Case in point. On the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Don’t let me spoil the book for you. Read these dark as shit stories then come back here.
Holmes, long since dead, was revived by his author as he was tired of getting beat up by old ladies swinging their handbags in the streets. Holmes’s return wasn’t all too strong though, with the aptly named Return of Sherlock Holmes. His comeback, justifying the pretence of his death was a bit weak. Still, Doyle managed to push out five more books after the detective’s supposed death. Oh ya, if you didn’t know Holmes was supposed to be dead, my apologies, but I did leave a spoiler warning rite?
I fucked up in reading the books in publication order, not being a Sherlockian (or if you prefer, a Holmesian) as I thought His Last Bow was his final outing. But actually, the cases in the Casebook were the final twelve stories that Doyle had penned. Interestingly, there was a gap of a good decade in between His Last Bow and the Casebook, and chronologically in terms of Holmes’s own storied life, His Last Bow was final. So maybe I wasn’t TOO wrong after all.
And not knowing what His Last Bow is like, I was surprised by the tone of the Casebook. There are murders and deaths, stories in which we are familiar with the opium-addict and his limping sidekick. But man these stories are dark as shit. I have mentioned in my previous review that we are drawn to the Holmes stories because it reveals the darker sides of our humanity, that murder is the logical consequence of our most extreme emotions. It is true here, but there is a natural animal savagery that I didn’t really consider before and we haven’t seen before in the Holmes repertoire.
Case in point: in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, the stepmother of a young “spineless” boy was accused of gnawing blood from the neck of her own baby. She is fighting for her sanity, locked in her bedroom, accused of vampirism. But the culprit was the spineless boy himself who jealously planned to remove his newborn stepbrother so that his father can focus all his love on him. He also tested the poison which disabled the family pet. It is such a base emotion, this hatred and jealousy, that a child may have the intention of taking away another life. This shit is dark.
Another case in point: In The Problem of Thor Bridge, the jealous Brazilian wife of a magnate shot herself in order to frame the new governess, for whom the husband had been lovestruck. In this story, the jealousy of the wife took an innocent woman into incarceration. This theme is dealt similarly in The Adventure of the Retired Colourman where the jealous husband murdered his young wife and lover (whether we can assume whether the relationship took place is another matter), and buried them in an abandoned well.
There are also meditations of lives ruined by flawed decisions. In The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger, the woman, a former circus trapeze artist who had lost her face from a lion’s mauling murdered her husband to elope with the circus strongman. The lion smelled blood and switched on its killer instinct on the woman. The strongman ran away, his life unscathed. It is a punishment perhaps that is crueller than death, and the contemplations of the woman to continue living or to end it all is a serious question for the genre.
Similarly, in The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier, the mystery of the missing soldier is revealed to be his leprosy. In this story and the former, we don’t examine the dark side of human nature as much as the dark side of existence. The soldier was lucky enough to have been misdiagnosed with leprosy, but it is a difficult tale to swallow: a soldier who had just barely escaped with his life in the Boer War leaped from the pan into fire as he seeked refuge in the bed of a leper. Would he had better off dying in the battlefield?
At surface value, these stories are laden with nihilism, that inherently life has little meaning if we judge the outcome of some of these stories. That man is inherently evil (even a small child!), or at least the society that impels man towards this evil is evil in itself. But there’s some reprieve from that, as it is a book that has some semblance of hope if you look in the right places. The veiled woman refused to give up her life, sending Holmes the poison she intended to kill herself with. The gambler in The Adventure of the Shoscombe Old Place redeemed himself with the bets that he won and lived a long and happy life.
There are novel techniques which Doyle used to present the famed detective from another angle. Here, in a couple of the stories, Sherlock Holmes presented himself in the first person. Though, yes, the language that he uses is almost identical to Watson’s, it is a refreshing take to the old formula. Thus, we get a perspective of what Holmes thinks about his best mate Watson. At times, Doyle also used the third person omniscient narration, keeping Watson and Holmes (and thus the reader) in the dark.
It hits different than other Sherlock Holmes books, but it plainly works. Perhaps the English readers at this time are already enamoured by the sensationalism of violent stories in their newspapers and tabloids, that this deviation to the darkness of man is just a natural path to take in the Holmes collection. Besides, at that time, England was just recovering from the horrors of the Jack the Ripper. And dare I say it, they were addicted to the thrill of the horrors.
And so are we. I don’t know the merits of the detective novel as a means to exercise my inductive reasoning and logical prowess, as clear and succinct as the Holmes stories are. Though you can guess, rightly or wrongly, the perpetrator of the crimes, we read the Holmes books for that deeper look into human nature, that we now watch in serial killer docuseries, but at a safe and comfortable distance.
