The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Academy Chicago Publishers

363 West Erie Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

Published in 1989. Reprinted 2005.

Copyright ©1989 by Frank D. McSherry, Martin H.

Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh

Printed and bound in the U.S.A.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir

The best horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Bibliography: p.

I. Horror tales, English. I. McSherry, Frank D.

II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Waugh, Charles. IV. Title.

PR4621.M35       1988       823'.8       88-3436

ISBN: 978-0-89733-265-1

Introduction

The Captain of the
Folestar

The Case of Lady Sannox

The Rend of the Cooperage

The Horror of the Heights

J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement

John Barrington Cowles

The Leather Funnel

The Lift

Lot No. 249

The New Catacomb

The Silver Hatchet

The Striped Chest

The Terror of Blue John Gap

by
Frank D. McSherry Jr.

This is the tale of the coming of the Hound in 1742:

The fog rolled in over the Devonshire moors. Through it, a terrified girl fled from a pursuing band of drunken revellers riding after her in the darkness. One rode ahead of his friends, and when they caught up with him they saw a sight that froze their blood in its veins: the girl collapsed on the ground, and, “standing over Sir Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that mortal eye has ever rested upon. And even as they looked, the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor.”
¹

Thus began the Curse of the House of Baskerville: any Baskerville who ventured onto the moors in the dark of night would die a horrible death.

A mere legend, said the country doctor who told the story to the famous London detective, Sherlock Holmes—or so the doctor thought until Sir Charles Baskerville was found dead on the moors, with no signs of physical violence upon him, but a look of terror on his face, and footprints on the ground around him: “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
²

So Sherlock Holmes' most famous case commenced, shot through with a thrill of unresolved horror. Although Holmes eventually deduced that Sir Charles had been murdered and trapped the killer in a suspenseful climax, the death of Sir Hugo was never explained. Thus in
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
as he was to do throughout his career, Conan Doyle dealt with the horror evoked both by the supernatural and by explicable acts of violence.

The thirteen stories reprinted here are almost evenly divided between these two types. All the stories are credible, carefully crafted and very compelling, and all were written in the same decade as the Sherlock Holmes stories which established the author's international reputation.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859; his father was an architect and illustrator and his mother, an Irishwoman, had been educated in France. The boy was educated at the Jesuit School, Stonyhurst, and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. During this period he discovered the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which had a strong influence on him.

At six foot two and weighing two hundred pounds, he was an excellent athlete, a first-class boxer as well as an enthusiastic rugby and cricket player. After graduation he signed on as ship's surgeon to the whaler
Hope
and took a six-month voyage to the Arctic. Following this he sailed for four months to the African Gold Coast, a trip that became
a nightmare when fever struck the crew and fire broke out on board.

He married in 1885 and went to Vienna to study diseases of the eye. He returned to Britain to set up an opthalmology office in Swansea. By 1891 it was obvious his practice was a failure, but, although he had a family to support, he was no longer interested in medicine, and had decided to become a professional writer. His first two stories were taken by
The Strand,
then a new magazine, whose editor, Greenough Smith, later said, “I at once realized that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe.”
³

He drew, of course, from his own experiences for his fiction. “The Captain of the
Polestar
” deals with a ship trapped in Arctic ice; its captain is hounded by the sounds of “plaintive cries and screams in the wake of the ship, as if something were following it … unable to overtake it.” This story was probably inspired by his voyage on the
Hope
and “The Fiend of the Cooperage”, in which watchmen at a large tropical warehouse vanish under mysterious circumstances, came probably from his voyage to Africa.

Some of his stories are based on real mysteries. “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement”, for instance, was inspired by the episode of the
Mary Celeste,
a brigantine which in December of 1872 was spotted yawing some 600 miles off the coast of Portugal. Crew members of the British ship
Dei Gratia
boarded the
Mary Celeste
to find it deserted; the captain, his wife and two-year-old daughter and the entire crew were gone, and there was no sign of violence or any disturbance on the tidy ship. The last entry in the log had been made on November 25th, about six miles off the Santa Maria Island in the Azores; there was no indication of any trouble. But the mystery of the
Mary Celeste
was never solved.

“J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement” offered a fictional solution to the puzzle. It was published anonymously in
The Cornhill
magazine in 1884 and was widely assumed to have been a factual account of the case by J. Solly Flood, the British Advocate General at Gibraltar, who had been in charge of the investigation. Mr Flood hotly disclaimed any connection with “Jephson” and fired off telegrams to newspapers all over England denouncing the story as “a fabrication from beginning to end”.
⁴

This is of course a reflection of Conan Doyle's talent for building credibility into his fiction. Note the skill with which the events of “Lot No. 249” slowly create an atmosphere of horror: Abercrombie Smith, a medical student, becomes interested in the actions of the student living in the room on the floor below his—a fat man named Bellingham, with a froglike face, who collects ancient Egyptian artifacts. Late at night Smith hears voices in Bellingham's rooms, and the servant tells Smith, “I want to know what that is that walks about his room when he's out and when the door's locked on the outside.” Then the murders begin, committed apparently by a monstrous beast with incredible strength…

Conan Doyle was interested also in the horrors inside the human mind. Jealousy and spite seek a monstrous vengeance in “The Case of Lady Sannox,” for instance.

Sometimes he showed a laudable prescience. In “Danger!” which appeared in
The Strand
in 1914, he foresaw the use of undersea craft to starve England into submission in a future war, and in “The Leather Funnel”, in which nightmares afflict the occupants of a certain room, he wrote: “Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order … no longer the amusement of the mystic, but the foundations of a science.” “The Leather Funnel” was published in 1900, the same
year in which Freud published
The Interpretation of Dreams
in German. Freud's book did not appear in English until 1909.

Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his defense of Great Britain's conduct in the Boer War. He went on to write plays and to dabble in amateur detection: his efforts in that direction—to clear the name of a man unjustly convicted—were instrumental in the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. He remarried after the death of his wife, and, after his son and brother were killed in the first World War, he became a believer in Spiritualism. His interest in parapsychology is evident in some of the stories: “The Striped Chest” and “The Silver Hatchet” combine psychic influences with crime; an eerie suggestion of hypnotism from far away pervades “John Barrington Cowles” and Flight-Commander Stangate has an extra-sensory perception of approaching danger on a calm, beautiful day in “The Lift”.

There has been a resurgence of interest in horror fiction in America since the end of the second World War. The amazing accomplishments of Science have perhaps, paradoxically, increased both our certainty and our uncertainty at the same time.

It is fitting that we leave the last word to Sir Arthur—taken from one of the stories in this collection:

‘When we think how narrow … this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom … it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.”

1
. A. Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
(Garden City: Doubleday & Co. n.d.), p. 790.

2
. ________ ,
Ibid,
p. 794.

3
. Reginald Pound,
Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950,
(n.p.: A. S. Barnes, n.d.),
p.41
.

4
. John Dickson Carr,
The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
(New York: Harper, 1949),
p. 40
.

[Being an extract from the singular journal of John M'Alister Ray, student of medicine.]

S
EPTEMBER 11th.—Lat. 81° 40' N.; long. 2° E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice-fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county. To the right and left unbroken sheets extend to the horizon. This morning the mate reported that there were signs of pack ice to the southward. Should this form of sufficient thickness to bar our return, we shall be in a position of danger, as the food, I hear, is already running somewhat short. It is late in the season, and the nights are beginning to reappear. This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the fore-yard, the first since the beginning of May. There is considerable discontent among the crew, many of whom are anxious to get back home to be in time for the herring season, when labour always commands a high price upon the Scotch coast. As yet their displeasure is only signified by sullen countenances and black looks, but I heard from the second mate this afternoon that they contemplated sending a deputation to the captain to explain their grievance. I much doubt how he will receive it, as he is a man of fierce temper, and very sensitive about anything
approaching to an infringement of his rights. I shall venture after dinner to say a few words to him upon the subject. I have always found that he will tolerate from me what he would resent from any other member of the crew. Amsterdam Island, at the north-west corner of Spitzbergen, is visible upon our starboard quarter—a rugged line of volcanic rocks, intersected by white seams, which represent glaciers. It is curious to think that at the present moment there is probably no human being nearer to us than the Danish settlements in the south of Greenland—a good nine hundred miles as the crow flies. A captain takes a great responsibility upon himself when he risks his vessel under such circumstances. No whaler has ever remained in these latitudes till so advanced a period of the year.