Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (15 page)

This transformation manages to trick both the investigators and the reader, but it is its foremost addressee, Sherlock Holmes,
whose credulity is the very motor of this story. It is a story invented and written for him, predicting before the start his
very subtlest reactions.

To say that Holmes is the addressee of this story is not only to observe that he is its main witness, since he himself leads
the investigation; it is to assert that his presence in that role essentially creates the murder, which could not have taken
place in his absence. The murderer needed Holmes in order to perpetrate the crime, for the detective is its centerpiece.

Several times in the book, Holmes brags about not believing in the theory of the murderous hound—only to be convinced by the
murderer of a different legend, that of the killer with the hound who executes his victims by heart attack:

“I told you in London, Watson, and I tell you now again, that we have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel. [ . . .
] We could prove nothing against him. There’s the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a human agent we could
get some evidence, but if we were to drag this great dog to the light of day it would not help us in putting a rope round
the neck of its master.”
⁹⁸

Several centuries after the primordial scene of Hugo Baskerville’s death, Holmes dotingly encourages a very similar legend,
even though he is convinced that he has abandoned the original myth. The dog is indeed accompanied this time by its master,
but it is nonetheless the same mythical creature.

Holmes ends up being so taken in by this legend that he willingly promotes it to his companions. It becomes possible to regard
him as the co-narrator of this unlikely story, embroidering the tapestry the murderer obligingly holds out to him, never realizing
that he is being manipulated.

It is not just Holmes’s predictable reactions that fulfill the murderer’s expectations; it is also Holmes’s thinking and his
suggestions. When we listen, we hear a voice other than Holmes’s own, one that is expressed through him to lure listeners
and readers away from the truth.

Thus Holmes is co-narrator and even in a way accomplice to murder; not only could the murder not be realized in his absence,
but he actually aids in its perpetration throughout the book—without being aware of it, but nonetheless with a good deal of
persistence.

If Holmes is indeed the unconscious coauthor of this story, it remains for us to identify his accomplice. Among all the narrators
who succeed each other in this novel, which is the guilty one? Which is the one who, by subtly instilling the legend of the
murderer-with-the-dog in the minds of characters and readers alike, hijacks their perception of reality in the service of
his own criminal interests?

* Even why he threatened Laura Lyons (“He frightened me into remaining silent” [
The Hound of the Baskervilles, op. cit
., p. 883]). But, if he did kill Sir Charles Baskerville, how are we to explain that he left the young woman alive and capable
of accusing him at any moment?

II
Death Invisible

A LOGICAL ANALYSIS of the facts, freed of the obsessive need to find murder whether it’s there or not, leads to the plausible
hypothesis that the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville was really an accident. But this hypothesis does not clear up all the
unresolved problems, nor does it reduce our story to a simple news item.

If the opening scene is not a murder but the scene of an accident, it does not necessarily follow that
The Hound of the Baskervilles
involves no murders at all. But this first clarification was necessary, so that we can stop seeing the whole of this story
through the eyes of Holmes and of the person who deliberately suggested a biased interpretation to him, and so that we can
try to understand what actually occurred, more than a century ago now, on the Devon moors.

Furthermore, the idea that Baskerville’s death was an accident—whether or not the doctor lied—does not mean that
The Hound of the Baskervilles
is not a criminal affair; quite the contrary.

The general atmosphere in which the story unfolds gives us the first impression that obscure forces are at work on the moor
and that a malignant intelligence reigns in the shadows, even more pernicious than the one Holmes naively thinks he has unmasked.

And it is hard not to notice that a lot of people die in this book. No less than three people—Sir Charles Baskerville, Selden,
and Stapleton—die in a short time on the Devonshire moor, and two others—Henry Baskerville and Beryl Stapleton—come close
to dying. A simple statistical evaluation leads us to think that the mortality rate is abnormally high in the neighborhood
of Baskerville Hall.

Still, if the accident hypothesis allows us to solve the mystery of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, it leaves a number of
mysteries unsolved. Who is the mysterious bearded character who shadows Henry and Dr. Mortimer in London, and why is he so
intent on drawing the detective’s attention to him by calling himself Sherlock Holmes? Who sent the letter warning of danger
to Henry Baskerville? Who tied up Beryl Stapleton, and why? And how are we to explain the shoe so opportunely forgotten by
the side of the path?

So how is it possible for
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, constructed around the story of an accident, still to be a murder story? The question contains its own answer: by forming
a hypothesis that there is
another murder
in the book. Such a murder could be easily carried out while the unsuspecting reader and investigators are focused on the
hound, whose sheer presence in the story prevents us from seeing the rest.

In most detective novels, the murderer tries to outsmart the sleuth by making certain that no evidence suggests his guilt.
He creates an alibi for himself, or conceals the motive that led him to act, or else arranges for suspicions to come to rest
on another suspect.

This period of the investigation is delicate for the murderer; even if another suspect has been arrested he remains under
permanent threat that the investigation will one day be reopened. This attempt to conceal evidence is obviously the weak point
in criminal undertakings, and it often leads to the arrest of the guilty party.

For the murderer wishing to conceal his crime, there is an important principle to remember: a murder will be investigated
if and only if it is recognized as a murder. In order to elude investigation, then, he needs only to suppress the murder itself,
so that no investigation happens at all.

This clever sort of evasion has not escaped specialists in crime. In one of her best novels,
Towards Zero
, Agatha Christie tells how a murderer tries to escape justice by ensuring that the murder is never recognized.

The hero of the book, Neville Strange, a professional tennis player, kills his old aunt, Lady Tressilian, by using a tennis
racket weighted with lead. He then plants two sets of clues in the house where the crime took place. The first series tends
to implicate him in the murder, but in such an obvious way that the police, made suspicious by the clues’ clumsiness, come
to suppose that the real murderer has planted the clues to frame Neville Strange.

The police are then seduced into following a second, subtler series of clues, which this time implicate Neville Strange’s
ex-wife, Audrey. She is arrested and accused—not only of the first murder, but of trying to frame Strange. Unless the investigators
do their jobs brilliantly, she will be condemned to death and hanged.

This delights the murderer, Neville Strange, because he killed his aunt expressly to have Audrey executed; she has left him
and he wants revenge. The first murder—the one committed with a tennis racket, of which Lady Tressilian is the victim—has
in fact no importance in the eyes of the murderer. Its only function is to conceal the second one, the attempt to have Audrey
hanged:

“You mean that Lady Tressilian’s death was the culmination of a long train of circumstances?”

  “No, Miss Aldin, not Lady Tressilian’s death. Lady Tressilian’s death was only incidental to the main object of the murderer.
The murder I am talking of
is the murder of Audrey Strange
.”
^*
99

Thus the real murder of
Towards Zero
passes completely unperceived by both the police and the reader. Just as a magician diverts the audience’s attention from
the place where the trick is really being performed, Strange focuses all the attention on the murder of the old woman. Wasting
their time and energy in clearing it up, the investigators fail to realize that another murder is in progress under their
eyes, hidden from sight by the first one.

I am convinced that it is a contrivance of this sort that we are witnessing in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. With his story of a murderer with a dog, the criminal manages to completely divert both investigators and readers from the
true murder scene, so that it ceases to exist as a murder and thus assures its author complete impunity.

It is a murder that, as in
Towards Zero
, does not appear at a precise moment in time—even if the physical death of the victim can be precisely situated—but instead
takes place through the entire story and before the very eyes of the reader, who witnesses a slow execution without realizing
it. From this perspective, the book is not the story of an investigation, but a secret narrative of an interminable killing
of which the reader is the unconscious voyeur and accomplice.

But there are two major differences between the two stories. The first is that the murderer in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
has no need to commit a first murder to carry out the second. It is enough for him to profit cleverly from the accident that
befalls Sir Charles Baskerville by transforming it into a murder. In this sense, his crime is much more successful than the
one recounted by Agatha Christie; it doesn’t even require him to dirty his hands.

And this success is made even sweeter—and this is the major difference between the two stories—by the fact that the murderer
in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
achieves his ends where Neville Strange fails. While Audrey Strange is saved from hanging by the sagacity of the police,
the victim in Conan Doyle’s book is executed with the complicity of Holmes, and without the true murderer ever being bothered.

As soon as the mystery of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
is posed in these terms and the notion of the invisible murder is presented, the solution comes swiftly; there are, after
all, only three deaths in the book. We have seen that all the evidence suggest that Sir Charles Baskerville’s death was an
accident, even though the detective’s interpretation of this accident contributes to the real murder.

The same seems to be true for the convict Selden. Although his death suits a lot of people, especially his family, it is hard
to imagine, given the circumstances, that it was the result of a knowingly premeditated conspiracy; it would have been enough
for those close to him to indicate his whereabouts to the police to get rid of him for good.

Which leads us to the third death, which is never questioned, and which goes completely unnoticed even though it certainly
poses a number of questions: the murder of the man we have previously proven innocent of murder, Jack Stapleton.

* Emphasis in original.