When I first read Holmes at around the age of ten, this story frightened the bejabers out of me, and I still find it the most truly horrifying of them all. The next morning, the two men are stark, raving mad and the woman is dead, with a look of utter terror etched on her face. The Devil’s Foot – one evening, a man leaves his two brothers and his sister happily playing cards together. Definitely a horror story this one, with a burial scene of Poe-like terror. The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax – Lady Frances Carfax is alone and friendless, a perfect victim for any unscrupulous conman who wants to get hold of her property. The credibility might be a bit over-stretched but Conan Doyle’s writing just about carries it off. The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place – a Gothic tale of crypts and corpses, greed and deception, this has definite elements of the horror story about it. Betrayal, brutality and cowardice are at the heart of this story – and it’s one example of Conan Doyle’s tendency to have Holmes leave punishment of wickedness to a higher power. Mrs Ronder and her husband were circus folk, lion-tamers… until it all went horribly and gruesomely wrong. The Veiled Lodger – there’s no detection in this one, as Holmes is simply the recipient of the secret behind the tragedy that befell the lodger of the title.
However Davies points out that there were experiments of this nature going on in real life at the time, so the story probably seemed much more credible to contemporary readers. That’s because the scientific explanation seems so ridiculous. I must admit this is probably my least favourite of all the Holmes stories because it’s so far-fetched. The Creeping Man – An elderly man who has fallen in love with a young woman starts exhibiting strange and frightening behaviour and seems to have acquired almost superhuman strength and agility. What Holmes discovers reveals a very human darkness at the heart of this family, perhaps more frightening than had the woman truly been a vampire. The Sussex Vampire – when a woman is found apparently sucking blood from her own baby and will give no explanation, her frantic husband applies to Holmes for help. Then there are seven of the short stories, all either with an element of the supernatural or with particularly dark and brutal storylines: This is Conan Doyle’s writing at its finest, a thrilling tale with a dramatic setting amidst the mists and mires of Dartmoor, and a terrifying climax as Holmes and Watson finally face the hound that has been the curse of the Baskerville family for generations. The book kicks off with the long story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, probably the most popular of all the Holmes tales. He reminds us of Conan Doyle’s interest in things not of this world as a great advocate of Spiritualism, and has selected stories that show Conan Doyle’s flair for going close to the edge of the supernatural, though in the Holmes stories the solution is always ultimately based in the rational world. Apparently he has also written six Holmes novels himself. There is an interesting introduction by David Stuart Davies, himself a writer of crime and ghost stories, and an authority on Holmes. This pocket-sized little book is published by the Collector’s Library and contains some of the darkest of the Holmes stories.
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