The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes (26 page)

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I
f we are to accept the evidence of recent book lists, which fairly shudder beneath the weight of “newly discovered” titles by John H. Watson, M.D., it would appear that the good doctor wrote a great deal more than he published, and was in fact one of the most prolific authors of his or any other time. The very limits of human nature insist that he could not have penned
all
of them, and it naturally follows that many are forgeries, a situation that has made the going difficult for those few which, for lack of evidence to the contrary, must be considered genuine. Such was the case with
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: Or the Adventure of the Sanguinary Count
, and I harbor no illusions that the present volume does not face a journey equally as demanding.

Thus it became doubly important that I check and crosscheck each of the manuscript’s dubious points as it arose, that I might arm myself against the brickbats that the unbelieving would hurl my way as surely as Tonga the Andamanese spat poison-tipped darts at Holmes, Watson, and Athelney Jones during the chase sequence in
The Sign of Four
. I am therefore indebted to the following works for their safe and sure guidance through the mine field of Sherlockiana and Victoriana:
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
, by William S. Baring-Gould;
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
, also by Baring-Gould;
In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes
, by Michael Harrison;
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
, by Vincent Starrett;
The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana
, by Jack Tracy; and
Naked Is the Best Disguise
, by Samuel Rosenberg, the last of which was of no practical help at all in authenticating the manuscript, but whose out-landishly entertaining leaps to various conclusions concerning the relationship of Watson’s writing to the private and political opinions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his literary agent, helped keep aflame my interest in things Sherlockian.

For those who wish to delve further into the events contained between these covers, I heartily recommend
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, by Robert Louis Stevenson. As a tale of terror, mystery, and tragedy it is hard to beat, and is one to which Hollywood has yet to do justice.

Finally, many thanks are due once again to William B. Thompson, a friend of long standing, for his spiritual support, the Arcadia Mixture, Ann Arbor scion of the Baker Street Irregulars, for comic relief, and to Sherlockians everywhere, latent and overt, for their continuing interest in the exploits of the world’s first consulting detective, and, as always, my family, because they are my family.

D
R
. J
EKYLL
’
S
“C
ASE OF
I
DENTITY
”: A W
ORD
A
FTER BY
L
OREN
D. E
STLEMAN

T
his is the one Hollywood didn’t like.

Too cerebral, they said; not at all like its predecessor,
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count
. (Never mind that they didn’t make that one, either.) Not enough slam-bang action, no midnight crypt visits, no caped vampires carrying off swooning females in diaphanous negligees, and only one special effect. Nothing that would translate into big box-office, like Ben’s trained rats or the pea-soup projectile vomiting of Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
. Just Robert Louis Stevenson’s original vision restored, along with his subtextual commentary on late-Victorian hypocrisy, with the greatest detective who never lived folded into the mixture.

I wasn’t disappointed. Movie action on
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
had stalled, thanks mostly to the difficult people who were then representing the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate and who had insisted on entertainment negotiation rights and a whopping share of the proceeds therefrom; it was clear that if there was to be a motion picture about Holmes and Dracula, it would not be based on my book. Since

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
had received its sanction on the same terms, I wasn’t investing in sun block and a ticket to the Coast.

The reaction from the studios did, however, teach me something about the philosophy of film. Screenwriting is a limited art, circumscribed by the writer’s inability to climb inside the minds of his characters. Barring the creaky, overused technique of the voiceover, a character’s personality can be revealed only through action: Man kicks dog — villain; man rescues kitten — hero. The sight of Dracula sucking blood is not a positive character reference, but the tableau of Holmes advancing upon the vampire with crucifix in hand would qualify him for high office.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
would not play onscreen for the very reason that makes it unique in the world of the action-suspense yarn: it presents a man of intellect retracing the steps of another man of intellect through the labyrinth of the human mind. Bereft of physical evidence — telltale footprints, broken pen-points — Holmes is forced to track the vanished Jekyll’s movements through the books he studied in his quest for the cause and cure of personal evil. Andy Warhol may have contented himself with filming reel after reel of a man bent over a tome of science or philosophy, nothing moving but the pages and the smoke drifting up from the bowl of his pipe; Steven Spielberg (or more likely, Roger Corman or Joel Schumacher) may not. The greatest advantage enjoyed by the writer of fiction intended to be read is also the biggest roadblock to adaptation to the screen.

Stevenson presented
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
as a mystery, with Henry Jekyll’s lawyer, the dour Utterson, performing as detective. Until Edward Hyde’s suicide and the subsequent discovery of Hastie Lanyon’s posthumous narrative and Jekyll’s journal, the loathsome Hyde’s hold over respectable Henry Jekyll is kept from the reader. Time and the novella’s fame (people who have never read Stevenson and are unaware of the story and the many motion pictures that have been based upon it know immediately what is meant by the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde”) have rendered the mystery angle superfluous. As early as its first appearance on the Victorian stage, the tale was told in linear fashion, beginning with the medical man’s experiments and his first transformation and finishing with his demise. Every film version to date has followed that formula (appropriate word) as if the studios elected to option the deceased doctor’s journal over the Stevenson treatment.

But Sherlock Holmes is a detective. As such, his entry was dictated by convenience and reason to coincide with Utterson’s concern about the singular terms of his client’s will. All that follows is as Stevenson envisioned, albeit with a Doylesque twist and an ending more in keeping with the proactive role of the sleuth as hero. (More on that ending later; like the classic itself, the first incarnation bore little resemblance to the last.)

It’s been said that a trained researcher can deduce the nature of a pond by an examination of a single drop of water. Likewise a child of the twenty-first century, with no knowledge of the nineteenth, will someday be able to comprehend the surface and subterranean details of late-Victorian English society on the basis of a first-time reading of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. Only Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray
and H. G. Wells’s
The Invisible Man
came as close during the period to capturing the central
angst
of a civilization at odds with its own ideal.

All times are repressed. From the tyrannical Puritanism of Cromwell to the pressures exerted by the religious right and the politically correct left under Clinton, the artist has repeatedly been forced to fly in the face of a sanctimonious majority in the service of truth. The example of the widowed Queen Victoria demanded that drawing-room manners and public-school concepts of honor and fair play be exhibited on all occasions, while the evidence of her many children indicated a variety of pleasures in the bedchamber, courtesy of the late Prince Consort. The dream thus personified was to maintain one’s social standing without neglecting the baser appetites; to misbehave gloriously and with impunity. Let Dorian’s likeness display the physical signs of his debauchery to a sealed room while its original turned the unlined face of an angel to the world. Permit Jekyll to practice good works for the admiration of his colleagues, and Hyde to taste the smorgasbord of sordid delights to be found in the East End. It’s the wish-dream of every pubescent schoolboy who longs to be invisible so he can enter and exit the girls’ locker-room at will.

How natural, then, that the ultra-conservative John H. Watson — wounded war veteran, incorruptible physician, loyal companion — and the Bohemian Sherlock Holmes — student of human frailty, bemused cynic, abuser of drugs and alcohol — should find themselves drawn into the two halves of Jekyll’s world. The detective will not hesitate to follow the spoor through opium dens and brothels. The doctor will trail him reluctantly, but act with decision to snatch his friend back onto safe ground should his eagerness precipitate him over the edge of the abyss. It was not unique territory for this partnership: “A Case of Identity” and “The Man With the Twisted Lip” had profound things to say about double lives and subsumed personalities. And as they had been with Dracula’s invasion of Holmes’s London, the time and setting made the prospect of a summit inevitable.

First and foremost, I am an entertainer, not an academic. I’m incapable of allowing any tale to remain sedentary. The insertion of the frenetic hansom cab chase in Chapter Eleven, with its toppling peddlers’ carts and mud-splattered policemen, earned favorable comments from reviewers — jaded by the influx of Sherlockian pastiches post-Nicholas Meyer’s
The Seven-Percent Solution
— for its humor and originality. I humbly accept the compliment of hilarity, but as for being a prime mover I must pass that credit on to the kings of silent comedy whose work inspired the scene. I suspect the
maestri
Keaton and Chaplin would have found an appreciative audience in both Holmes and Watson, one for the precision of the stunt direction, the other for the
schtik
.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
is not as well known as
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
; the latter remained in print without interruption for twenty years, and has appeared twice since, with only brief periods of unavailability. This publication marks the latter’s first solo appearance since the Penguin reissue in 1980. The difference has to do with the vast following claimed by Holmes and Dracula individually, while the Stevenson
ménage
has yet to achieve cult status. Yet I consider
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
the better book. It’s a more mature work, the Sherlockian rhythms are more faithful to the model, and the title is superior.
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
still sounds too much like a film directed by Edward Wood, Jr. I only settled on it because I couldn’t think of a better way to get the names of both hot-button characters up front.

Not everyone at Doubleday & Co. agreed with me. One of the mental giants in sales and marketing wanted to call the book
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, on the theory that bred-in-the-bone Sherlockians looked up all pastiches under “S” in
Books in Print
. I ignored the twerp.

I placed more faith in the suggestion of my editor, Cathleen Jordan, that my original ending — Jekyll/Hyde committing suicide while Holmes and Watson look on — added nothing to Stevenson’s and relegated the detective and his amanuensis to the roles of passive witnesses. The present conclusion, in which the pitiable schizophrenic forces Holmes to put him out of his misery (or
them
out of
their
misery), preserves Jekyll’s tragic heroism while making Holmes’s part in it more dynamic. The only editorial complaint, as I recall, was that the new ending added twenty pages to the narrative. Consider it the author’s equivalent of a director’s cut.

The thing that has vexed me most about all previous published editions is they contained the same egregious typo in the last line of Watson’s narrative. As written, in regard to Holmes’s directive to Stevenson to leave Holmes and Watson out of his account of the Jekyll case, it read: “I was not very much surprised to learn that he had not forgotten the advice which Sherlock Holmes had given him.” As published in the first Doubleday edition, it read: “I was not surprised to learn that he had forgotten the advice which Sherlock Holmes had given him.” The deletion of that second
not
made nonsense of the crucial last line and negated the entire premise, suggesting as it did that Holmes and Watson
had
appeared in the Stevenson version, rendering
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
redundant. Despite editorial promises to correct the error in future printings, it cropped up in every edition published by Doubleday, Penguin, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. The copy you hold is thus the first to contain the correct ending.

Literary legend has it that Stevenson wrote the first version of
Jekyll
in a delirious three days, under the influence of a nightmare, only to destroy it upon being told by his wife that he had overlooked the story’s mythic potential in favor of creating a lowbrow “crawler.” The version he then wrote is the one which has come down to us. Under the influence of my own premise, I wondered if perhaps the story I sat down to tell was the one Holmes had persuaded Stevenson to abandon. Con men and writers of fiction are equally susceptible to their own pitches.

There is a popular misconception, circulated by critics and scholars who should know better, that the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed into public domain some time ago. They are still very much in the control of those who administer his estate. The death-plus-thirty-years rule that governed British copyright law protected all rights worldwide until 1980, but the dates of publication in
Collier’s
of the later Sherlock Holmes stories continued to shield the characters of Holmes and Watson in the United States until 2000. In the meantime, an international copyright law was passed stating that literary creations will remain the property of a writer’s estate until seventy years after death. The ghost of Sir Arthur is still to be reckoned with; a situation with which I have no problem, except for migraines caused by some of the people I have had to placate. Dame Jean Doyle-Bromet, daughter of Sir Arthur, was a treasure. A number of the supernumeraries who have claimed to speak for her, before her death and after, are disinterred findings of a different type.