In The Hound of the Baskervilles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t really brought Sherlock Holmes “back” after killing him off in the story “The Final Problem” since The Hound had been set sometime before  Holmes and Moriarty took their plunge from the Reichenbach Falls. With this story, however, Doyle finally had some explaining to do.

I think he does so with real skill. Holmes’s survival is accounted for with a wave of the hand. When Moriarty grappled with him at the edge of the cliff above the Falls, Holmes used a baritsu maneuver to flip his enemy and save himself. Apparently baritsu (“the Japanese system of wrestling”) might have been based on the then new British mixed martial art of Bartitsu (a combination of “ju-jitsu” with the name of the guy who developed it, Barton-Wright). Contemporary readers may have been intrigued, but despite attempts at its revival I think Bartitsu is only a historical footnote today.

The mechanics of Holmes’s survival aside, what I found most impressive about what Doyle does here is the way he threads the plot of “The Final Problem” (which had been published ten years earlier) with what’s going on here. After his presumed death, Holmes had stayed in hiding in order to hunt down the rest of Moriarty’s gang, making this story a pretty direct sequel. His fear of an assassin with an air gun is even worked back into the plot as an essential point. Sure you can pick holes in various places as you go along, and various editors have, but they’re points that I had no problem ignoring. Meanwhile, the shift from the main mystery, a locked-room murder, to the capture of Moriarty’s Number Two (“the second most dangerous man in London”) is nicely done.

Though he doesn’t have much to say for himself, Colonel Moran’s face tells a story. Watson reads his physiognomy like a medical text:

It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow without reading Nature’s plainest danger-signals.

Physiognomy is now seen as a pseudo-science, but in 1903 the idea was still current. Holmes, however, is prepared to take these matters a speculative step further:

There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of his own family.

Watson immediately responds that this is “surely rather fanciful.”

“Well,” Holmes admits, “I don’t insist upon it.”

It is indeed a fanciful theory, and one that expands quite a bit on the notion that comes up in The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes sees something in the portrait of Hugo Baskerville that reminds him of the face of Stapleton, calling it “an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.” What he’s arguing here though is less like a regressive gene resurfacing than an instance of the theory of embryo recapitulation, where “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” only occurring on the family level rather than that of the species. I’m sure this is an idea that doesn’t bear much looking into, but I love the way Holmes himself dismisses it as unimportant anyway. What is important is that the great detective is back: “once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

Who says that? Watson? No, it’s Holmes, referring to himself in the third person! He really was setting the pattern for a modern celebrity.

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