Spooky October is an excellent time to read or re-read some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creepy Sherlock Holmes stories. Every Holmes fanatic has their favorites. Here are four of mine.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
This one is most likely on everyone’s list. It’s pure Gothic and based on an ancient local legend. This story has everything. The setting is a bleak moor surrounded by the great Grimpen Mire and is isolated and forbidding. There are also prehistoric ruins, and an escaped murderer roaming the moor. Then there is the mysterious death of Sir Roger Baskerville, lord of the ancient and dark Baskerville Hall, who believed in the so-called curse of the Baskervilles, a hell hound whose pelt shimmers with brimstone and whose jaws drip hell-fire and is heard howling at night upon the moor “in those hours when the powers of evil are exalted.” Add to that mysterious warnings to the new lord and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, and a variety of other strange going’s on, and you have a jolly good spooky story!
The Speckled Band
I was perhaps eight or nine when I first read this story. I wasn’t allowed comic books. However, because of my pleading, my mother found a range of “literary comics” and bought me Robin Hood and Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band. I read the Speckled Band sitting on the couch in our living room in the early afternoon in bright daylight and it still scared me silly. The image of Holmes and Watson sitting in Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom in the dark, the bed frame bolted to the floor, waiting, straining to hear that sinister whistle, and the nearly silent approach of the viper has never left my mind.
The Adventure of the Creeping Man
Professor Presbury is marrying a much younger woman and has begun a regimen of injections of a serum concocted from ape glands to supposedly rejuvenate him and boost his virility. The serum does more than that, it transforms him into a kind of ape man. The images of him scaling the high walls of the manor peering in windows and menacing the women within are breathtakingly creepy.
The Sign of Four
Not your traditional spooky story, although there are a lot of strange going’s on to do with India and the late Captain Sholto’s sons, as well as quite a bit of suspense. The real creepiness is in the person of Tonga an exceedingly ugly and dangerous Pygmy of the Andaman Islands who is the companion of Jonathan Small and who uses poison darts that cause paralysis and instant death. I suppose you could call The Sign of Four a kind of quest for revenge gone wrong, thanks to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
I re-read these stories frequently, but especially in Spooky October!
Artwork by Matthew Stewart from the cover of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conn Doyle