of Mark Twain, who poked fun at Doyle’s work in a satire titled “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story.” In rebuttal, the Times maintained that The Hound of the Baskervilles “in construction, movement, and finish, is a fine piece of work.” Then G. K. Chesterton, in his review for the Daily News, complained of Doyle sneering at Edgar Allan Poe in a previous story, while imitating that more esteemed writer’s creation of Monsieur Dupin. (Other critics make distinctions between “imitation” and “influence.”) But Chesterton added that Sherlock Holmes “has passed out of the unreality of literature into the glowing reality of legend.” In this instance, Holmes got a better review than Doyle.

  You think that’s strange? Just you wait.

  The book’s appearance on best-seller lists in America was credited to the lack of a sane line between truth and fiction, the myth that Sherlock Holmes was an actual person: corporeal, not fictional. How insane is that? Well, there was an actual Baskerville family (and Sir Arthur was their frequent houseguest).5 You might say the hound existed, too, if only in folklore. Show me a moor anywhere in England, and I’ll show you a giant, ghostly dog with glowing red eyes.6 And twenty-seven years later, T. S. Eliot chimed in on the madness with this quote on Holmes: “The plain fact is, he is more real than his progenitor.”

  Sherlockians, loyal fans of Sherlock Holmes, took strangeness even further by forbidding members to speak the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at their meetings. Holmes was flesh-and-blood real to them, and any mention of Doyle’s authorship was an intolerable contradiction of their faith. So . . . this is a damn fan club, and the poor author is worse than dead to these people; it’s as if he had never lived. And that’s strange, because T. S. Eliot also said, “I am not sure that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not one of the great dramatic writers of his age.”

  Till the end of his days, the author, merely life-size in a world that wanted giants, could not compete with the fictional man.

  Feeling sorry for Doyle?

  What about Holmes? His own creator tried to murder him (poor bastard); he was a flaming drug addict (no wonder); and he suffered clinical depressions stemming from the boredom of a beautiful mind with nothing to do between finding brilliant solutions to mysteries that no one else could penetrate.

  What else might make us sympathetic to Sherlock Holmes? Well, there’s his other addiction, to shag tobacco. He’s rude, aloof, and untidy. Also, in more recent times, he’s been diagnosed with sociopathy, autism, and Asperger’s syndrome, but let’s put the pop psychology aside. Too facile.

  Consider the plight of the genius. It’s taxing for him to deal with ordinary intellects, rather like us trying to converse with a household pet, a dog that is willing, even eager, but can’t hold up his end of a conversation. High intelligence is Sherlock Holmes’s most remarkable disability. (At school, I had a friend with an IQ of 186. He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he walked into trees and could not be trusted to cross a road on his own.) Holmes is obsessively focused, concentrating on criminal acts to the exclusion of social pursuits. You won’t see him out dancing. No ball games. No prayer circles.

  And there are holes in his education, perhaps a practical matter of storage space in memory. He has encyclopedic arcane knowledge, but he can’t be bothered to learn anything that won’t help him solve a puzzle. He doesn’t have the recipe for boiling an egg, or instructions for taking out the trash that covers his carpet. Rules of etiquette elude him, and the polite lie would not occur to him.

  Holmes may be cold, but not intentionally cruel, and so he has no idea why acquaintances should take offense at being treated as lower life forms. Just try to imagine his having an earnest “relationship talk” with a woman. Now stop that before you hurt yourself. This is why we love him so—he could never love us—but occasionally he will admire a quality in someone, and that is something to shoot for. We aim for grace.

  Handicaps galore, Holmes also languishes in bouts of melancholia, periods when he cannot get out of bed to greet a client at the door. Even a brilliant man may need a keeper of sorts.

  Enter his companion, Dr. John Watson.

  Poor Watson sometimes gets a critic’s short shrift as the foil (a hack writer’s device to make another character shine by comparison), and Arthur Conan Doyle may actually have intended that. But here’s a dirty secret of authors: more can emerge from the writing than was ever intended by the writer.

  So instead of getting all stick-to-the-author’s-intent-you-filthy-bastard, I say play Holmes’s game. See what the evid
ence reveals about the good doctor, a former soldier. Brave. Honorable. Loyal? Oh, God, yes. And for all of this, he cannot stand out as a literary character unless coupled with Holmes, and Holmes has days when he can’t even stand up without Watson. Imagine half a wheel. That’s Sherlock Holmes, cerebral, ill-mannered, and cold. But half a wheel goes nowhere. The other half? That’s John Watson, the one with all the social graces, compassion, and a gun. Now the wheel is whole, and they can roll. (For support of this idea, look to “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane.” I’m not the first or the tenth to note that both stories are failures for the absence of Watson.)

  In the early pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a visitor to Baker Street suggests that Sherlock Holmes might be “the second highest expert in Europe.” This does not go over well, and the detective tells him to consult the better man. After much back-stepping apology on the part of the would-be client, the matter of rank is settled: Holmes rules. Does this suggest narcissism? Much of Sherlockian lore will say so, though, in my own view, I doubt it. (Back to the analogy of pets: Might your dog believe that you’re conceited? You do think you’re smarter than the dog, right?)

  A true fop of a narcissist would lose Watson’s respect, and Holmes never does. I believe he’s simply aware of where he belongs in the pantheon. Does Holmes preen, or chase after compliments? No, and no. So the logic prevails. He’s only a stickler for facts. The man is the most brilliant player in the field of deduction—an honest observation, even though it is his own.

  When we meet Holmes in this novel, he has a history shaped by previous stories: he’s kicked cocaine, defeated his archenemy, and vanquished death itself. He is nuanced to completion, but not quite a man in full. He never becomes a sexual being, but he doesn’t need to be. We have Watson for that, the one who chases the ladies and sometimes marries them. Those who are looking for romance can go away and read a lesser novel. The rest of us are in it for love of the game, for love of the man. And the man is fearless. Keep turning the pages to witness his chasing across dark moorland laced with quicksand, in pursuit of a hellhound.