Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons by
James Lovegrove
Titan Books, 408pp, £11.75,
October 2020, ISBN 9781789094695
Conan Doyle’s The
Hound of the Baskervilles was serialised in The Strand Magazine from
August 1901 to April 1902 and then published as a novel (or, more accurately, a
novella) by George Newnes the following month. The tale is probably the best known of all the Sherlock Holmes stories
and is certainly one of the most filmed, with big and small screen adaptations
stretching from 1914 to 2016 at the time of writing, including retellings in
both BBC One’s Sherlock (2010-2017) and CBS’s Elementary (2012–2019)
series (The Hounds of Baskerville in 2012 and Hounded in 2016
respectively). I think it may also be
the narrative about which I have written the most, in terms of number of
publications: a review of one of the sequels, David Stuart Davies’ The
Tangled Skein (1995) in TQF24 (2008); an article for Crime and
Detective Stories (2008) in which I propose an alternative solution to the case; a review of SelfMadeHero’s graphic novel in TQF29 (2009); a chapter in Josef Steiff’s Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy (2011) in which I suggest that the novella is primarily a work of horror rather than crime; and a short story sequel, “The
Wrong Doctor”, first published in TQF50 (2015) and reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 20 (2016) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017). The reason for
my fascination – or perhaps I should say fixation – is my interest in crossover
between crime and horror fiction (particularly, but not exclusively, the occult
detective) and my agreement with Christopher Frayling’s claim that The Hound
is one of the four great Gothic horror stories of the first century of the
genre, alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus
(1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),
and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In the chapter for Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy I examined both
the creative context of the novella, which was originally intended to be a supernatural
story co-authored with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, and the narrative itself to show
that the mystery plot is underpinned by tropes much more common to the horror genre.
If my fascination is a fixation, I am at least not alone
in my neurosis. My alternative solution
(which made the case for Dr Mortimer as the mastermind behind the conspiracy)
followed Arthur Robinson’s “Justice Deferred: Deaths on
Dartmoor” (2006), also in Crime and Detective Stories, which identifies
Henry Baskerville himself as the villain, and Pierre Bayard’s Sherlock
Holmes was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles (2007),
in which Beryl Stapleton takes centre stage.
Until reading James Lovegrove’s novel, which is advertised as ‘Continuing
the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles’ on the cover, I had read
three sequels: Michael Hardwick’s The Revenge of the Hound (1987),
Davies’ The Tangled Skein, and a short story I have been unable to track
down since. Though I enjoyed The
Tangled Skein when I first read it, in retrospect none of the three comes
close to doing justice to Doyle’s original.
If anyone can, Lovegrove seems to be the author to do it. He has been publishing novels since 1990, has
written for children, young adults (as Jay Emory), and adults, has a military science
fiction series called The Pantheon, and currently writes for the Firefly
franchise. He is also the foremost
writer of Sherlockian pastiche, publishing three separate sets of novels in
imitation of Doyle: six titles in Titan’s The New Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes series; The Cthulhu Casebooks Trilogy, the first of which I
reviewed for TQF here; and two standalone novels, Sherlock Holmes and
Christmas Demon (2019) and Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the
Stapletons – all since 2013.
The
Hound was published after Doyle had terminated
Holmes’ career and life (albeit half-heartedly, with no corpse) in “The Final
Problem”, which was published in the Strand in 1894 and explicitly dated
to 1891. The Hound was not
intended to be Holmes’ resurrection – that would come in “The Adventure of the Empty
House”, published in the Strand in October 1903 – and, as such, is one
of the cases undertaken by Holmes and Watson prior to the detective’s
apparently fatal clash with Professor Moriarty.
The dating is somewhat vague, prompting much speculation among Holmes
enthusiasts, and my own choice is autumn 1888.
Lovegrove has selected the equally convincing autumn 1889 and begins his
novel with a foreword by Watson that addresses precisely this question and is
itself dated to 1903. The foreword, as
well as Lovegrove’s occasional discussions of Sherlockian lore – solving, for
example, the mystery of Watson’s disappearing dog in A Study in Scarlet
(1887) – will endear him to the audience to which he has dedicated his novel,
‘HOLMESIANS AND SHERLOCKIANS EVERYWHERE’.
What might not endear him to that audience is his representation of
Watson, who is more petty and more timid than Doyle’s original and, maybe more
importantly for contemporary readers, than either Martin Freeman or Lucy Liu’s
Watsons. This is a personal preference
and, in consequence, a minor criticism, but I favour pastiche that recognises
Watson’s own extraordinary qualities. He
is, after all, something of a polymath – a doctor, a soldier, a detective, and a
bestselling author.
Let me state at the outset that Beast of the Stapletons is by far the best of the three
sequels to The Hound that I have read (I exclude my own from the comparison,
of course). My main – and only
substantial – problem with the novel is its structure, to which I must draw
attention before proceeding to its content.
The novel is composed of three parts of six, sixteen, and eighteen titled
chapters respectively (for a total of forty).
Part I begins with an incident that establishes the personality of
Lovegrove’s Watson, is followed by four chapters in which Benjamin Grier, Baskerville’s
friend, consults Holmes, and ends with a detailed recap of the first case. I understand the need for the recap, but it
constitutes an entire chapter and, combined with the preceding four chapters of
exposition, facilitates a reading experience in which we are told rather than
shown the sequence of events. This experience
extends to Part II, the whole of which is a summary by Watson of Holmes’ recounting
of the week he spent on Dartmoor while Watson remained in London. Lovegrove’s play of similarity and difference
to and from the original is inspired, but his reversal of the Holmes–Watson
dynamic in The Hound (in which it is Holmes who – ostensibly – remains
in London) detracts from the suspense of the narrative. As readers, we immediately know that whatever
may have transpired during that week, Holmes has escaped entirely
unscathed. Part III employs a more engaging
style of storytelling, involving a more active and adventurous Watson, but
Lovegrove applies the brakes as soon as the pace picks up: Chapters 26 to 29
are all set aboard a Transatlantic steamer as Holmes, Watson, and three
accomplices pursue the villain, who has been revealed in Chapter 25. It is very difficult not to read these
chapters as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a delay in the narrative
that has no parallel in the original.
The premise of Beast
of the Stapletons is straightforward but intriguing: history is repeating
itself in Dartmoor, with the victim being Baskerville’s wife rather than uncle
and the murder weapon a huge Calyptra moth rather than a giant black dog. The appearance of the vampiric moth seems to
implicate Stapleton, the villain of the original, who was an entomologist by inclination
and whose body was never discovered.
Whether the moth (if it exists at all) is Stapleton’s ghost or a
corporeal servant he has spent the last five years breeding, is (like the true
nature of the hound in The Hound) all part of the mystery, but given
that Doyle never involved Holmes in the occult, it is fairly obvious that Stapleton
has not returned from the dead (which is not to say that he has not returned at
all). Lovegrove revisits the pleasures
of the original by setting up a similar pool of suspects: Mortimer, Frankland,
Laura Lyons – and of course Grier and Stapleton (if he survived). As soon as this pool is established, however,
it is drained almost as quickly as Grimpen More, which is being emptied by an
enterprising Grier in search of Stapleton’s skeleton. One of Holmes’ suspects commits suicide by
the same method used to murder Audrey Baskerville and conveniently leaves the
solution to the puzzle of the moth in a cupboard (readers familiar with Stoker’s
unfinished The Lair of the White Worm will have anticipated this particular
dénouement). Case closed, or so it seems
until Holmes concludes his recitation with: “There is something about it that I
cannot put my finger on. I feel that I
am missing something obvious, something so glaring that by rights I should have
seen it long ago.” Three days later Baskerville’s
son, Harry, is kidnapped and one of his servants, Mrs Barrymore, poisoned. Once the perpetrator of the crimes is
identified, the novel changes form from a murder mystery to a crime thriller, with
the thrills coming courtesy of the dual attempts to rescue the child and apprehend
the suspect – or, suspects. Once
the sea voyage is over, the action rises quickly and there is a tense climax consisting
of a spectacular variation on a Mexican standoff. The novel concludes with a deathbed confession
that imbues retrospective meaning into the narrative and foregrounds the depth
of Lovegrove’s engagement with the original and with the Sherlock Holmes canon as
a whole.
While avoiding
spoilers, I am compelled to commend the author for noticing two features about
both the canon and The Hound. The
former is concerned with Doyle’s recycling of certain names and certain
syllables within those names. This was
probably unconscious on his part as he did not keep any kind of database or even
detailed notes on the stories, in which there are numerous inconsistencies (the
most famous of which is probably the location of Watson’s war wound). The latter is concerned with the physical
similarity between one of the canon’s villains and a character in The Hound. I cannot say any more, but as far as I know,
Lovegrove and I are the only ones to have both identified these phenomena and
put them to use in fiction. As his novel
will have a much greater readership than my short story, I look forward to the
idea reaching a wider audience and maybe even being used in future pastiches
and adaptations. Lovegrove has nonetheless
made an error in Beast of the Stapletons, albeit a forgivable one: he
appears to have forgotten that Dr Mortimer had a wife. The following is by Holmes from Chapter 6 of The Hound: “There is our friend Dr Mortimer, whom I believe to be entirely
honest, and there is his wife, of whom we know nothing.” The mysterious wife is only mentioned once more in the novella (by Mortimer) and never seen at all or, strangely, considered to have played any part in the case whatsoever.
My suspicion is that Doyle himself forgot about Mrs Mortimer – he wrote
very quickly and used very few drafts – and was not the last author to forget the
details of his own plot (Raymond Chandler’s comments on the murder of the
chauffeur in his 1939 novel, The Big Sleep, spring to mind).
In closing, the compilation of a history of my own engagement with The Hound inspired by Lovegrove’s striking sequel
reminded me that I’ve now been reviewing for TQF for twelve years…which is two years longer than I’ve ever committed to any job, though not quite as long as my marriage… long may they both
continue.