The Bruce-Partington Plans

Unless we consider his virtuosity on the violin, we see our protagonist at the beginning of this story enthralled by a new hobby quite out of sorts with his previous monographs.  What could the study of medieval music ever offer Holmes?  Amusement, certainly, and perhaps keen artistic satisfaction; yet there is nothing forensic or organizational to be enjoyed.  From his other pastimes – codes, bicycle tracks, chemicals, ash – we detect a pattern of knowledge that could only appeal to the fanatic or crank.  Holmes's veil of cold precision notwithstanding, he evinces appetite for all forms of crime so that, with years of practice, brief observation would yield understanding as easily as color betrays acid.  Such knowledge would allow his resolution of the most trivial questions of everyday science to the broadest anthems of human motivation.  One such motivation has always been the opportunity to forego a plain existence that will result in plain dreams and a plain spouse for the risk ushered in by opportunity, by a mystery that promises reward or glorious failure.  And the mystery in question commences by way of that éminence grise of the British government, Holmes's brother Mycroft.

The problem?  Submarine plans of the highest technology and secrecy.  Its status?  On the verge of completion, unbeknownst to the public at large, although the weapons remain a project that Mycroft believes everyone has heard of in the same way that everyone has heard of the Yeti: an impossibility that might one day actually be proven to exist.  Holmesian scholars have not hesitated to note that such submarines, at least in terms of their allotted destructive forces, would not drift out of blueprint for another dozen years – but we do not read these adventures for historical accuracy.  The time was undoubtedly ripe for such speculation, as was the grim specter of war that abetted the naval subterfuge between Germany and England in the North Sea (as depicted in this prescient work).  So when a young man by the name of Cadogan West is found murdered in an underground railcar one November morning, little is made of the matter (Holmes even calls the case "featureless").  Yet Mycroft's telegraph indicates that his worrisome task involves no one other than this young clerk at this defunct arsenal.  The Royal Arsenal is one of those government buildings that have more locks than secrets.  The plans, ten in all, were housed under the watchful eye of Sidney Johnson, another among the canon's memorable secondary characters:

He is a man of forty, married with five children.  He is a silent, morose man, but he has, on the whole, an excellent record in the public service.  He is unpopular with his colleagues, but a hard worker.  According to his account, corroborated only by the word of his wife, he was at home the whole of Monday evening after office hours, and his key has never left the watch-chain upon which it hangs.

West is accorded a less laudatory review, and his "hot-headed and impetuous" tendencies will certainly decide his fate; but it is Johnson who should draw our attention.  Johnson embodies the steady banality of petty government work, of officials who for all their malingering cannot commit to a barefaced lie.  The few sentences offered on his disposition indicate not so much a stereotype as an inevitability, the uniform reactionary that haunts the halls of every strong governmental institution.  Considering the novelty of submarine warfare, such an official would be in principle the least likely among all professions to place greed and deception before a planned and secure life.  Although this same official and his ilk remain the closest citizens to the vault of state secrets.

There is a pleasing fervor to The Bruce-Partington Plans that only compares to the more attenuated tension of a well-made thriller.  It is one of the longer Holmes stories, and one of the best, and its effectiveness lies in the intricacies of the crime.  A transfer of the plans could drastically shift military advantage, which suddenly endangers empire and citizen alike – but neither Holmes nor we, as it were, are concerned with empire.  From all indications West had a hand in the blueprints' disappearance as he was found with seven of the ten on his murdered person.  Granted, these were the seven least important prints; and there is the implication that the submarine could be passably engineered on the basis of the three others.  What is more, West was about to marry (Watson and Holmes interview his sobbing bride), and could also have used the money were he planning to purchase separate quarters or start a family.  Yet compare Mycroft's impression of Johnson cited above to what he thought of the younger clerk:

He has been ten years in the service and has done good work. He has the reputation of being hot-headed and impetuous, but a straight, honest man. We have nothing against him. He was next Sidney Johnson in the office. His duties brought him into daily, personal contact with the plans. No one else had the handling of them.

My copy, a venerated edition which must be right, contains "impetuous"; but an online search also yields "imperious," which cannot possibly refer to the callow and naive West.  Unless, of course, he took the whole notion of global domination more seriously than first imagined.  Strange what ten safe and sheltered years can do to human desire.

The Brazilian Cat

Almost exactly eight years ago, as autumn was gathering its troops for an assault on the Northern European summer – perhaps the closest thing to Paradise we may experience on this earth – I drifted into this film festival with a certain plan in mind.  The two films selected differed significantly in their premises but were indicative of my particular bias for the region: two Russian sisters, baptized into a life of luxury by an unscrupulous father, were the subject of the first tale; the second featured the most beautiful city in Europe and a black feline whose origin was, well, probably somewhere beyond our realm.  That the sisters' reality reflected the brutal capitalism of the New Russia, or whatever it calls itself, was of lesser importance than the manifest superstition of the typically skeptical Dane.  Even small tractable beasts in their sleekness and perfection hint at some distant power, which brings us to this story.

Our protagonist is an impecunious gentleman, Marshall King, of "expensive tastes, great expectations, aristocratic connections, but no actual money."  We cannot lament the fact that he is given to "pigeon-shooting and polo-playing" any more than the condition of other landed elite who just happen to be stony broke.  Yet King is more sensitive than your average peer.  His desire to stave off his mounting creditors – a strange parallel to what would occur later in his story – is attenuated by a longing for a plain, happy life bereft of the social responsibilities that accompany wealth.  Since in the family there is a considerable amount of money, King cannot help but feel that he is being precluded owing to little faith in his capabilities, a rather damning verdict for a man of leisure if true.  For that reason then does he leap at an unexpected invitation: his first cousin Everard, who is anything but impecunious, has just arrived from Brazil, bringing with him fauna of the most outlandish caliber, from birds to serpents to creatures wholly unknown to contemporary Europe.  But while Everard's panama hat, white linen clothes, cigar and back-slapping mirth all cater to an unfortunate stereotype, it is his Brazilian wife who may be his most exotic import:     

Nothing could be more hearty than his manner, and he set me at my ease in an instant.  But it needed all his cordiality to atone for the frigidity and even rudeness of his wife, a tall, haggard woman, who came forward at his summons.  She was, I believe, of Brazilian extraction, though she spoke excellent English, and I excused her manners on the score of her ignorance of our customs.  She did not attempt to conceal, however, either then or afterwards, that I was no very welcome visitor at Greylands Court.  Her actual words were, as a rule, courteous, but she was the possessor of a pair of particularly expressive dark eyes, and I read in them very clearly from the first that she heartily wished me back in London once more.

If you are familiar with Conan Doyle's most famous collection of tales, you may detect similarities between this Latin American woman and a couple of others – but I will leave that to the Holmesians.  King gladly treks out to Clipton-on-the-Marsh dreaming of a blank check, his wretched frame inspired with hope from Everard's reputation as a benevolent and unstinting soul. The invitation is for a week, during which time he will get to know his cousin and his wild adventures, ostensibly a socially acceptable means of currying favor with a more moneyed relative.  He is not disappointed, but rather whisked into a manor of immense proportions, and immediately asked to do nothing except be himself – all of which, coupled with Everard's manic requests for telegrams ("he had never fewer than three or four telegrams a day, and sometimes as many as seven or eight") might lead less gullible minds to a certain conclusion. 

Apart from a few flashes of incomplete understanding, King never questions his cousin's behavior.  He never really wonders why the man has so many animals but no children, why he invited a cousin he barely knew to exist and who could be expected to hit him up for an intrafamily loan, or, considering his eccentric hobbies, why he would bother to come back to England in the first place.  King is certainly more chary of the wife, who is portrayed by Everard as kind but "incredibly jealous," her ideal for the couple being "a desert island and an eternal tête-à-tête."  The shrewd reader will already have two or three scenarios in mind as Everard reveals the main attraction of his private zoo, a beast kept apart from the rest of the animals for very obvious reasons.  Although details of this monster will not be divulged here, one should ask oneself what type of megalomaniac would risk life and all four limbs to cordon off part of his manor for a dangerous pet (another Holmes story might aid in answering this question).  King does everything he can to display his helplessness and lack of knowledge on the nature of the beast, and despite the fact that the whole scheme smacks of skulduggery, we will only be as informed as our first-person narrator.  Even if we know what type of brutes Everard would keep on his desert isle.    

The Sussex Vampire

It has been about fifty-five months since my fateful re-acquaintance with the world of Holmes and Watson in this bookshop, and perhaps owing to its rather provocative title my eyes fell first to this story.  A fifteen-minute read in the bookstore café and I left with the complete works in two rugged paperbacks (to be devoured in their entirety once I reached my sunny modern loft in Berlin).  Whether I truly remembered the tales from the summer now twenty years ago may be debated; more likely I retained only a few culprits, dialogues and twists, all of which were augmented by my love for the series featuring this late actor.  The story itself was considered promising enough to be expanded into a movie-length episode with Brett, and has remained a minor victory of style and concision. 

It is November, cold, mysterious, a month that drifts into perpetual gloaming, when the detectives receive a message from a certain Ferguson.  Ferguson was once Watson's regular opponent during their rugby days, a time that Watson typically recollects with exaggerated fondness (such is the machismo of the the average male that brutal, useless afternoons are transformed into a charming period of camaraderie).  Ferguson relates an almost impossible tale about the household of a close friend in which inexplicable events have cast a pallor upon the souls that therein reside.  This friend, whose personal life is known by Ferguson in suspicious detail, married a Peruvian beauty five years ago after his first wife died leaving him a son, Jack, now about fifteen.  While initially a happy pairing, their marriage soon becomes a conduit for suppositions that do not involve merit or mention, and the gentleman feels that he shall never come to know his wife:  

The fact of her foreign birth and of her alien religion always caused a separation of interests and of feelings between husband and wife, so that after a time his love may have cooled towards her and he may have come to regard their union as a mistake.  He felt there were sides of her character which he could never explore or understand.  This was the more painful as she was as loving a wife as a man could have - to all appearance absolutely devoted. 

A small stereotype of Anglo-Saxon and Latin relationships perhaps, but one that rings true in the matter of frankness and passion.  The mistrust could surely be imputed to the fact that they had known each other only a few weeks before taking their vows, yet another inherent difference persists even after they decide to have a child of their own, a difference buttressed by the description of the manor upon Holmes and Watson's arrival:

The room, as I gazed round, was a most singular mixture of dates and of places.  The half-panelled walls may well have belonged to the original yeoman farmer of the seventeenth century.  They were ornamented, however, on the lower part by a line of well-chosen modern water-colours; while above, where yellow plaster took the place of oak, there was hung a fine collection of South American utensils and weapons, which had been brought, no doubt, by the Peruvian lady upstairs.  Holmes rose, with that quick curiosity which sprang from his eager mind, and examined them with some care.  He returned with his eyes full of thought.

More specifically, full of thought on the horrific scene depicted by Ferguson, who is quickly revealed as both the author and subject of the long letter beseeching Holmes and Watson to help him discover what could be wrong with his wife – the same wife caught on more than one occasion sucking the blood out of her infant's neck.

Avid readers of detective fiction and horror will undoubtedly reach the right conclusion about the alleged vampirism, which Holmes refers to as "rubbish," "absurd," and something that "does not happen in criminal practice in England," an interesting way of avoiding a question regarding its actual existence.  As in many of Conan Doyle's later works, there are elements and clues already famous from other entries, a sidelight more indicative of fatidic patterning rather than any lack of creativity on his part.  To those not enchanted (alas, at one point I counted myself among them) by the miniatures of genius that these tales represent, our vampire and her appurtenances can proffer as fine an introduction as any of the more canonically recognized classics, most of which predate our sleuth's temporary demise.  In fact, reading them in order of publication suggests both that Holmes and Watson are necessarily wiser as time progresses and that their cases begin to echo past achievements.  Not that there could ever be any real-life vampires for two men of science apart from an occasional bat.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

One wonders why certain works of art attract us, and the common answer is that they respond to something that we lack in our own lives.  Desperate housewives will devour hunky, everlasting romances; pimply lads will become superheroes in the furrows of their imagination; old men will wax sentimental over movies contemporaneous to their youth.  Our modern fascination with tales of horror has provoked a slew of interpretations so banal that one cannot but impute this banality to the interpreters themselves, and the less said about these silly theories the better.  Yet this fascination is long-standing.  For those of faith, evil is as real as goodness – even realer in the sense that evil invariably predicates the destruction of good and cannot exist in any sort of vacuum.  The tangibility of the horrors of war, famine, pestilence, or ethnic cleansing cannot be mimicked in art, only referenced.  So as we let our fancies drift into ancient castles, unlock rusted wards, and pore over wicked tomes, we feel a need to confront these baleful shapes – and then something very odd occurs.  Amidst every malediction and ghoul that might infect our thoughts, we desire for a brief moment – indeed, perhaps even a while longer – the possession of that shape because that shape is power over the commonality of our existence.  Each of us wants to be not only a superior among men, but also privy to what lies on the other side of the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Evil, for whatever you might conceive it to be, offers us the straightest path to knowledge, even if what it teaches us is that we should appreciate every iota of our earthbound life and treat it like the flaxen stream it is.  Which explains our First Disobedience, as well as this immortal tale.

As one might expect from a production bold enough to invoke a deceased author's blessing, the plot closely follows that of the book.  At the acme of Victorian storytelling in the late nineteenth century, a young barrister by the name of Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) sits aboard an East European train on his way to meet a Romanian count (Gary Oldman) who needs little introduction.  His travels are true to the fantastic opening passages of the novel, and the aura of mystery and dread could not be richer or more imminent.  During this obvious precursor to very bad things Reeves remains unflurried and almost impassive, which led to some nastiness in the reviews of the film and whispers of mediocrity.  Whatever one may think of his thespian abilities, Reeves's casting is correct: his natural stiffness and timidity reflect the average citizen's view on unusual matters.  Harker may be the only one in the theater who does not find the wizened freakish count to resemble a grotesque, long-nailed cadaver, but he is also not in full possession of what else the count could be if not a human being.  The solipsistic age of reason (a most regrettable misnomer) bred a certain type of man: the skeptic who took the longest time to admit that he did not or could not know how to explain the phenomena of his immediate environment.  Harker is essential because as he overnights within the Count's lifeless walls, he will witness a host of terrible events and in some of them even be implicated.  These will include an abominable tower and moat, three vixens and a baby, a mirror and a razor, and a series of unspeakable occurrences that he confesses only to his diary and to us.

Whom he cannot inform is his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who awaits him in the company of her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) and Lucy's triptych of hapless suitors.  The difference between the book and the film is an element that could only be theatrical and which is actually revealed by Ryder's presence in the very first scene not as Mina Murray.  Whether this conceit simply panders to the juvenile whims of the target audience depends on rather subjective notions of coincidence in art, although it can be said that in context the addition does more good than harm.  I would even go as far to say that it solves, in an artistic fashion, the main structural weakness of the original: namely, why on earth Dracula wished to leave the country in which he was practically invulnerable to expose himself to constant danger in a city brimming with enemies.  Mina worries aloud, a tidy way of containing the novel's original epistolary format, whilst the Count approaches, communicating through former barrister Renfield (Tom Waits) as around Gibraltar heads a boat replete with crates of his native soil (perhaps never in cinematic history has there been a crew so doomed).  Upon landfall, the Count begins plotting and scheming his way into the lives of strangers, all of which serves an ulterior motive.  Lucy becomes very ill from a mysterious sickness unknown to conventional science; an old abbey is attorned to a certain tall, dark foreigner; Mina suspects that Jonathan has fallen on very black days in that distant kingdom even though he is forced to pre-write a number of calming if overly plain letters sporadically mailed by the Count; and Renfield, who languishes in an asylum, has been predicting the arrival of his Master.  And what happens next will involve a hunt of the implacable monster who will flash enough of his former humanity to inflate what could have been a unerring fable into something deeper and more plausible. 

The pleasantries of the film are so numerous that we forget how simple and operatic the plot machinations really are.  Apart from sumptuous wardrobes and effects that convince us we have entered another dimension, the casting of all the main characters betrays Coppola's intuition for harmony among actors whose looks could easily have them mistaken for the heartthrobs of a daytime soap.  The exception to these pretty people is Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), a grizzled Dutchman and specialist on obscure diseases, as well as a perfect foil to the monster he "has been pursuing all his life."  He hijacks the search for answers and is necessarily branded a mystagogue; in time the other parties concur with his outrageous conclusions and finally know almost as much as we do.  Van Helsing alters every aspect of the film's course while also becoming its true crusader and detective; in the book, by contrast, more is accomplished by the peripheral characters although this may be a function of its inflexible structure.  That we first meet the Dutchman as he is making an old academic pun on an unfortunate pair of near-homophones indicates we must change our perceptions accordingly, and his humor and foreignness are much needed in the otherwise morbid London alleyways.  Not that you would want to go anywhere near those places.

The Horror of the Heights

A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger.  Yet tigers exist; and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured.

                                                                                                   From the "Joyce-Armstrong Fragment"

More than once on these pages I have claimed that the best works of this author are his best-known.  Now this statement has stood through generations of scrutiny, detractors and admirers, and cannot seriously be denied.  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle's remaining oeuvres are valuable not only as satellites around the brilliant sun that he placed among our stars but also as exemplary prose of its own.  Conan Doyle's greatest asset as an artist was his unwillingness to listen to anyone except himself – thereby incurring both the good and bad of splendid creative isolation.  The bad, of course, may be found in some of his weirder works, for the most part historically inspired (and here I admit my difficulties in finishing these works, so lengthy and unpromising have they proven to be); but the good has yielded some texts of astounding creativity, even miniatures like this famous story.

We begin as in so many tales of Holmes and Watson with a first-person narrator, but unlike Watson, who often knows much less than the characters he describes, our editor and host appears to be omniscient – well, omniscient apart from one important detail.  The tone is also markedly different because from all indications our subject seems to lurk outside the realm of empirical science:

The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter.  The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement.  Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation.  This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger.  I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date.

The Joyce-Armstrong fragment turns out not to be the logbook of some collaborative scientific expedition, but the notes of one wealthy Romantic with particularly rabid opinions on what should be valued in life.  He was "a retiring man with dark moods," a "poet and dreamer," and a "mechanic and inventor," all of which point to the felicitous and rare coincidence in one soul of ambition and imagination.  Despite these credentials, "there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious," a comment which had it been made by a more cynical writer might have been interpreted as something less extraordinary than deranged, the madness of the blue flower.  But Joyce-Armstrong has more sober ends in mind.  He is convinced that something above the clouds (what he labels an "air-jungle") has been snapping up pilots and disposing of them elsewhere.  Precisely that "elsewhere" is what interests him, and he is definitely in the minority:

Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere .... But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper.  It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level.  Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains.  It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone – always presuming that my premonitions are correct.

Thus begins the actual manuscript in medias res, its first two and its last page having been lost.  Yet that first "nevertheless" indicates that Joyce-Armstrong has been struggling to convince anyone who would listen and might understand a smidgen about flying of his unearthly "premonitions."  And one fine day, dressed "for the summit of the Himalayas" and full of mettle and grit, he sets out with the goal of scaling forty thousand feet of air.

What he finds, if it can be described with any available vocabulary, will not be revealed here.  The premise of the story is one of sheer terror that cannot appeal to the average person because the average person would not possibly be able to take a monoplane seven miles above the ground, nor grasp what insanity might beset an oxygen-starved brain at those heights.  And given the awesome dramatic tension that Conan Doyle develops, the cantle of jungle above these clouds might not be what horror buffs would expect.  But horror assumes many forms, one of the most effective being the subtle dread of something evil that should not exist.  There is also the matter of the self-fulfilling epitaph that Joyce-Armstrong leaves and which is often cited by students of the ghost story as well as erudite connoisseurs of Conan Doyle's oeuvre.  But what, pray tell, would we do without "accidents and mysteries"?