The Norwood Builder

Were you to review modern cinema's development of the thriller, you would come across a singularly ingenious topos called the "framing of an innocent fugitive."  Ingenious in that it often involves a situation in which the opinion of the world is so vehemently opposed to considering the fugitive's innocence that he himself thinks he might have committed some wrongdoing in an altered state.  Once upon a time we had demons; now we have drugs, hallucinations or mental illness, but the lack of responsibility or blackout periods remain (indeed, sleepwalking was one of the least satisfying ways of explaining gaps in memory, and is featured as the solution in more than a few prominent nineteenth-century crime novels).  There are, of course, other methods for handling the subject, including the possibility that a mandarin plot is afoot.  This is the worst fate of all, because the conspirator is near-omnipotent and, if truly diabolical, wise to any moves that you might undertake.  Such is the conundrum facing John Hector MacFarlane, a young solicitor who seeks advice and refuge in this story.

Being green and unobtrusive, MacFarlane cannot overcome his amazement when a well-to-do fellow bachelor, Mr. Jonas Oldacre, approaches him in his office one day and asks him to cast his last will and testament "into proper legal shape."  The fifty-two-year-old builder is a verbal stranger to MacFarlane, although  the cantankerous Oldacre was at one time acquainted with MacFarlane's parents. Papers are examined, hands are shaken, and the young man promises to come by Oldacre's house the following night to examine some scrip and housing deeds.  Yet that is not all: the sole benefactor of the will is none other than MacFarlane himself, a condition justified by the relationless Oldacre's having known his family and wanting to reward a "very deserving young man."  MacFarlane proceeds to the builder's estate, staffed only with a housekeeper, and discusses the terms of the will before suspiciously open French windows and a suspiciously open safe.  The examination of the paperwork takes much longer than expected, forcing the young solicitor to pass the night in a nearby inn.  The next morning, by his own account, he learns that Oldacre's estate was damaged severely in a fire that had begun the night before, and that Oldacre himself perished in the inferno.  All of which makes the young MacFarlane a very wealthy and, unfortunately, very wanted man. 

Surely, one might snicker at this "filthy wealth of coincidence" (to use this author's expression); yet upon reflection of most any important event in one's life a plethora of hitherto unnoticed data may surface.  This is a very modern phenomenon.  Our advances in forensics have enabled us to construct situations in which we can identify the culprit from processing all the evidence on hand, regardless of the personality, motives, or relations of the people involved.  Indeed, it is really with the introduction of Holmes and Watson – two men of science – that we begin to do away with what is specifically called Menschenkenntnis in German, or a "knowledge of human nature" (the fact that we have no exact term for it should be explanation enough).  While I applaud any progress made in the field of identifying or verifying criminal perpetrators, one should not forget that these persons, while desperate, ignorant or evil, are still just like the rest of us, that is, motivated by very personal issues and factors that can be grandly categorized but not fully understood without an understanding of how people tend or tend not to do things.  When Holmes became world-famous at the end of the nineteenth century, he was praised by scientific pundits who saw him as a paladin against the Romantic notions of human behavior.  Here was a man who thrived on proving things by testing every physical detail against every other; whose creator and sidekick were both medical doctors; and who shunned theories that encapsulated superstitions, curses, or other unprovable agencies.  But what many forget is that Conan Doyle himself believed in all these forces, and spent the greater part of his life promoting their importance.  Was this a natural recoiling from Holmes's massive shadow?  Was it owing to his realization that he would forever be known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great Sherlock Holmes?

Perhaps, although unlikely.  Despite Holmes's empiricist methods, he is a wise knower of men.  He understands the little details that might turn an otherwise pleasant human being into a criminal, and re-imagines this evolution at its every stage.  As for poor MacFarlane, a preponderance of proof lies against him:  he was the last visitor to see Oldacre; his fingerprints are on the primary documents as well as all over the house; he had no connection to Oldacre, having just met him, and was relatively impecunious and living with his parents; and, of course, he stood to inherit a heaping pile of banknotes as a result of this crime.  And while a new piece of physical evidence cements the police's case, Holmes plows on owing to a hunch that has nothing to do with all the daggers he sees before him.  But it does have to do with that most despicable of human fallacies, the unwillingness to forgive, the opposite of all we should strive for.  And for grudges there is rarely any physical evidence.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Some of us have the unfortunate habit of ignoring those works or manifestos which do not concur with our own.  Only too natural, we might say, because life is short and consecrating time to theories we know to be patently false (for whatever reason) is a waste of our dwindling days.  So bereft of imagination or credibility are many of these decrees that more demanding readers, readers whose main aims are beauty, truth, enjoyment and a moral framework for all aspects of life, are infuriated.  If that sounds like a lot to ask for, you might question why you read at all.  Personally, I read to seek out that one moral law that has always existed within me and is reflected by the starry night above me.  I do not find it often; sometimes it only exists in snippets or flashes amidst a garish carnival of platitudes.  In some rather infrequent cases there obtains a concatenation of detail evoking the shadow of that law, however ignored by the text itself, and the result is what the Greeks called irony.  Rarer still are images of purported truth cast in colors and shapes that could not possibly mean anything more than earthbound pleasures – until you look very closely and see that a few of these pleasures (especially affection, physical attraction, laughter, and friendship) are indeed reflections of something much, much greater.  Thus we are bound to examine all information we come across.  In fact, we can and should assume that within the maze of misperception, bias, and fear there lurks a crazed beast whose roar can bring us something of this law.  Modern psychology, a field with which I am very unfortunately well-acquainted from readings, has taken it upon itself to explain all our dreams, nightmares, waking moments and desires through a children’s set of boxes and crayons.  It has tried (and failed gloriously) to make us think we are all puerile players in a nonstop run of a tasteless musical on the Great White Way, singing the same chants and dancing to the same bongo drums.

Now there is nothing wrong with childhood, but there is something terribly wrong with its ignorant revolt against authority.  Curiosity, optimism, the sense of immortality that many children’s circumstances permit them to enjoy – all of this we should never forget; the love of family, of one’s homeland, of the moments and other souls that make us into responsible adults, all of this we should cherish.  When people long for their childhood, it is either because their childhood was very happy or their current life does not contain this sense of immortality, of unending meadows cascading among unending hillocks.  The assumption of another persona to the psychologist indicates a deep-seated urge to escape one’s existence, although every writer of fiction, like every actor, assumes a myriad of guises over a career and can still be (and often is) very content with his “real” self.  To what other vocation does such an apparent paradox belong?  To those persons of deep faith, those who appreciate their earthbound existence but also look forward to redemption in some higher state; loving one does not mean hating the other.  A lengthy but necessary introduction to one of the finest short stories of the English language.

The basic facts are known even to people who have never opened Stevenson’s text: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a scientist of genius and loner by nature, has acquired a nasty and violent friend by the name of Edward Hyde.  That Hyde might be sponsored by Jekyll is the direct suggestion of the narrator, who culls his details from Mr. Utterson, a London lawyer who hears of an awful crime involving a young girl and a payoff to her relatives from very respectable circles (a strange foreshadowing of these legendary crimes).  Since Utterson is in every way an upstanding Victorian citizen as well as a scholar of the law, this crime of moral turpitude cannot go unpunished.  The trail boomerangs back to Jekyll, who happens to be one of Utterson’s clients as well as an old friend, reminding us of the aphorisms about how well we think we know our dearest comrades. One wonders what the first-time reader might have made of the strange comings and goings of Hyde from a building adjacent to that of Jekyll, and from the physical deformity and abhorrent cruelty that distinguish Hyde from his maker:

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude.  Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity.  The problem he was thus debating as he walked was one of a class that is rarely solved.  Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.  ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman.  ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it.  God bless me, the man seems hardly human!  Something troglodytic, shall we say?  Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?  Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?  The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend!’

The story proceeds in magnificent suspense until a pair of fatal decisions are made, and Utterson is left with a letter from Jekyll detailing his descent into hell.  The letter, which I should like to quote in toto, is such a literary delight that we are struck anew by the ability of its author, and of the temptations of evil in the face of knowledge and progress.  It is here that Jekyll becomes Hyde and Hyde turns into Jekyll, that the two persons once thought distinct appear as anagrams of their own weaknesses.  It is also here that Jekyll reveals why he might have wanted such an escape, and his explanation – for a moment, in any case – appears to be as lucid an ancient codex on combating evil as anything else we might have heard, in this case by grasping, literally and figuratively, at its tenebrous strength.

What one shouldn’t conclude, however, is that the titular bicephalous beast somehow metaphorizes an affliction.  Nor should we suppose that the whole project can be reduced to the modern plight of a small percentage of our population with a misunderstanding of their proper persona, in some cases leading them to conduct their business as totally separate people.  Stevenson, like Utterson, was a lawyer not a doctor, and his interest is in the motives of men not some cerebral malfunction.  That evil and goodness should operate within the same immortal soul is our oldest and still our most critical moral quandary; nevertheless, that a man of superior intellect would generate, in his own nightmare, such a lowlife scum as an alias speaks more of his own inner darkness than any shame he might have had in inducing the transformation.  Despite his claims, Dr. Jekyll is not a good man gone wrong: he is a bad man who finds an outlet in his creative work, in time making himself into his own Frankenstein's monster.  For that reason perhaps is man “commingled out of good and evil,” whereas Edward Hyde, “alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

The Hound of the Baskervilles

An egregious mistake was rectified with the publication of this novella, one of the finest in the English language.  In it returned the most renowned of all fictional detectives, and with him, we are told, thousands of readers.  All to a man were relieved that one of their constants in life was back from, well, the dead.  Yet if you are familiar with the arc of this story you know that Conan Doyle was more than a little reluctant to resurrect his immortal.  This hesitation was caused in part by his wish to become more than a “writer of detective stories,” an honorable calling, doubtless, although not literature’s highest.  In the felicitous creation of Holmes and Watson, Conan Doyle ensured that readers would celebrate the  quadricentennial of his birth as they once feted the centennial.  Sure enough, Conan Doyle forayed into other fields, including some books on spirituality that I will probably never bring myself to read, and we can definitely respect his literary ambitions.  But his genius lay in his development of an art form that seems lesser but was actually superior.  Superior because it had no peers, and perhaps its most glorious manifestation remains the tale of the evil hell–hound on the moors.

The setup will be old hat to mystery buffs: an aged millionaire dies under mysterious circumstances and his young heir pays no heed to warnings about a family curse.  To make matters even worse, the heir is an American and untrained in the ways of his British ancestors, rendering him even less suitable to handle the situation, the mansion, and, of course, the beast that allegedly scared his relative to death.  Since the family Baskerville is a known commodity, Holmes monitors the developments.  He is initially delighted to be consulted on the matter by Dr. Mortimer, the family doctor of the recently deceased Charles Baskerville.  Holmes’s enthusiasm wanes, however, when Mortimer argues for the hound’s supernatural origin, to which Holmes suggests that he might make better use of a priest than of the residents of 221B.  Nevertheless, a personal meeting with the heir, Henry Baskerville, and another series of what could not possibly be coincidences motivate Holmes to venture out into the granite upland of Dartmoor.  There he meets a few more characters who will be pieces in the puzzle and begins his investigation in typical Holmesian fashion by retreating, masquerading, and for a long time leaving Watson as befuddled and uninformed as his readers.

Holmes’s other three novellas share one fatal flaw that escapes The Hound of the Baskervilles: a wholly unnecessary back story that, while thorough in its explanation, casts the meat of the novel in a rather superficial light.  The most unfortunate of these devices can be found in this novella written after The Hound of the Baskervilles, but inferior in every way imaginable, although the methodology of the crime itself is ingenious.  But the tale of the padfoot might also be the best Sherlock Holmes tale by virtue of its freshness and observation of the fundamental rules of suspense, character development, and plot.  One occasionally gets the feeling in other stories that many of the barbs and details are throwaways for the sake of atmosphere and propriety (this later adventure is one example of too much talk, not enough snooping).  Nothing of the kind here.  We get instead an allegory, which when done garishly is one of the lowest forms of literature, and when done with great artistry sublimates into the stratosphere of the magnificent.  The fact that we are uncertain about the nature of the beast, or even of its ambitions (Dr. Mortimer relates the gory legend with great relish), whether it be flesh at all or simply a maudlin ruse in animal form, makes the book a late cloudy afternoon one–sitting classic.  And let us not forget the moor, because after this experience, you never will.             

The Return of Imray

Thinking of this Englishman as a writer of detective stories sounds strange, although the times and places in which he lived afforded his skills ample opportunity to develop.  What Kipling could not find in his environs in Lahore or Bombay he imported from the birthland of his forefathers, and his whimsy and sense of the nugatory cannot be better expressed than in a quote from this story:

For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. 

This is undoubtedly one of the finest sentences of English literature: the whole tale, then, is to be a moment in the life of someone who is probably dead and surely unimportant, except to the narrator, who has other ends in mind.  Art at the microscopical degree is still art, and an inquiry into the miniature particles of its construct as commendable as the painting of a chapel ceiling.  And Imray is suddenly as significant as any other fictional character that has ever lived.

Our narrator has few contacts in the world he describes.  There is only another Anglo–Indian, Strickland, a friend and policeman who rents the bungalow formerly inhabited by the Indian Imray, and Strickland’s dog, Tietjens.  What is particular about Tietjens, a bouncy and frisky beast with more personality than just about anyone else in this story, is that she is immediately identified as both a “slut” (a connotation that in 1891 was not quite like today’s use of the word) and a “familiar spirit.”  Now I cannot say I am an expert in the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, but this stroke suggests a sympathy with the local tradition that is often missing in “colonial” narratives, for lack of a better term.  Kipling himself was often charged with being too negative about the civilizations his country subjugated and the glee with which he spread his literature suggested a certain pride in the accomplishments of imperialism.  That view, in retrospect, comes off as too politically charged to be of any consequence: Kipling wrote about what he saw and heard, and what he saw and heard was at times appalling and inspiring for entirely different reasons.  True enough, we watch souls through their cages and imagine what they are really like within, and sometimes our guesses are spot–on.  Other times, we gaze smugly at those around us and think that we can read a soul in the vicissitudes of its face.  Perhaps we even chat with these spirits to confirm our suspicions.  But then, one day, these spirits vanish into the crowds we never seem to have noticed and, upon taking inventory of our recollections, we find that nothing will resummon them because all along they were figments or pastiches of our own projections.  We know nothing about them except that at one time they existed, although even that is assailable.  We know nothing about them and would never be able to find them again unless they entered our world on our terms, and so we forget them and find others, more beautiful or more interesting.  And our narrator realizes he knows absolutely about Imray.

It is perhaps understood that Imray is dead or returned in some other form or both.  A shadow accompanies the story line from an appropriate distance, with a reserve that seems unlikely given the beliefs the author ascribes to the natives:

The rooms of the house were dark behind me ... my own servant came to me in the twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tight to his drenched body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some one.  Very much against my will, but only because of the darkness of the rooms, I went into the naked drawing–room, telling my man to bring the lights.  There might or might not have been a caller waiting — it seemed to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows — but when the lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without, and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.

Outside, as “storm after storm came up,” Tietjens is seen howling at something or someone.  And someone tries to call out to the narrator “by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.”  After that long and magnificent description, two snakes slither their way into the story as if dispatched to destroy the interlopers in Imray’s house.  Then we meet one last character who reveals exactly why Imray disappeared, an explanation that you could not possibly expect in a purely “Western” story devoted, as it must be, to dispassionate reason.  And Imray’s strange fate, like the weblike tale in which he is entrapped, is both logical and ridiculous.   

Silver Blaze

Although this marvelous story derives its name from this lordly animal set to race in this region of England, its most famous line involves another four-legged friend who "did nothing in the night–time."  My edition boasts that this line is the source of the expression, "the dog that didn't bark."  If this is truly the origin (I will not even dignify it with a search, either online or off), then the future of mankind is indeed in troubled hands.  It would be hard to believe that, after thousands of years of cohabitation, we would need an emaciated and neurotic sleuth to tell us that there is something amiss about a guard dog who chooses not to fulfill his duties.  Wait until someone publishes a story featuring a cat who doesn't sleep (again no search, this cat must be out there somewhere) and decides to watch over its owner, and we may coin an even more telling idiom about human nature.  In Silver Blaze, a beautiful silvery steed from this legendary British stock is missing and its trainer John Straker is dead.  Since the horse can rightly be viewed as a sort of piggy bank – or as we say in our waggish slang, a cash cow – it seems logical to assume that the horse has vanished for the sake of the money that will be earned betting against it. 

This gambit has long since been one of the favorites of sports stories: it is just before the biggest competition of the horse's or athlete's career that the prize participant either gets injured or disappears without too much of a trace.  The team or trainer cannot believe the poor timing with which all this has occurred (although, if you're a betting man, this is the only time for this type of thing to occur; we are witnessing this even now before the largest American sports event of the year), and panic and goldfeverish speculation set in.  The investigation, narrated by the faithful and jubilant Dr. Watson (one of the steadiest and most optimistic narrators in literary history), has all the usual components for a great Holmesian tale.  There is the unique locale, either Victorian or early Edwardian London or one of England’s innumerable moors, tors, or hamlets; the somewhat overtasked police force; a handful of potential culprits who all immediately respect or fear the legendary detective; and the impossible crime itself, which in this case begets one of Holmes’s more ingenious solutions.  Apart from the missing horse, the dead trainer, a band of gypsies, a rival stable, a curious late–night visit, some curried mutton, and a set of diverging tracks, the clues are more than peculiar: a box of matches, two inches of a tallow candle, a brier–root pipe, a pouch of sealskin with that particular cut of tobacco called Cavendish, a silver watch with a gold chain, a fistful of dollars (that is to say, these products from the Royal Mint), an aluminum pencil case, a few papers, and a small, delicate knife with an ivory handle.  “A very singular knife,” remarks Holmes.  His medical companion agrees: apparently, such knives are only used for the finest of surgical incisions.  But such a knife could not possibly have been employed as a murder weapon, since Straker was bludgeoned by nothing less than a large blunt object. 

Unlike other adventures in which Holmes abandons Watson for a few pages to gather data or question informants offstage, very little detail is not made available to the reader.  Holmes’s people skills, which he can turn on and off like electric current, are displayed in their fullest form, and his charm and patience have never proven to be more effective.  And there is also that now–immortal dog who decides not to bark on the night of the murder, even though we suspect he might have every motivation to do so.  Had he barked, of course, we would hardly know of him now.  Yet perhaps one day we will instead remember Silver Blaze for Holmes’s revelatory statement that it was, “in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer’s house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me.”  Surely, we think, there must be some aspect of human nature that can be embodied by the spiced meat from two-year-old ewes.