Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard Page A

menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea.
      “The hound!” cried Holmes. “Come,Watson, come! Great heavens, if we are too late!” 42

    Watson’s great narrative weakness—the habit of borrowing clichés from fantastic literature and applying them to reality—whenever
     the dog is involved descends nearly to the level of caricature, but is present throughout his whole narrative.
    He is even more apt to give way to the temptation of the frankly supernatural; and though Holmes officially refuses to let
     himself be caught up by the legend of the Hound, he soon shows he is just as taken in by it. Of course he gives no credence
     to the theory that the dog is a spectral creature that has wandered through the centuries, but he does accept a more modern
     version of the legend, in which the dog is serving a criminal’s interests.
    It is striking to see the way that Holmes, at the very beginning of the investigation, summarizes the affair for Watson. Having
     procured a large-scale map of Devonshire, he describes the place this way to his friend:
    “This small clump of buildings here is the hamlet of Grimpen, where our friend Dr. Mortimer has his headquarters. Within a
     radius of five miles there are, as you see, only a very few scattered dwellings. Here is Lafter Hall, which was mentioned
     in the narrative. There is a house indicated here which may be the residence of the naturalist—Stapleton, if I remember right,
     was his name. Here are two moorland farmhouses, High Tor and Foul-mire. Then fourteen miles away the great convict prison
     of Princetown. Between and around these scattered points extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then, is the stage upon
     which tragedy has been played, and upon which we may help to play it again.” 43
    The description is factually objective, since it is based on a map, but we can see that several terms (“the desolate, lifeless
     moor”) already evince belief in a supernatural atmosphere conducive to somber tragedies and mysterious crimes.
    The same subtle transformation of reality by writing is at work in the first reconstruction that Holmes offers of the death
     of Sir Charles Baskerville:
    “Why should a man walk on tiptoe down the alley?”
      “What then?”
      “He was running, Watson—running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his
     face.”
      “Running from what?”
      “There lies our problem. There are indications that the man was crazed with fear before ever he began to run.” 44
    Here again, it is the choice of each word (he was “running desperately,” “crazed with fear”), and even the construction of
     the sentences (with the panting repetition of “running”)—or, if you like, the writing of the scene—that transposes the tale
     of Baskerville’s death into the domain of fantastic literature.
    What is set in place at the beginning of the investigation continues throughout the novel. Watson, making himself the deputy
     for Holmes’s vision, keeps perceiving the “facts” through the prism of their shared interpretation and transmitting his anxiety
     to the principal witness, Dr. Mortimer. The tone is struck in the first report to Holmes:
    My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken
     corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and
     also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the
     other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk
     are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples.
     As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own