The Hound of the Baskervilles is, I suppose, the most widely remembered of all Conan Doyle’s accounts of Holmes and Watson at work. What most of us have forgotten is that it was also, for reasons that had very little to do with the story itself, among the most rapturously received when it first saw the serialized light of day in August 1901. The reason for the rapture was simple. Holmes had disappeared on 4 May 1891, locked in a literal cliffhanger at the Reichenbach Falls with his archenemy Moriarty. In The Final Problem (1893), Watson had told the story of Holmes’s end: ‘the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world’. The real murderer had, of course, been Conan Doyle himself. He was through with frivolous yarn-spinning, and for eight long years he resisted all blandishments; he was a much more serious man than that, as he had proved by his courage as a field doctor and by his outspokenness as a man of letters with a public conscience during the Boer War. But in 1901, while he was recovering from his South African experiences in Norfolk with a journalist friend and golfing partner, it one day rained too hard for the course. Fletcher Robinson amused the writer by telling him some Dartmoor legends, including one about a spectral hound. A month later Conan Doyle was striding over the moor himself, cultivating the seed of a new novel. Holmes was still firmly dead in his mind, and the first conception was presumably of doing something in the historical line. But when it came to the writing . . . the hound demanded Holmes, and Holmes it got, though Conan Doyle insisted adamantly that the story dated from the pre-1891 past. No one was really deceived. The serialization ended in April 1902. In October 1903 there appeared the most eagerly awaited case of the whole series: The Empty House. It announced that Holmes had survived the Reichenbach incident; in other words, Conan Doyle had recrucified himself. The news was greeted like that announcing one of the great Boer War reliefs, with universal joy.
This book was therefore a kind of test case, both of the depth of public demand after the eight years of silence and of the author’s ability to satisfy it. His frequently expressed boredom with the two great incubi of his imagination has always to be taken with a large pinch of salt, and I think nowhere more than in this first step towards a full resurrection. The way to kill off characters (or to keep them dead) is to show them in some banal repeat of a previous situation, not to put them in a highly romantic setting and face-to-fang with one of the great archetypal monsters of human folklore.
The dog of death has the most ancient pedigree of any canine species, well recorded at least as far back as Anubis, the sinister jackal-headed undertaker-god of ancient Egypt, who must in turn derive from a much older fear. The northern European Mesolithic peoples had begun breeding the hostility out of wolves by 7500 b.c.—dog bones of that age have been found at Star Carr in Yorkshire—but the terror of that ancestry has persisted the world over. In Britain this lycophobia1 has lingered longest in the Black Dog group of legends. Not a mile from where I live in Dorset there is a lonely lane. You walk there one night, and you see a little black dog following you. As it comes closer, it grows larger and larger. However fast you run, it is not fast enough. The little black dog is as big as a bull when it finally slavers over you for the kill. All very picturesque and harm-less—yet recently the Borough Council decided that Black Dog Lane had better have a new name, and the pub at its corner had a new sign painted . . . showing an amiable black retriever. Some folk memories apparently still require castration.
There are countless variations of the Uplyme Black Dog all over the country. There is another famous one at Hatfield Peverel in Essex, and others in Suffolk and Norfolk with the name Black Shuck. On 4 August 1557, Black Shuck entered the church at Bungay ‘with fearful flashes of fire’ and killed two of the congregation, then raced twelve miles south to Blythburgh and killed a man and a boy in the church there.2 The Isle of Man had the Mauthe Doog, a demonic spaniel. One of the many Dartmoor spectral hounds showed huge glassy eyes and steaming sulphurous breath, and killed every man it met at the place where its former master had been mysteriously murdered—by way of encouraging the others, one must presume, to call in Baker Street as soon as possible.
Dartmoor is most famous for its Wisht (a West Country dialect word meaning ‘sad and uncanny’) Hounds, which were led by the Black Hunts-man—Satan—and could hunt the sky as well as the ground. They were more often heard than seen. An ordinary dog died on the spot if it heard their baying, and an imminent human death was certain. One moorlander met the Black Huntsman one night near Widecombe and foolishly asked him for game. He was thrown a bundle. When he got home and could see what it contained, he found himself staring at his own small son, who was away on a visit. The vision disappeared when a servant ran in to tell him that the child had truly just died. The Wisht Hounds were also called the Yeth Hounds, yeth being Devonshire dialect for ‘heathen’. These were inhabited by the tormented spirits of unbaptized children, hunting for their souls or those of their negligent parents; the early Church knew all about the value of shock publicity in encouraging wider use of the eschatological safety belt. But the most terrible of these phantom packs came from the North of England: the Gabriel Hounds, which had human heads on canine bodies.
All this may seem a long way from 1901, and even further from 1973. Yet strangely enough, there are senses in which it is not. I once lived very near the moor; and I even worked on it for a year, training young Marines. I have seen Hound Tor and others in the kind of light (unlike fighter pilots, the Wisht Hounds preferred low cloud cover for their operations) and from the distant angle that still require surprisingly little effort of the imagination to turn a long granite outcrop into a gigantic pack in full cry. But there is another sense in which the hound is associated with Dartmoor. I have also been taken for an escaped convict (as well as having myself helped hunt for escapees) and had Alsatians set on me from several hundred yards away—not an experience I wish to repeat. And I’ve even seen the Hound itself.
I went on Dartmoor alone one winter dusk in 1946, with a mist coming down, to search for a section of recruits lost on an orientation exercise. I was climbing a slope up to a tor. The light had gone, and I could just make out the massive boulders against the coming night. Then suddenly and silently a formidable black shape moved and stood in a breach of the rocks above me. I haven’t forgotten the few moments of pure atavistic terror that possessed me before I had the sense to pull out the Very pistol I was carrying . . . and plainly, I lived to tell the tale. And yes, of course, it must have been a wild pony; but what I saw, like many a lonely and bemisted moorman before me, was the Hound. They, after all, did not carry Very pistols; nor had they read Jung and Freud.
So two kinds of rather curiously related fear—both used by Conan Doyle—haunt the moor. The first is a very primitive one caused by its isolation and the still-potent sense of menace it can evoke when visibility turns bad. Even in this year of disbelief, one’s revealing instinct, if one is alone there in a mist or at night, is to turn constantly to see if one is being followed—the loom of the unimaginable. One experiences the more rational (if statistically hardly more probable) fear when a convict is out and on the run. But both experiences draw on ancient memories of hunting and being hunted, of man versus dog . . . or, originally, wolf.
Needless to say, the real black hound is the moor itself—that is, untamed nature, the inhuman hostility at the heart of such landscapes. That is a universal terror; and one thing Conan Doyle must have seen at once, during that wet day by the fire at his Norfolk hotel, was that he had at last found an ‘enemy’ far more profound and horrifying than any mere human criminal. The Hound is the primeval force behind Moriarty; not just one form that evil takes, but the very soul of the thing.
There are those who think that making any criticism of the Holmes épopée is like taking a sledgehammer to a butterfly—or, more accurately, to a kind of delightful Gothic folly that is now also a national monument. The fact that it was erected at all seems far more important than discussion about whether it could have been better designed or built. This is above all the view of that amiably eccentric band of enthusiasts who like to pretend that Holmes and Watson were real people, and therefore quite beyond the scope of literary judgement. To point out faults is to be guilty of humourlessness, as bad as blaming Alice in Wonderland for lack of surface realism. Yet this kind of credulous, and very English, adulation seems to me finally to devalue both Conan Doyle and his profession. He was a fallible writer of fiction, not an infallible recorder of reality; like all novelists, he was a dealer in plausible hypotheses, a confidence trickster—though out for your belief and attention rather than your money. That his recipe worked brilliantly at the popular level we all know; but I should like to give another con man’s view of his technique—both where it worked and where it didn’t. In any case, the way we exempt writers such as Conan Doyle (Ian Fleming is a later example) from serious criticism is by no means as generous a proceeding as it may seem. A good deal of condescension is involved as well. But let’s start on the credit side.
Conan Doyle’s stroke of genius was in solving a problem that all novelists are familiar with: the natural incompatibility of dialogue and narrative. In essence this is a kind of conflict between what the reader wants and what the writer wants. At the very heart of the novel form is the story, that hard lump of pure narrative to be summarized on a single page, but which in the final product has, by means of description, analysis of motive, conversation, and all the rest, to be spun out over two hundred pages or more. Conversation and narrative are generally antipathetic, since continuously moving narrative displeases the writer’s sense of realism; but if he or she concentrates on realistic conversation, which like the Wisht Hounds loves running round in circles, the narrative goes out of the window. That is why so many children skip the ‘talk bits’ when they read; they want the lovely chocolate taste of pure story, not the dull old cabbage of he-saidshe-said.
Yet one has only to flick through the pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles to see that the book is quite astoundingly full of dialogue for a story of such exciting action. Conan Doyle gets away with this by three principal means. The first is that he rigorously excludes almost everything from conversation that has not directly to do with the forward movement of the story, or those aspects of character that fuel such movement. He is even very sparing with that second vital (for most novelists) characterizing function of dialogue. What use he makes of it is confined mainly to the early scenes or the mere first page on which a new character appears. Thus Dr Mortimer is allowed a dotty little speech about Holmes’s dolichocephalic skull in the first chapter. With typical economy, it kills two birds with one stone: it stamps Mortimer for good and tells us that Holmes is a remarkable fellow even in his anatomy. But such luxuries largely disappear as the action warms up. Everything is fined down to the one end: move the story.
Conan Doyle’s second insight was to perceive that if you are going to rely heavily on conversation as your narrative medium, then you will do much better with two vividly characterized and temperamentally opposed mouthpieces than with one central ‘I’—or eye. The same rules apply as in the music-hall routine or the TV comedy show. One of the roles of a feed is to be a surrogate for the audience: the punchline is delivered not only against the punching bag on stage, but against everyone else in the audience who failed to see it coming. The butt is arguably more important than the marksman, in fact—and certainly the most effective way for Conan Doyle to kill off Holmes would have been to kill off Watson instead. It is only in a very superficial sense that he is less ‘important’ and less intelligent than the master detective; technically and symbiotically, he is completely his equal—indeed, in my judgement a much cleverer creation on the author’s part.
It is not simply that Watson is the obvious foil for Holmes’s brilliance and that his ineffable capacity for not understanding what is really going on allows Conan Doyle to provide explanations for the slow-minded reader as well; by being the principal narrator, imbued with an unfailing talent for following the false trail, he is also cast as the main manufacturer of the suspense-and-mystery side of each case. In The Hound of the Baskervilles Sherlock Holmes grasps the essential nature of the problem very early indeed—by the time of the theft of the new and old boots. A hound is involved, and it must be a real hound, since supernatural hounds don’t have to bother with scent. Ergo, some human means to offer Sir Henry up to a four-footed fiend. Ergo, he must live near Baskerville Hall. It cannot be Dr Mortimer, and it is not likely to be an old-established resident such as Mr Frankland, which leaves . . . one senses that Conan Doyle knew he was on thin ice here—and not for the first time—in making Holmes so cryptically unforthcoming (and very nearly, dare one say it, foolishly slow). Immediately following the scene about the old boot, Watson says, ‘We had a pleasant lunch in which little was said of the business which had brought us together.’ This is blatant murder done on credibility. Yet we accept it: Watson (your and my man at Baker Street) is such a dimwit—and so clever at leading us on by the nose.
Nor is it that Holmes and Watson are always set to work against each other in order to spin out the story. They form a very useful alliance in another direction for the author. As a bald narrative basis (as Dr Mortimer presents it in the beginning) for a case, the notion of an ancient family cursed with the attentions of a supernatural hound is dangerously near a piece of macabre kitsch. But if it is apparently found plausible by both a brilliant sceptic and a staidly unimaginative doctor, who are we to doubt its possible truth? Two such different buyers are much more convincing than one.
But I think it is Conan Doyle’s third reason for using conversation so much that is by far the most important. It is this: dialogue is intensely immediate. It might seem that the descriptive passages in a novel would be the only properly visual ones; but conversation is much closer to the immediacy of the actual image than we generally realize. Take the most conventionally descriptive chapter in the book, where the landscape and ambience of Baskerville Hall are dealt with; and take the very first chapter, which is almost all conversation. The former is like reading a set of stage directions (and rather crudely done, at that); but the latter is like being in a darkened theatre: true, one can’t quite see the actors onstage, but one is very close indeed to their voices . . . much closer to their fictive reality, I would suggest, than one is to that of that countryside and manor house in Devon. The latter are already dated; but Holmes and Watson and their visitor are timeless.
That Conan Doyle was a great deal better at narrative-moving dialogue than at straightforward description (that is, at drama rather than prose) prompts me to believe that we ought to see him as a forerunner of the strip cartoon—as also of radio- and television-script techniques. In his time he was not alone in this: one thinks of The Dolly Dialogues3 and their like, and, much more important, of the tremendous increase in illustrative content in all writing, from advertising to poetry, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Hardly a popular novel, between 1880 and 1914, whose most melodramatic moments were not also drawn. What Conan Doyle seized on—as did the Strand magazine (founded to foster ‘popular literature’)—was this universal new public desire to have the visual as well as the verbal faculties entertained. The spread of literacy, the renascence of the theatre, improvements in print technology—all these played their part. His coup de maître was to see that this thirst could be better quenched by conversation than by the more obvious answer: lengthy bastard-visual description. The eye is a lightning-fast absorber of real images, whereas the written description of such images is painfully slow. Good dialogue dances you forward, whereas even the best descriptive passages put the brakes on; and the strip cartoon is simply an attempt to get the best of both worlds.
In communications-theory terms, then, Conan Doyle devised a very successful method of accelerating information output—just how good a method is shown by the fact that even in our own intensely visual age, his fragments of the Gutenberg Galaxy remain very difficult to put down. No English writer knew more about sinking that mysterious hook into the reader. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, he ‘strikes’ at the very last sentence of chapter 2:
‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’
The trout is done for. My guess is that the least-read chapter title in all literature is the one that heads chapter 3.
But now I should like to look at the debit side. I referred advisedly just now to the strip cartoon. The danger4 of Conan Doyle’s method is caricature, which is properly a weapon of humour or satire. That is why Holmes and Watson have been endlessly parodied, have been sent up in both senses—into the pantheon of national archetypes as well as by countless teams of professional comedians. Watson was clearly conceived as a partly comic figure from the beginning; but Holmes has acquired a ludicrous aura that cannot have been intended. It is not just that he is too clever to be true, but also that he is too true to pure caricature to be ‘clever’ by the highest literary standards. This is not to say that great characters or novels cannot be based on caricature; Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, and many others prove the contrary. But where Conan Doyle failed (as his cartoonist forebears failed beside Rowlandson, Gillray, and Cruikshank) was in matching ends to means. In the Sherlock Holmes stories caricature becomes the end; it is not related to any significant truth or human folly. Of course, this lack of any deeper content, never a deprivation that ordinary man has conspicuously wept for, makes for easier entertainment; but it raises other problems when it comes to an honest literary appraisal.
All this was very shrewdly discussed a year or two ago by Jacques Barzun in an essay called ‘The Novel Turns Tale’,5 in which he suggested that the appalling snobbism of the average literary critic towards crime and detective fiction was founded on a grave confusion of two different forms. The novel proper is a ‘narrative that professes to illuminate life by pretending to be history’; the tale ‘is a narrative too, but comic; not in the sense of laughter-provoking, but in the sense of high make-believe, indifferent to direct portraiture’. He went on, ‘The tale, much older than the novel, appeals to curiosity, wonder and the love of ingenuity. If it “studies” anything, it is the calculating mind rather than the spontaneous emotions, physical predicaments rather than spiritual.’ Very clearly, if this classification is correct, Conan Doyle belongs to the tale-tellers, in the long modern line from Poe to Ross Macdonald, and not with the novelists. To say that he lacks the stature of a Hardy or a Conrad is like saying a long-jumper lacks the height of a pole-vaulter. What is really meant is that the novel is a much more important form than the tale.
Although I should be prepared to argue that the latter statement is generally true (even in the novel’s present sickly condition), I think the futility of judging long-jumpers by pole-vault standards is obvious. Professor Barzun finished his essay with an interesting specification: ‘One goes to a tale because it is a marvellous invention, because it is ingenious, full of suspense and concentrated wisdom, because it flatters the eye and the mind by its circumstantiality, liberates the spirit by its “disdain of realism", and appeases the heart by its love of reason.’ Does The Hound of the Baskervilles pass that test (framed, one suspects, with Candide in mind as exemplary model) of the form?
In my view it fails in three particulars: in concentrated wisdom (or love of reason); in ingenuity; and in circumstantiality. Barzun has pointed out that this last quality and ‘disdain of realism’ are not contradictory, and especially in the detective tale. Raymond Chandler’s brilliant thrillers are not—any more than are works of the corpse-in-the-library school—realistic portrayals of men and women and their societies; but they are, at their best, highly accurate in page-by-page detail. They are convincingly ‘real’, in other words, as we read. It is only when we stand back and compare the whole to actual life that we see we are knee-deep in fantasy—a simplistic socialist one in the case of writers such as Chandler and Hammett, where all rich people are baddies, and the private eye, behind his peccadilloes over whisky and women (as Holmes over cocaine), is ethical first cousin to Sir Galahad and Robin Hood.
Sherlock Holmes had been on Dartmoor before—in ‘Silver Blaze’, published in 1892—and his creator had already in that instance had trouble over just this matter of circumstantiality. His horsey admirers complained that he had got his training and racing world very wrong indeed. ‘I have never been nervous about details,’ riposted Conan Doyle, ‘and one must be masterful sometimes.’ An even more bizarre mistake in this story was his putting Tavistock, ‘like the boss of a shield, in the middle of the huge circle of Dartmoor’; and I am afraid he does not do much better by the moor (if Baskerville Hall is ‘fourteen miles’ from Princetown, it is not on Dartmoor at all) and its natural life in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The whole description of Grimpen Mire, for instance, is Romantic-Urban nonsense. I have been in and out of a lot of such bogs and mires. One might just drown in a few of them by taking a really long leap from the edge, but I doubt it. They are far more an irritating than a lethal hazard at night; by day you mistake their livid green for grass once only. Then, too, very few wild orchids grow at all on Dartmoor, and none flower anywhere in Britain in mid-October; hart’s-tongue ferns do not have ‘fleshy’ leaves; bitterns boom only in spring. Such very minor details may not be of importance in themselves, but signs of ignorance in the creator sort ill with the omniscience granted the created; too ‘masterful’ an attitude here brings Conan Doyle closer to Watson than to Holmes. There is an analogous weakness in the Baskerville ‘statement’ of 1742. Its pastiche fustian will do for the page-gobbling ignoramus, but not for anyone who has the least real knowledge of the cadences and vocabulary of eighteenth-century English; nor do I think a paleographer would be very convinced by Holmes’s one clue as to his dating method for the same document.
Another way of betraying circumstantiality is by fudging it over with too much impasto. For two pages, as Watson drives to and arrives at Baskerville Hall, the lines are so clotted with darks and gloomys and blacks (Dartmoor granite isn’t black, by the way) and their synonyms that one feels very nearly back with Mrs Radcliffe and ‘Monk’ Lewis. A more serious lapse still affects the credibility of the two female characters in the book. Conan Doyle was never very happy with his fictional women—especially where he was so strong with the men, in dialogue—and neither Laura Lyons nor Mrs Stapleton manages to rise above the late-Victorian stereotype of the compromised ‘lady’. The former’s scene with Dr Watson is handsomely the most tritely and stagily artificial (even allowing for the reporter) in the whole book.
The least successful character of all seems to me to be the villain. Stapleton is far too much of a ‘prim-faced’ pale shadow beside his outlandish murder weapon, and his straw-hatted mania for British entomology goes neither with his past nor with his present. That circumstance was added, one must suppose, on the old detective-tale principle of keeping your real criminal hidden well up your sleeve. I pointed out earlier that hiding was desperately necessary in this particular case. The smokescreen laid down here just about works at that level (though it is very thin compared with the brilliant cover-up in The Valley of Fear), but at the cost of credible psychological motivation. I think I know why Conan Doyle sends Stapleton to a silent death in the Grimpen Mire: he is not a man who otherwise could have explained himself convincingly. Indeed, outside Holmes and Watson, the book makes a poor showing on character throughout; one wryly recalls the almost Dickensian richness and charm of The Sign of Four in this respect.
The book must also be criticized on the side of ingenuity. There is a marked shortage of pure detection and a great deal too much of Watson’s stupidity and trailing of the red herring; too much is engineered (and sacrificed) to the end of a spine-chilling denouement. The hound must run; and more likely courses of events are all sent begging. Conan Doyle was a fanatical, and very good, player of real games all his life, and in all his work there is, so to speak, a conflict between the intellectual and the cricketer (as there was, in all his family, between ‘serious’ and cartoon art). He was a bowler of near–county standard6 and a very useful bat—and not the man, I imagine, to hang about at the crease. In The Hound of the Baskervilles there is very much the feel of a batsman chancing his arm on a lively wicket, getting in some cracking cuts and off-drives . . . but missing a fair few as well. Of course we owe his tremendous narrative brio very much to this love of attacking sports such as cricket and boxing, of set rules for the brisk exercise of physical and mental energy. But we are not seeing here one of his more thoughtful innings.
It may seem harsh to demand wisdom and reason of a book of entertainment, and of course we do not expect the ‘wisdom and reason’ of a Candide. But I think we can ask for a little more than we receive. The irony is that many other Holmes cases are much more satisfactory in this respect, though with far less potentially fertile material. Perhaps we can grasp the failure best by comparing The Hound of the Baskervilles with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in the way in which one remains an exotic murder story and the other rises to a much higher symbolic level—as do the best Poe stories.
This failure to exploit a little more richly the chances offered, the sense of a missed opportunity, is undoubtedly the price of that virtue I cited on the credit side: the splendid gift for fast narrative, and in particular for narrative told through dialogue. Even the most intimate conversation is a quasi-public thing; few of us think as frankly and profoundly in our mouths as we do in our minds. And then the one person in the Baker Street world who does sometimes reflect on the wider implications, who is given the luxury of generalizing, is Sherlock Holmes himself; but he is absent from very nearly half the book, and we have to make do much more than usual with Watson’s literal and plodding view of things. Far more, for instance, could have been made of the hound symbolism—for Holmes also is houndlike in his cunning, his pertinacity, his secretive patience, his ability to dog, his ferocious concentration once the scent is warm. Baker Street is his kennel, and his snapping boredom there between hunts is very canine indeed. We are glutted with story; and starved of pause for atmosphere, for darker shadows and depths to congregate, darker confrontations between man and nature, man and evil, man and his past. Things happen too fast, too vividly and eventfully, almost like the film of the book rather than the book itself.
Such velocity matters less in a short case, where compression is of the essence; but the technique brings dwindling returns with a long one, which may well be why Conan Doyle wrote so few of them. It is significant that he fell back upon another device with his two other—and artistically much more convincing—long-case mechanisms. Over half of The Valley of Fear is taken up by the McMurdo ‘flashback’, while even Jonathan Small’s makes up nearly a quarter of The Sign of Four.
But when all is said and complained of, the real criminal here is very possibly less Conan Doyle himself than an innate flaw in the detective-tale genre. However fantastic and far-reaching the first half of a detective ‘mystery’, the second half is bound to drop (and only too often flop) towards a neat and plausible everyday solution. The determination is the negation of everything inherent in the theme except the identity of the murderer. A degree of bathos is inevitable as soon as the mundane processes of the law take over. This is one good reason that the thriller evolved from the detective story proper. There a Chandler can criticize right-wing America, a Le Carré can explore the psychology of deception, in a way that the cramping demands of the old crime-solution formula do not allow.
In Conan Doyle’s case we are left finally with superb caricatures and an unsurpassed narrative technique; and a sympathetic regret. He never really understood his greatest talent. But that makes him the normal artist, not the exception.
I do not want to end on what may seem an unduly theoretical and puritanical note. The incisiveness of the caricature remains remarkable, and the lasting appeal (and indeed the increasing appeal of period charm—is anything more redolent of their era than the three sentences that close the novel?) of the Holmes-Watson saga is too universally well proved to allow a case for major failure, as opposed to minor faults, any real ground. On paper we can all adapt animals better for survival than evolution itself has seen fit to do, give eyes to the blind and ears to the deaf—only to find that the old lady knew rather better what she was doing in the first and only real place than we had imagined. One can invent a more subtle, more significant Conan Doyle; but I think it is revealing that it is very difficult indeed to imagine a more popular and healthily enduring one. To be no more than fun to read could be a sin only in a world where everyone was fun to read. It is not a sin that most of the writers of this world are ever going to permit a man such as Conan Doyle to commit. They try too hard. His secret was that he tried enough.
1. The wolf was the most recent of our large native mammals to disappear. It was not totally extinct until about 1750.
2. And also made the steeple collapse. It was the day of a great storm, and the real visitation was almost certainly an instance of that rare phenomenon, ball lightning.
3. The Dolly Dialogues (1894) were by Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863–1933), generally referred to as ‘Anthony Hope’.
4. Almost a genetic one, in Conan Doyle’s case. His grandfather John Doyle was the most famous political cartoonist of the 1830–1850 period. One of John Doyle’s sons, Richard Doyle, was the pride of Punch during the 1840s; another was director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Conan Doyle’s own father, Charles, was an architect by profession and an artist ‘in the Fuseli manner’ by inclination, while his great-uncle (and the godfather who gave him his second name) was Michael Conan, the Paris art critic. A formidable predisposing array.
5. In Mosaic 4, no. 3 (University of Manitoba Press, 1971).
6. If the most important event for him in August 1901 was the new ‘Holmes’, in August of the previous year it may well have been that he took the most treasured scalp in cricket, W. G. Grace’s . . . caught at the wicket, moreover.