The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [373]
The drama in which his clients are caught up always turns out to assume the shape of another plot. It may be an Overcoming the Monster story, as in The Speckled Band, where Holmes in fact plays a more than usually central role as the hero who personally overcomes the monster. The distraught client is a young girl, an heiress, who feels threatened by the grim, violent figure of her stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, with whom she lives in the country. Two years earlier her older sister had died in violent and mysterious circumstances in the same house. Holmes inspects the house, in the doctor's absence, and works out how the sister must have been murdered and how his client is now in danger of the same fate. Of course we, the readers, are not told what he has deduced, since this would destroy the suspense. Holmes then secretly returns to the house at night, and in the nick of time manages to send the agent of murder, a deadly snake, back on its tracks up a bell rope and through a specially-contrived hole in the wall to the next room from which it has come. Here it fastens its deadly fangs in the villain who sent it, Dr Roylott, who is after the girl's money. The monster is thus overcome, the beautiful young heroine has been saved; and if this were the usual Overcoming the Monster story we might then expect the brave hero to marry the `Princess' he has rescued. But here we expect nothing of the kind. The heroine passes out of Holmes's life and he returns to his lodgings quite unchanged by his adventure.
No Holmes adventure is based more overtly on the Overcoming the Monster plot than the novel with which Doyle marked his detective's return to life 11 years after he supposedly fell to his death with Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls. The suspense of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is built up through Doyle's conjuring up the image of a gigantic, luminescent and `monstrous hound, seemingly supernatural, which roams a fog-wreathed Dartmoor at night and is associated with the mysterious death of a local landowner. Holmes deduces that the `monster' is not a ghost but a real dog, being used to further a series of crimes, the perpetrator of which he identifies. The climax comes when he manages to shoot the monster, just before its fleeing master is sucked down to his death by a bog (adapting an image borrowed from the climactic episode of R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone 33 years earlier, when the villain was sucked down to his death in a similar quagmire on Exmoor).
Within the framework of the Mystery, however, other Holmes stories are based on different plots. The Musgrave Ritual takes on the shape of a Quest, ending in the discovery at the bottom of a pond of a great treasure, the ancient crown of England. The Boscombe Valley Mystery turns out to be shaped by the plot of Comedy, where the dark figures are two fathers, locked in a deadly quarrel, while their two children long to get married but are prevented from doing so by their fathers' feud. One father murders the other, so that suspicion at first falls on the innocent son, which is what brings in Holmes to investigate. The result of his intervention is that the `hero' and `heroine' are at last liberated from the shadows and free to get married. But by this time, Holmes has long since returned to Baker Street, to await his next case.
It is this curiously detached role played by the central figure in the Mystery, and his lack of real human involvement with the other characters who pass temporarily under his scrutiny, which really gives us the central clue to what these stories are about.
It is significant that most Mystery stories are concerned with discovering who has