Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles
By Pierre Bayard
As Reviewed by Macy Walsh
Anyone who imagines that Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter may claim to be the largest franchise in literary and film history has just not been paying attention. In raw sales they may emerge victorious, but in sheer numbers of attempted tributes, revisions, expansions, parodies, exposes and scholarly studies, they are no competition for the Sherlock Holmes industry. Novels and stories that star the private detective from Baker Street pour out of publishing houses every year.
Now we have a scholarly work out of left field by a professor of French literature at the University of Paris who is also a psychoanalyst. With Sherlock Holmes was Wrong, professor Bayard offers a novel interpretation of what is arguably the best known and most beloved of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The professor’s contention is that the truth behind the story eluded not only Sherlock Holmes, but generations of readers and Conan Doyle himself and he means to set the record straight; to reveal the real crime committed at Baskerville Hall and see its perpetrator brought to belated literary justice.
Bayard contends that in settling on Jack Stapleton and his hound, Holmes nailed the wrong suspect. In brief chapters he recounts the well-known plot, describes Holmes’ methods of inquiry, notes a number of mistakes made by the master, presents his own method of “detective criticism” and then delineates all the problems with the story and solution.
Among the problems the professor highlights are: Why did the hound leave no marks on the first corpse, that of Sir Charles Baskerville? When Seldon, the convict, dies wearing the clothes of Sir Henry Baskerville, the hound is never actually seen, so why assume that it was responsible? It does attack Sir Henry near the end, but only after a shot has wounded it first. Bayard also notes that, after deciding on Stapleton as his suspect, reading all the clues as pointing in his direction and then driving the man out onto the moor to his certain death, Holmes waves away the issue of motive when questioned by Watson. In response, Holmes admits this is “a formidable difficulty,” but adds, “I fear you ask too much when you expect me to solve it.”
Fortunately, the story offers enough clues to indicate, not just the real killer (and the real murder), but also Doyle’s “hatred” for the hero his public forced him to revive and bring back from a supposed death at Reichenbach Falls, as reported by Watson eight years before. Turning to psychoanalytic theory, Bayard argues that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a “compromise formation.” It represents Doyle’s deadly hatred for Holmes by absenting him from much of the story (Watson is sent to Baskerville Hall to investigate alone for many chapters), by showing Holmes committing mistakes and inaccuracies when he does reappear, by associating Holmes with evil portents and forces, and of course by showing the great detective fastening on the wrong suspect and, indeed, the wrong murder: “…the victim in Conan Doyle’s book is executed with the complicity of Holmes, and without the true murderer ever being bothered.”
Underlying Bayard’s theme of Conan Doyle’s “hatred” of Holmes is his contention that fictional people are, in some important respects, the same as real people; that they have a strongly real existence–at least in the unconscious psyche of human beings–and thus they can act, to a degree, on their own initiative; that they can move into the real world, as real people can move into the fictional world. As evidence of this, he offers Holmes mania–the massive and violent public outcry that literally forced Doyle to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead–as well as Doyle’s own struggle with the character that he seemed to conceive as literally killing him from within.
It’s heady stuff for the casual reader who simply wants to enjoy a good “who-done-it” without spending too much time analyzing the plot or the author’s motives, but Bayard lays out his arguments concisely and convincingly, in plain language. The chapters, as well as the book as a whole, are short. If you know and love the Holmes canon well, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you don’t, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss is about. I found it thought-provoking and fascinating. Oh yeah, who done it? You’ll have to read it!
