Arthur Conan Doyle's The Silver Hatchet: A Detailed Summary & Literary Analysis

The following tale is one of the first to reveal Doyle’s taste for crime fiction, but it is a case far better suited for William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-finder rather than Sherlock Holmes, for – unlike the feigned devilry of The Hound of the Baskervilles or “The Sussex Vampire” – the supernatural powers that haunt these victims are all too genuine. The format is one to which Doyle would return several times, most notably in “The Leather Funnel” which also features a medieval relic with a macabre past and a malign influence. Doyle was certainly drawn to the narrative of the commonplace world being invaded by sinister and exotic forces, and most of his horror stories feature just such a concept.

And he was not alone: there is something about this plot that distinctly presages the spirit of M. R. James’ tales: an artifact haunted by a supernatural spell, a scroll hidden within it which carries a death sentence to those whom it encounters (cf. “Casting the Runes,” “Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” etc.), and a clueless professor horribly killed as a result of impetuous curiosity.

The stories of H. P. Lovecraft also have an ancestor in this tale of bedeviled antiquities: Dr. Hopstein bears a strong resemblance to “The Call of Cthulhu’s” ill-starred Professor Angell, and the plot shares elements with “The Picture in the House” and “The Hound.”

But this story is pure Doyle: written in an affable, journalistic style that attempts to relate facts in a thorough but appealing way, “The Silver Hatchet” paves the path for many more macabre mysteries and, specifically, for the most famous of Doyle’s crime chroniclers – Dr. John H. Watson – whose debut adventure was a mere three years away. And – like those same Baker Street chronicles – it is deeply invested in the Victorian conversation surrounding the complex (and sadly suspected) nature of male friendship…

SUMMARY

Shortly before Christmas in 1861, the prolific antiquarian and Hungarian aristocrat, Count von Schulling passes away, leaving his massive collection of medieval artifacts and manuscripts to the University of Budapest. The school sends the curator of its museum, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, to receive the trove and catalogue it for storage or display. Not long after, however, von Hopstein is found savagely murdered on a snow-swept street not far from the museum. His head has been split almost in two through the crown, as if by a heavy blade, but his pockets are heavy with coins (about a month’s worth of wages for a working man), so robbery seems unlikely.

The first suspect is a Jew named Schiffer, who had assisted in unloading the count’s legacy, but he is accounted for by an elderly janitor named Reinmaul who testifies that they were together when they heard von Hopstein’s dying cry in the street below. Nine days later, Schiffer is discovered laying in a gutter of the Grand Platz with his head split open in the same exact way – also with coins on his person – and the entire metropolis is ablaze with rumors and anxiety about the unmistakable presence of a psychopathic killer, who could strike again at any moment.

It is in this atmosphere that two best friends – Leopold Strauss and Otto von Schlegel – find themselves embroiled in the danger and drama. Both young men are medical students at the university, and both hail from Silesia, leading them to become intensely close to one another. They are drinking at a beer cellar late one night and head home across the Grand Platz in the driving snow when one of them steps on something sharp, reaches into the drift they are traversing, and pulls out a strange weapon: an antique hand-axe with a keen, steel blade and a strange, embossed silver handle.

Putting two and two together, they assume that the hatchet must be Schiffer’s murder weapon. Instead of turning it into the police (it is four in the morning), Schlegel offers to hold onto the evidence and turn it in when the chief of police is awake. All seems well, and them men part ways with warmth, but as Strauss turns his back on his friend, Schlegel finds himself overwhelmed with an impulsive urge to burry the hatchet in his companion’s brain. Consumed with this irresistible fury, before Strauss has barely taken a few steps away, Schlegel charges him with the axe held high.

Alerted by the sound of his friend rushing at him, Strauss spins around, and instinctively grapples with Schlegel, deflects his blow, and yells for help just as two policemen are passing by on their beat. The three men wrestle Schlegel to the ground and drag him to the police headquarters, with a stupefied Strauss trying to make sense of it all, while defending his friend’s reputation, and a mortified Schlegel – restored to sanity – begging his friend’s forgiveness.

Two police inspectors – Baumgarten and his dear friend and lieutenant, Winkel – address the case, hearing out the patrolmen’s testimony while examining the curious axe. At first they are positive that Schlegel is the serial killer, but as they are holding conference, a third civilian – Wilhelm Schlessinger, Dr. von Hopstein’s assistant curator – arrives in a fit of nerves, demanding to be arrested for von Hopstein’s murder – an impulsive and motive-less deed, which he describes in detail, overwhelmed with grief for the man he considered his oldest, dearest friend.

As they men puzzle over this development, Baumgarten handles the axe, but hasn’t held it for more than a few seconds before he is, likewise, overwhelmed with a sudden rage, turns to Winkel, and throws back the blade to burry it in the back of his friend’s skull. Fortunately, the ceiling is low, and the blade sticks in a rafter on the downswing. Furthermore, the silver handle bursts from the blow, allowing an antique scroll to fall out.

The parchment is found to be inscribed with a curse from Johann Bodeck, a member of the occult, Rosicrucian Council, who inserted it into the weapon after his best friend, Max von Erlichingen, used it to murder his wife, Joanna Bodeck, in what seems to have been a covetous rage. The curse insists that anyone who touches the hatchet will be visited with “the grief which it has dealt to me! May every hand that grasps it be reddened … with a loved one’s blood.” Whether the “grief” in question is the end of a friendship, the death of a great, spouse-like love, or both, is not specified.    

As noble men with full respect for justice, Baumgarten, Schlegel, and Schlessinger each insist on being arrested by Winkel, and going to trial for murder or attempted murder. At the trial, further evidence is brought to light: just after Christmas, Reinmaul is found hanging after leaving a suicide note confessing to having murdered Schiffer, his best friend, after the two had assisted in the unloading of von Schulling’s artifacts. Ultimately, it is proven that all four incidents occurred shortly after one man picked up the hatchet in the company of his dearest, male friend.

All are acquitted, and the evidence proves sensational to the Austro-Hungarian public, who are stunned that such supernatural evidence is accepted by a formal court. The judges try to explain their verdict by pointing to the testimony of a forensic scientist who claims that it is possible that the axe was envenomed with some kind of toxic ointment which could have just happened to affect the men while they were in the company of their closest friends.

Conveniently, however, the hatchet was almost immediately disposed of in a lake (with the help of a poodle: the police were too afraid to touch it), so this is sheer conjecture. Schlegel and Strauss were fully reconciled in friendship, and von Schulling joined the army to atone for his crime, where he is killed in the Austro-Prussian War. In his will, he pays to have a massive obelisk erected on von Hopstein’s grave in his friend’s memory.

ANALYSIS

On the surface this is a creepy antiquarian story that warns of the dangers posed by antiques with uncertain provenance, presaging the tradition of M. R. James. Another reading might interpret this story as a cut-and-dried crime thriller with no supernatural element – decoded by the Holmesian Dr. Langemann – presaging The Hound of the Baskervilles and borrowing from Poe’s tales of ratiocination, like The Gold Bug. Miranda takes such a tack when she confidently declares:

“In The Silver Hatchet (1883), the reader again sees scientific explanation eliminate any semblance of the unknown in a tale of violence and the supernatural… Doyle again refers to the advancements in forensic toxicology to reason that a poison, not an ancient curse, is responsible for the behaviour of the individual wielding the silver hatchet.”  

I disagree that Langemann’s theory is meant to be seen as a definitive explanation (it is interesting, but unproven, and Doyle has precedents for fairly straightforward supernatural happenings in many other tales), and – more than this – I think that, thrills aside, this story has almost nothing to say about poison or curses, and everything to say about the passions and anxieties surrounding male friendship during the Late Victorian era.

From an early point in his career, Doyle became keenly interested in the concept of the “homosocial relationship” – particularly the platonic affection of two male friends. This tension famously hounds modern interpretations of Holmes and Watson, who – beginning with 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes – have frequently either been confused for, implied to be, or depicted as having homoerotic attractions, and it was – as I have argued in a different analysis – the primary theme of “Lot No. 249,” which is essentially a complex masculinity parable disguised as a mummy story.

II.

During the Victorian Age, while emotional familiarity was restricted and regulated by convention and custom, public displays of affection were common between men, and hardly ever excited attention or speculation. Men linked arms (just as Strauss and von Schlegel do) and even snuggled cozily one against another in photographs without risking accusations of homosexual attraction. But the finals decades of the Victorian era would increasingly cast a shadow over the brotherly warmth that many men – straight and gay alike – felt comfortable publicly expressing.

The Cleveland Street Scandal, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the 1871 trial of two cross-dressing socialites called “Fanny” and “Stella,” and the Decadent Movement’s dangerously publics displays of hedonism posed a threat to the open affection that men at that time felt free to express towards one another – a vulnerable warmth that would have been scandalous had it been openly shared with a woman, even a wife. Suddenly motives were being called into question and the nature of male friendships were now being examined under the same suspicion and scrutiny that opposite sex relationships had long suffered.

The private energy propelling the warmth – whether emotional, sexual, or criminal – is suddenly a matter of distrust, suspicion, and anxiety. Are they chums who can comfortably trust one another’s motives and fidelity, or is there something rapacious and violent stalking behind the screen of public affection?

Although the scandals of the 1890s were still several years off at the time “The Silver Hatchet” was published, it retains a cynical uncertainty with the very close, affectionate relationships which these men share. Note the mortal danger into which each killer or potential killer has unintentionally placed his dear friend by virtue of his love for him: their shared affection is the source of their undoing, and a potential snare which could lead them to ruin and prison.

The secret sauce of their downfall is the private love they share in their hearts – a secret which only the curse attached to the hatchet (which calls upon it to be “reddened with a loved one’s blood”) could possibly recognize. Furthermore, the curse ambiguously demands that the holder suffer the same “grief” which Johann Bodeck experienced when his best friend murdered his wife: note, that the result isn’t that the man’s best friend murder their own wife, but that they end up murdering their friend.

The algebraic implication here is that the murdered friend is serving as a stand-in for Bodeck’s slaughtered spouse. If there is a subliminal lesson here, it is that close friendship between men (especially between single men) can be dangerous, even though Doyle (whose stories are rife with masculine camaraderie) makes it clear that they are worth it. 

You can read the original story HERE!

You can find our annotated and illustrated edition of Doyle’s best horror fiction HERE!