“An Exciting Christmas Eve” (1883)

This story by Arthur Conan Doyle was written when he was about 24 and does not alas have very much to do with Christmas or the Christmas spirit. I’m not sure why it is set in the season, except that might have made it more marketable in publishing circles of the time. The plot is ludicrous and, contra the title, not so exciting. But Doyle is good enough, even at young age, to make it suspenseful and it is often enjoyable in spite of its various weaknesses. The first-person narrator, Herr Doktor Otto von Spee of Berlin, is a chemist who specializes in explosives. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872 is raging along. Foreign spies or undercover agents (presumably French) want information from him about bombs, so they kidnap him to get it. In a way it makes sense in 1883 for an explosives expert to be heroic like von Spee is here. That might have changed after about World War I and it does seem strange here. Nobody ever thought much of the Unabomber, for example. In the end a lot of the problems in this story may be more about the inexperience of Doyle. The kidnapping of von Spee is not handled well and in general the story assumes we are more keenly interested in bombs than we might be and that we already know what things like “guncotton” are. I suspect the explosions here would be likely to kill people. Von Spee notably survives a big one. Basically, the story describes von Spee’s expertise and bona fides, then he is kidnapped and told he must train bomb-makers with his knowledge, and then he figures out a way to escape. You really have to lean into your suspension of disbelief if this story is going to work for you, especially with this premise. But even as a young writer still coming up, Doyle has a knack for making his stories entertaining and engaging. Just don’t expect this one to work well if you’re including it in some kind of Christmas ritual. Yes, I do think Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. But this story is not really that.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
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“The Horror of the Heights” (1913)

I liked this silly story by Arthur Conan Doyle for a few reasons. It reminded me in good ways of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically “At the Mountains of Madness” (from 1936). Still need to get to Lovecraft’s book of criticism—I wonder what if anything he made of Doyle. Lovecraft doesn’t necessarily seem like he would appreciate Sherlock Holmes and maybe never looked past Doyle’s most famous work. After a random dud or two, this is the second Doyle story I read in a row that was pretty good. I expected more stuff like this from him—simple, engrossing fantasy adventure stories. Here it’s all about the state of flight technology circa 1913, and the idea is that there are jungles of a type above the cloud level, with creatures living there we can’t see from the ground. Even on clear days it all just blends into the blue sky. There’s a strained frame about a found notebook with a few missing pages and (gasp) bloodstains, but basically this is a first-person story told by the pilot. He’s attempting to get above 30,000 feet and that alone requires some telling. Doyle sounds knowledgeable about flying and the technology, at least to me who knows very little about it, so it’s believable enough. After some tribulations this pilot gets all the way to 40,000 feet and that’s where the real action is: giant floating translucent jellyfish creatures and a purple snake-like monster that attacks and forces him to land, which is the last we hear of him. The frame narrator speculates that our pilot fueled up and returned forthwith for further study, where he met his unknown demise. Also, maybe not so obviously, he took some time to write up this 5,000-word account. This story might be too busy on the margins—Doyle makes the heart of it more the climb to 40,000 feet. But the detail is interesting even before we get way up there and encounter the creatures. It probably qualifies as some kind of “weird” story. I quite like these creatures up there. They verge on the tall penguins in “Mountains of Madness” and they are nice story decoration. In both stories it’s apparent they are more or less earthly life-forms still unknown. Now we know there are no jellyfish creatures in the sky, no mountain range to rival the Himalayas in Antarctica. But there might have been when these stories were written. Now I think it’s more Mars where we focus our maybe-just-maybe imaginations (even as we are learning it is impossibly cold and toxic). Or spaceships and deep generational space travel. We should try thinking about surviving climate change. This story probably has to be accounted quaint by most contemporary readers, and so it is. But it’s also charming and this rising to the occasion (no pun intended) to face down the challenge, even if the result is death, is probably the best part of it. It’s plucky, and in an unaffected way.

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"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892)

Read story by Arthur Conan Doyle online.

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories brought a strange combination of the hyper-rational and the superhuman to the foundations of mystery stories as we know them today, advancing and developing them in new and better directions. The influence is still basically huge. Most Holmes stories feature at least one scene where the eccentric master detective reels off a series of insights that astonishes everyone within earshot. He's like a magician, but tut-tuts and gives all credit to science and the logic of deductive reasoning. Holmes is indeed observant, a fine trait for any detective, but his amazingly accurate insights are more often a matter of misdirection on the part of Doyle, who is the real magician. Examine closely any of these displays by Holmes, and one is more apt to find a series of lucky guesses. The clues often support other interpretations as well. But everyone in these scenes is amazed, so we go along with it. There's probably some psychological term for this powerful effect, and what the hell, it makes the stories entertaining. The fact is, there's something wonderfully comforting about Holmes and his sidekick / biographer, Dr. Watson, that makes their stories a pleasure. Holmes is a ridiculous superman but at least he has flaws too, and somehow it works. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is a fine example of how it's done. Holmes amazes his clients (and Watson, and us) once or twice, and solves the mystery before any of the rest of us, even as we are all exposed to the relevant evidence at the same time. Amazing! This one is an example of the locked-room mystery subsubgenre, in which a victim is found locked into a room that can only be locked from the inside, with no evidence of any other way out. It's an ingenious dream of a mystery—until, again, we look at it or think about it too closely, at which point it verges on self-parody. I'm reminded of villains in places like James Bond movies, who are never satisfied with simply killing someone, but instead must have elaborate schemes involving fountains, indoor pools, sharks, and floors that recede into walls. Certainly we have a version of that here. But we also have something that's scrupulously fair by the rules it sets for itself, the rules of giant swaths of mystery story writing. We have equal access to the clues, but Holmes is usually the only one who can put them together. I just picked one story for this exercise, but my own experience is that Sherlock Holmes stories are best enjoyed by the handful, meaning you're better off picking up a collection of a dozen or more (why not all of them!) and reading that. It's probably not a bad idea to make sure this story is included.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle