Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1. Arthur Conan Doyle
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Hall itself, before a ferocious black dog breaks through the glass doors and attacks him (magically leaving no marks on the body.) The makers of 2001’s The Hound with Matt Frewer have their canine appear in broad daylight, at one point staring up at Sir Henry as he looks out of his ancestral home towards the moor. Even the 1939 Basil Rathbone vehicle shows a dog pushing Selden to his death. These explicit depictions lessen the force of the story’s climax — we have seen the hellhound several times before the attack on Sir Henry, and so there is less for us to be startled by.
Pacing is another basic component to a tale of suspense. The comatose pace of the Granada production was perhaps its biggest shortcoming. As noted above, my dim view of the 1988 Granada production is not idiosyncratic. In David Stuart Davies’s comprehensive Starring Sherlock Holmes, the author cites a conversation he had with Jeremy Brett not long before the actor’s untimely passing. When Davies asked Brett “if he could have a final crack at one of the unfilmed Holmes stories, which would it be? Without hesitation he replied, ‘I’d like to do The Hound again. I think we can do much better than that. I was terribly unwell making the film. It was underconceived. The script drifted — which is fatal. Holmes was away too long.”
And although a Hound-like plot, complete with a glowing marsh monster, was employed to great effect in Rathbone’s later, non-period The Scarlet Claw, his Hound, with a surprising lack of mood music, often failed to grip. By contrast, one of the areas in which the 2002 Roxburgh Hound succeeded was in its dramatic, pulse-pounding, and very different opening, with the inquest into Sir Charles’ death punctuated with flashbacks to his autopsy.
None of these would seem to be insurmountable obstacles. CGI technology that can create a plausible Gollum should be able to create an animal that matches Doyle’s words. (According to Sherlockian film expert Phil Cornell, in a recent issue of the scion publication, The Passenger’s Log, there was some talk in the late 1970s of Peter Cushing appearing in his third version of The Hound, which would have featured a stop-frame animation hellhound from special effects master Ray Harryhausen.) And a subtle hand could content itself with terrifying off-screen howls, suggestive silhouettes, or other tried-and-true tricks of the trade to ratchet up the suspense, even among those members of the audience who can recite the text of Watson’s second report from Baskerville Hall verbatim.
HOLMES AWAY FROM HOLMES —
Perhaps as equal a difficulty for the screenwriter is to stay true to the spirit of the book while finely adjusting the storyline so that there is more Holmes. The Hound is the only one of the long stories without a lengthy back-story set in India or America, but it still goes for a fairly long stretch without Holmes’ presence. “This works really well in a book, as we associate with Watson on his own, for after all he is our story-teller, he holds the point-of-view. But in a film that is not the case, and the audience feels dislocated not to be with Holmes,” observes David Pirie, author of The Dark Water, the only recent pastiche that succeeds in pitting a Holmesian sleuth against an evil that may be otherworldly.
The 1973 Hound with Stewart Granger expands Holmes’s role by having him initially accompany Sir Henry, Mortimer and Watson to Dartmoor, before concocting an excuse that will enable him to continue his inquiries in secret. In theory, such a liberty could work, but given the poor casting and production values of that effort, it is not so easy to visualize that plot alteration in a better-quality adaptation. Perhaps someone with imagination could craft an early Holmes-Stapleton encounter that would prove to reveal an important clue.
At the other extreme is the 2001 Matt Frewer production, although many may feel that the decision not to have his quirky, self-parodying Holmes reveal himself on Dartmoor until he shucks off a disguise and takes potshots at a blinded hound that hunts by smell alone to have been a wise choice under the circumstances. The lack of intelligence in that version’s script is demonstrated by its inclusion of a scene in which Kenneth Welsh’s very able (if elderly) Watson tracks down Holmes’s lair in the stone hut, without actually tracking down Holmes himself.
Other productions, most notably the 2002 BBC version, tack on lengthy invented scenes to play up the Holmes-Stapleton battle of wits, seeking to elevate the secret Baskerville to Moriarty-like dimensions of villainy. Once again, with the right cast, and writing faithful in spirit to the Canon, such scenes could address the problem of the missing Holmes, but the efforts thus far have sacrificed fidelity to the story’s spirit for action or post-modern recursions (when Richard Roxburgh’s Holmes insists that Stapleton’s schemes will leave little mark on the world, his adversary knowingly counters that he will achieve immortality because of the fame of Holmes himself, a conceit that just doesn’t work).
One option that has not been attempted comes from Denis O. Smith, the brilliant author of some of the best pastiches ever written, including “The Secret of Shoreswood Hall,” one of the very few tales to capture the spirit of The Hound, and who richly deserves to be widely read both within Sherlockian circles and the general mystery-loving public. He has suggested that a screenwriter could give Holmes more actual detective work to do while on Dartmoor than would actually be shown; perhaps more grilling of Dr Mortimer and/or Stapleton about the ancient legend that could expose questions about its provenance (after all, as commentators have long pointed out, the text says nothing about how Sir Charles’s predecessor met his end, and if he did not die in a manner consistent with the legend, why would Sir Charles have taken it so seriously?)
THE ACTOR PLAYING SIR HUGO DUNIT —
Many mystery readers don’t focus on the fact that, as Bert Coules puts it, “Most of Doyle’s stories are not detective stories in the modern sense of the word.” The solutions in the Canon are often either not particularly surprising, or not based on fair-play clues carefully sprinkled beforehand. In some ways, The Hound is more of a mystery than many others of the original sixty. Denis Smith has commented that The Hound “is also notable for being one of the very few of Doyle’s stories which is presented pretty much in the form which was to become popular later in the 1920s and ’30s, that is, an initial mystery plus a cast of innocent-seeming, if somewhat eccentric local characters, one of whom, you suspect, may in fact be the villain. It is also almost unique among Doyle’s Holmes stories in having a sub-plot (the business with Selden and the Barrymores) which is dragged across the path of the main plot like a red herring, to confuse the issue.”
Even so, Doyle unveils the man behind the dog earlier on in the book than might be deemed ideal. (Bert Coules, again — Doyle “gives away the identity of the murderer quite incidentally. It’s almost thrown away, a long way before the end of the story.”) And some film versions give the show away even earlier than that by casting the same actors (1972’s William Shatner and 1983’s Nicholas Clay) as both Sir Hugo and Stapleton without taking any pains to make the family resemblance a subtle one. Others (the 1988 Granada for one) show too much of the mysterious figure dogging Sir Henry in London to make his identity much of a mystery.
Suspense concerning the hand on the devil-dog’s leash could be enhanced by delaying the revelation of the villain’s identity (although Basil Rathbone in 1939 only risked his client’s life a second time by not sharing his suspicions with Watson until the very end of the film), or, as Denis Smith suggests, by writing in “in a few extra encounters with Frankland and Mortimer, to try to make them appear a little furtive or suspicious, and possibly making a little more of Laura Lyons’s absconding husband.” Efforts along these lines have been attempted — the 1939 and 1959 versions do make token efforts to transform the genial young Mortimer of the book into a scowling, belligerent figure with some secrets to hide, but fail to develop the concept. (Many Holmesian scholars have noted plot inconsistencies in the original — how did the doctor’s spaniel make its way to the heart of the Grimpen Mire? — that suggest to them that Mortimer and Stapleton were in league. And the first Cushing Hound featured a half-hearted attempt to cast suspicion on Frankland, now both an entomologist and a bishop, by introducing a deadly spider into the action. The 1983 Richardson adaptation substitutes a brutal drunkard Geoffrey Lyons, complete with Roylott-like poker-bending strength, for Frankland, but then undercuts the logic of the plot by not only having his wife strangled, thus eliminating any residual belief that unearthly forces might have been at work in Sir Charles’ death, but by showing Lyons snoring downstairs while she is murdered., thus eliminating