Tales of Unease, collected short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, written between 1883 and 1921. Pictured, 2000 Wordsworth edition, with introduction by David Stuart Davies.
Arthur Conan Doyle is of course most famous for creating one great pop culture icon, Sherlock Holmes, and to a much lesser extent a second, Professor Challenger. The man himself had always wanted however to expand his literary horizons, and he was most proud of his historical novels, with some good reason: The White Company, for instance, is snappy and animated where its models, the works of Walter Scott, lumber today. Why no-one’s made a film of it I can’t imagine. Tales of Unease, however, is a collection of some of his ephemera, ghoulish and ghastly stories that suggest the breadth of his imagination and his generic reflexes. Conan Doyle had a particular fondness for adventure, for tales of revenge, and for the motif of penetrating the unknown, for exploring and explaining the inexplicable. This last fascination, and the desire to hold the irrational at bay, is at the root of the electric brilliance of the character of Sherlock Holmes, sitting with the authority of a judge at the crossroads of chance and fate. Conan Doyle became increasingly frustrated with writing detective stories, and his hero, precisely because they stood in the way of his indulging his interests more deeply: where Holmes became beloved because he delivered readers from the anxiety of the fantastic, it was the anxiety of the fantastic that intrigued Conan Doyle. As he became more and more of a mystic, the idea that all perceived truth had deeper levels changed its nature for him.
In this light, a curious aspect of the Holmes stories – and this is why the Holmes novels are all rather inferior to the short works – is that they are in essence passive: although both Holmes and Watson, on the page if not always in their screen incernations, are robust men capable of taking care of themselves, and there’s often some last-minute piece of gallivanting to try and catch some criminal before they escape, yet they are almost always too late upon the scene. The action is always happening to someone else, in some other place, and even if it is soon explicated, it rarely has immediacy. Considering that Conan Doyle took real delight in derring-do, ripping yarns, and physical action, which he had a real gift for writing, this constriction, as well as his more intellectual preoccupations, were at odds with the detective genre as he had helped to codify it. Where later writers in the mode would skew the genre closer to mental parlour games where action is inconsequential and the processing of clues up front. In Conan Doyle, the pleasure is instead in listening to Holmes explicate how those clues have given him understanding of often utterly bizarre mysteries.
In any event, Conan Doyle was a natural yarn-spinner, and some of the stories collected in Tales of Unease resemble the kinds of crime Holmes would come across after the fact, particularly the morbid vengeance romance of the 'The Lord of Château Noir' and 'The Brazilian Cat': the latter tale, especially, possesses one of those faux-avuncular villainous relations with nasty intentions that Holmes battled so often. In the 'The Case of Lady Sannox', a Turkish ambassador desperately appeals to the surgeon Douglas Stone, a flashy man about town who is currently the lover of society diva Lady Sannox, to come and save the life of a veiled Eastern woman by slicing away her lower lip, which has been inoculated with a poison that will soon spread and kill her.
“He grabbed the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he tore out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, he knew that face.”
Yes, the woman is Lady Sannox, and the Turk is her husband Lord Sannox in disguise, having artfully contrived a vicious and unmistakeable punishment for both guilty parties:
“It was really very necessary for Marion
He signs off with commands to forward his mail to Venice
“There was a rustle somewhere, the vague sound of a foot striking a stone, and then there fell silence upon that old Christian church – stagnant, heavy silence which closed around Kennedy and shut him in like water round a drowning man.”
Like many of Conan Doyle’s similes, that last one is both a touch overwrought, and also utterly relishable: the clever dovetailing of the image of silence, in Kennedy’s isolation in the dark, with water that will drown him, both having the same import of inevitable death, and the image of drowning itself presaging expiration in a similar welter of helpless panic. The brief epilogue, a supposed new report of Berger’s subsequent fame and fortune as the discoverer of the catacomb with the grim corollary of the tragic finding of Kennedy’s decomposing corpse, “his sad fate” written off as the “natural result of his own temerity”, sees Conan Doyle’s pithy technique utilising the mistaken tone of the report, and the way drama can be abstracted to meaninglessness through reportage, to give a blackly ironic cap to the story.
The medieval moralism in these two stories, and in 'The Lord of Château Noir', is both the source of such tales’ appalling pungency and vicarious entertainment value: the refusal to countenance moral rather than merely legal violations, and their direct, physically totemistic punishment, is of course a long tradition in macabre fiction, but one that’s actually taken a relatively long time to soak into the cinema with “torture-porn” films that explicitly mangle the bodies of pretty young things in vengeance for their wanton, rapacious way. Conan Doyle’s take isn’t as orgiastic (or uncomfortably sexualised) as such generic mutations, although his prose lends it a rather lusher force than many, and the erotic undertone to the violence in 'Lady Sannox' in particular is hard to miss. Conan Doyle’s influence on other writers and then filmmakers was however detectable in a much older subgenre of the horror film, a specifically interesting aspect of two other, elaborate tales in the collection, 'The Ring of Thoth' and 'Lot 249', which anticipate various mummy-on-the-loose movies.
A sadistic kind of moral expiation is thoroughly condemned, and yet a fascination with an eroticised variety of it still fully on display, in a story that evokes the theme indirectly: 'The Leather Funnel' sees an unnamed narrator visiting his strange, rich, occultist Parisian friend Lionel Dacre. Dacre, with his fascination for psychic and paranormal phenomenon, convinces him to sleep for the night next to an odd antique, the titular funnel, rigid with age and scored with strange grooves. The narrator has a dream that proves to have been exactly the same as that Dacre had when he slept near the funnel, and he explains the object’s history: it was the funnel used for giving the ‘extraordinary question’ – filling a person’s stomach with water until their torso ruptured – by inquisitorial authorities to a “small young woman with blonde hair and singular, light-blue eyes – the eyes of a child.” The horror of the narrator in having witnessed part of the woman’s fate is barely leavened by learning what Dacre has discovered about the mystery: she was an infamous aristocratic murderess, despised for her utterly amoral, psychopathic crimes including killing her father and brothers, and yet one who gained respect for the bravery of death. The marks on the funnel were from her teeth biting on it in her agonies.
‘The Lord of Château Noir’ is likewise set in France, and invokes relatively recent history (in 1894 when the story was composed) in being set during the Franco-Prussian War. This story extends Conan Doyle’s innate interest in poetic justice into that recent conflict, suggesting the way violence, even modern warfare, contains eternally primal essentials. Here his deft descriptive prose is on exhibit:
“It was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north-west…A thin, cold rain was falling, swishing among the tall poplar trees and rustling in the fields on either side….Behind them the twenty infantryman plodded along through the darkness, with their faces sunk to the rain and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay.”
And the Château itself:
“At half-past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate. The wall in which had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base…The black château lay in front of them. The moon shone out between two rain-clouds and threw the old house into silver and shadow…Above was a dark roof breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it. A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.”
A better lesson for creating a fetid, menacing atmosphere in the space of a few paragraphs is hard to find, the prose charged with cinematic vividness. The picture of Captain Baumgarten himself, bald, “heavy-jawed, blue eyed, with a curving yellow moustache”, not brilliant but stolid and reliable, is a fittingly, cool, crisp representative of the Prussian forces, who leads his men out one night, acting on intelligence bought from a captured farmer, identifying Count Eustace of the Château Noir as the leader of the murderous band of guerrillas killing Prussian soldiers. The German soldiers, desiring revenge on the man who’s been assassinating their comrades, instead find themselves entrapped by their quarry. Baumgarten settles to wait for the absent Count’s return, with his men bivouacked in the château, by a fire in the house’s great hall, only for Eustace to appear from the shadows of his own great hall, like one of his own family portraits has come to life, or an unforgiving ghost, to confront the Prussian warrior. Eustace’s motive for unremitting punishment of the Prussians is slowly, memorably revealed as he inflicts upon the Captain the same hideous disfigurements and humiliations that were imposed on the Count’s own son, who had fought with the French army, before showing a final, dubious pity, as did the Prussian general who released his son as a blind, agonised ruin:
“And so it was that Captain Baumgarten, disfigured, blinded and bleeding, staggered out into the wind and the rain of that wild December dawn.”
Conan Doyle’s sense of the world as islets of composed civility and calm surrounded by intimidating chaos, unruly passion, uncharted menaces and ethereal possibilities, to be approached with scientific curiosity but understood with instinctual fervour, is apparent in all the stories in the collection, and are quintessentially Victorian in many ways: the fear of the new, waiting to be stumbled upon, or the fear of explosions of things thought repressed and forgotten, is constantly described. Something of his Holmesian methodological approach is apparent in ‘The Brown Hand’ applied to a supernatural subject, a story which also, like The Sign of Four and its model The Moonstone evokes the blowback effect of disrespect to foreign cultures and Imperial plundering infiltrating the bourgeois English landscape. Sir Dominick Holden, a brilliant and well-rewarded surgeon who had lived and worked for many years in India, is now an exhausted and melancholy wretch even though he’s retired with his equally suffering wife to a house bordering Salisbury Plain. The reason, as described by a distant relative who tells the story, is because Holden had amputated the hand of an Indian man, and had kept the severed hand as an object of his medical research having promised the man he would see the hand was buried with him when he died. But the hand had been destroyed in a fire and now Holden is relentlessly persecuted by the Indian’s shade, appearing every night to search his house for the jar containing his lost limb.
The narrator’s cunning ploy, once he’s experienced the shade’s forlornly angry appearances, is to offer the ghost a substitute, fetching the amputated hand from a dead Indian man from a London
‘The Brown Hand’ and ‘The Brazilian Cat’ have similar starting points, tales of penniless young men visiting wealthy relatives recently returned from overseas with dire secrets, and they each pay off with the hero becoming rich after an adventure with those relatives, but through very different methods: ‘The Brazilian Cat’ is perhaps the story in the collection that most entirely resembles a Holmes tale, lacking only the detective himself to discern the grim intent of the villain. Young Marshall King, who had been raised to expect being the heir of a Lord but has fallen, through indolent ways, into grave fiscal peril, eagerly accepts an invitation from his cousin Everard King, a former Brazilian planter, to stay with him for a while, hoping to beg for some money to escape a debtor’s disgrace. But King has other, deeply sinister plans, which to be fulfilled require him to lock Marshall
“Pulling off my dress-coat, I threw it down over the head of the beast. At the same moment I dropped over the edge, seized the end of the front grating, and pulled it frantically out of the wall. It came more easily than I could have expected. I rushed across the room, bearing it with me; but, as I rushed, the accident of my position put me on the outer side. Had it been the other way, I might have come off scathless. As it was, there was a moment’s pause as I stopped it and tried to pass in through the opening I had left. That moment was enough to give time to the creature to toss off the coat with which I had blinded him and to spring upon me. I hurled myself through the gap and pulled the rails to behind me, but he seized my leg before I could entirely withdraw it. One stroke of that huge paw tore off my calf as a shaving of wood curls before a plane. The next moment, bleeding and fainting, I was lying among the foul straw with a line of friendly bars between me and the creature which ramped so frantically against them.”
The big cat, having tasted human blood for the first time, is now insatiable for it, and, of course, the moment Everard enters in the morning, he instead becomes the animal’s brunch. Again, the gross physical violence that Marshall suffers is necessary for his moral character – he’s not the same dissolute gadabout at the end – and he finishes up the beneficiary of the Lord’s inheritance finally thanks to Everard’s other conniving. Everard’s menagerie of collected animals and association with exotic climes of course resembles Dr Roylott in ‘The Speckled Band’, the idea of arranging a financially fortuitous animal’s mauling obviously similar to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Everard’s falsely genial, Pickwick-esque air of equanimity disguising bottomless depravity similar to Jephro Rucastle’s bogus bonhomie in ‘The Copper Beeches’ (and also his end at the jaws of his own deadly mastiff). The first-person account of the experience is however great storytelling both technically and in effect, the reassurance inherent in the device barely compensating for the you-are-there intensity of the night in the cat’s cell. Again, like ‘The Brown Hand’ and several other stories here and elsewhere in Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, the importation of the exotic sets off almost unnoticeable yet finally destabilising vibrations, akin to the psychic emanations of the object of ‘The Leather Funnel’ and the thought-manifestations in the short mystical story ‘Playing With Fire’. Everard’s beasties indicates not the mere fancy of an eccentric but his embodied wish to have his relative eaten and the violence that might otherwise have been suppressed and made latent in him by the bland English weather instead stoked to psychotic ends by unfulfilling foreign adventures, is an interesting, and largely unconscious, metaphor for the colonial project’s effect on the masterminding nation.
Some stories in this collection are throwaway fillips, and two of the least essential are basically jokes, albeit each possessing an irony over transforming expectations: ‘The Nightmare Room’ and 'The Los Amigos Fiasco' are attempts at outright humour that prove Conan Doyle’s dry wit was better served stitched into the fabric of far darker pieces. Both are set in the United States, a country which for Conan Doyle, as for Jules Verne, represented excitable pioneering not always tethered to reasoned application, and ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ offers another B-Movie plot that would be pinched for the The Invisible Ray and Man-Made Monster: a rampaging bandit named Duncan Warner is to be executed via the new invention the electric chair, but using a far stronger power source than has been used before, for the small Californian town of Los Amigos has a brand new and very powerful generator. But Peter Stulpnagel, a canny but little respected local researcher chosen as one of a panel to arrange their experiment in electrified homicide, predicts that a stronger electrical charge will, instead of killing a man, imbue him with amazing properties of power and longevity, and this proves to be the case: Warner and Stulpnagel hoot amicably as the Los Amigos lawmen try first to kill the criminal with great charges, and then to hang him the good old-fashioned way, which proves laughably unsuccessful. In ‘The Nightmare Room’, a hoary melodrama in which two men, a French dancer’s husband and her lover, play a game of death to see who’ll be her final mate, proves to merely be a lousy movie that the producer wants to shoot over again.
No more substantial is ‘How It Happened’, although it has a different focus, being a story that is plainly the offspring of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist bunkum. It's a supposedly verbatim account of a female medium’s channelling of the spirit of a man who died in a car crash and how he came to experience his own death and lingering in the afterlife, meeting a friend who had died before in perplexity before the penny dropped. ‘Playing With Fire’ likewise is built around spiritualism, with a circle of bourgeois London dilettantes introducing a new member, an inquisitive, slightly reckless French psychic into their company, and he begins pressing them to penetrate new possibilities in generating physical manifestations of their thoughts, finally resulting in the appearance of an invisible unicorn that makes havoc in the house, unicorns having been the obsessive subject of an artist in the circle. It’s a stry mostly interesting for how Conan Doyle treats plainly his great thematic refrain: the manifestation of the subconscious impulse, and the literalisation of terrifying forces.
“His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of (his eccentricity). Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: ‘And where, pray tell, is Myrtle’s head?’”
Joyce-Armstrong soon proves, by taking a new aeroplane up to the edge of the stratosphere, that the great heights are inhabited by colossal jellyfish-like animals that are so lightweight that they spend their entire lives drifting upon the air currents, and decay away to nothing before ever falling to earth when they die. Some of these animals are harmless but others are great beaked things held up by gas bubbles within their bodies, capable of tearing men and machines to pieces, and finally Joyce-Armstrong becomes the victim of them when he ascends once too often. It’s both an inspired piece of cryptozoological fancy, and a kind of steampunk horror-adventure from the days when the earth’s limits weren’t so well defined. It’s enough to make you wish that flying the friendly skies occasionally required passengers manning machine guns to fight off swarms of gossamer beasts.
More familiar in plot if just as tense is ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, which likewise it told by an account within another narrative, left behind by a recently deceased doctor, John Hardcastle, who, upon taking a restful visit some years earlier to rural Derbyshire, encountered a terrifying phenomenon. The familiar if sparse atmosphere of the region is well laid out and a feeling of the humdrum encoded in such details as the fact Hardcastle is living with a pair of old spinsters, a world as far from menace and the inexplicable as it seems you can get, and yet the landscape is eerie and teems with hidden caves and pits, including the Blue John shaft, dug by Romans extracting precious ore, which is now the centre of local legends about a mysterious beast that roars within and steals out at night to consume livestock. A young divinity student, Armitage, tells Hardcastle about these stories, willing to say he’s heard the roars himself. The doctor dismisses him, but soon hears the menacing howl from deep within the earth himself, and, taken over by curiosity, ventures into the shaft, only to fall and extinguish his light, soon realising he’s trapped within with a huge, unseen thing, and the written description of this encounter possesses a Spielbergian relish:
“It was a tread – yes, surely it was the tread of some living creature. But what a tread it was! It gave one the impression of enormous weight carried upon sponge-like feet, which gave forth a muffled but ear-filling sound. The darkness was as complete as ever, but the tread was regular and decisive. And it was coming beyond all question in my direction.”
Hardcastle keeps his wits together and the creature doesn’t detect him, and he flees the shaft, but on hearing that Armitage has vanished, probably snatched by the beast in walking the moor, he decides to arm himself and ambush the monster. Conan Doyle cleverly exploits a folk-myth atmosphere here – many a rural locale has its unexplained marauder that consumes sundry sheep to this day – and generates a sense of unease in the English landscape, and a good old-fashioned monster hunt with the clever potential explanation that the animal belonged to a species of underground-dwelling bears look though extinct but perhaps having instead lived deep and this had through luck found a portal to the surface that gave it an easier supply of food. Whilst Hardcastle takes on the beast and emerges victorious, he, like several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here, is consumed swiftly once he has looked deeply into the potential for chaos to linger in the orderly world.
If ‘The Horror of the Heights’, ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, and to a certain extent ‘Playing With Fire’ are all kinds of monster yarns, so too is ‘Lot 249’, one which also links to ‘The Ring of Thoth’ in sharing a motif of ancient Egyptians alive in the modern world, but they are actually quite diverse stories. If ‘The Ring of Thoth’, with an unknowably old but still perceptibly human ancient stalking the deserted corridors of a museum searching for the mummy of his long-lost lover, obviously prefigures the 1932 Karl Freund film The Mummy, ‘Lot 249’ anticipates other more familiar varieties of mummy movie where a bandaged, desiccated working corpse possessing great power and mindless menace stalks unfamiliarly everyday locations. ‘Lot 249’ was actually filmed, very loosely, as an episode of 1990’s Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, but the story's atmosphere is less William Gaines and far more M.R. James, with the fusty academic locale of Oxford vital to the ironic disparity of the drama, although it never suggests James’ gift for almost abstractly suggested menace and subliminal manifestation. Conan Doyle was finally, usually much more literally minded than James, and less authentically antiquarian in his references.
In ‘Lot 249’, an industrious young medical student, Abercrombie Smith (you’ll have noticed that several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here are, like him, doctors or in training as such), living in a tower on campus with two other young men, Edward Bellingham and William Monkhouse Lee, is told by another friend, Jephro Hastie, of the nastiness Bellingham has exhibited, and the strange grip he has on Lee, having gotten himself somehow, in spite of his rotundity and obnoxiousness, engaged to Lee’s beautiful sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that Bellingham’s gifts for obscure languages has given him rare knowledge for using Egyptian black magic for influence, and he’s taken it step further by obtaining and reviving a mummy to use to assault enemies and people who defy him, as attacks about campus proliferate and Smith begins to understand the dreadful nature of the sounds he’s been hearing from the room beneath his.
“…he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it. It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue.”
Such classic macabre imagery marks out the story, the longest in the collection, although Smith’s final dealing with Bellingham Bellingham
The note of crepuscular romanticism and lingering, consuming emotional loss in this story is even more defined in the collection’s best story, ‘The Captain of the Polestar’. Here several of Conan Doyle’s characteristics come together with completeness: penetrating a veil of existence at the limits of the rational world, the lingering of the spirit, the mystery to be discerned, the excellently sketched physical environment, the morbid sexuality, and the enigmatic dominant man whose motives are barely perceivable to the common fellows about him. Here, that dominant man is the eponymous captain, Nicholas Craigie, an almost suicidally valiant captain of a whaling ship threatened with becoming icebound within the Arctic Circle , his increasingly anxious crew reporting visions of spirits around the ship and wailings from the hazy semi-perpetual twilight. Craigie himself, described by the narrator, the ship’s young medical officer John McAllister Ray, is a brusquely intelligent but strangely changeable, capricious man, who has enjoyed putting himself the in the way of danger in the past. In spite of the eerie manifestations and physical danger the ship is in, he’s determined to hold on, and Ray himself, archly rational, gives way to the atmosphere:
“The night was very dark – so dark that, standing under the quarter-boat, I was unable to see the officer on the bridge. I think I have already mentioned the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas. In other parts of the world, be they ever so barren, there is some slight vibration of the air – some faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground…It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you all in its gruesome reality. You find your tympanum straining to catch some little murmur, and dwelling eagerly on every accidental sound within the vessel. In this state, I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.”
Conan Doyle was actually writing here partly from experience, for he had served for a voyage on a whaler in the north, the Hope, in 1880, and his story, written three years later, was actually one of his first stabs at fiction. That it displays a care in creating mood and a depth of feeling that’s missing from the most recent stories in the collection perhaps says something about how being tethered to the Holmes stories eroded his more expansive authorial gifts. But they never abandoned him entirely. The storytelling in ‘Captain’ is indeed nearly as minimalist and suggestive as M.R. James, as a tantalising sketch of a beautiful woman in the Captain’s cabin accords with the feminine appearance of the ghost stalking the ship, the Captain maintaining a murmuring vigil making promises to the wind, and then finally leaping from the ship and vanishing across the ice floes chasing this wraith, to be found later, frozen to death, his apparent death wish finally fulfilled. The explanation? It comes in a brief epilogue supposedly written by the young doctor’s father, accounting the story of a friend who had known Craigie:
“According to his account, he had been engaged to a young lady of singular beauty residing upon the Cornish coast. During his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.”
The suggestiveness here, the simultaneous offering of solution to the mystery and suddenly even more ambiguous reasons, is genuinely poignant, and the story itself captures something of the same mood of seaborne desolation found in the end of Frankenstein and in Coleridge. It’s not unworthy of either, and it’s the only time in the story that Conan Doyle wields the aura of the truly grand kind of fantastic story, and not merely exciting or sly. But they're all marked out by how lingering past and looming future always seem to offer the same immensity of threat. Finally, Conan Doyle’s bifocal sense of reality and truth at least served him well in creating tales of unease.
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