Despite their insistence on remaining “flat-footed on the ground” of objective materialism, the particularly inexpressible, Gothic ethos of terror was never an alien element to the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson. Early on, the unmanning threat of inarticulable fears haunted the duo in the byzantine conspiracies detailed in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. Later it stalked them in such gaslit thrillers as “The Speckled Band,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Cooper Beeches;” “The Cardboard Box,” “Black Peter,” and “The Sussex Vampire;” “The Veiled Lodger,” “The Lion’s Mane,” and of course The Hound of the Baskervilles. One story, however, dealt more intimately – perhaps more psychologically – with terror than any other, since terror itself – rather than a bullet, snake, or harpoon – was the villain’s weapon of choice.
And what a weapon. When listing his twelve favorite Holmes stories, Doyle ranked this one as ninth, and – despite its relative obscurity – it is not terribly difficult to see why: the murder is horrific, the mood grim, the tone Gothic, and the mystery truly baffling. It remains one of the great locked room murders in the annals of Edwardian detective fiction. Holmes had seen terror employed as a modus of murder in previous cases – it was used to incite Sir Charles Baskerville’s fatal heart attack for instance – but never in such a sadistic manner: the idea is not to hasten a seriously diseased heart into its inevitable collapse with the application of a sudden shock, but to callously pursue three healthy, young people so beyond the protections of sanity that they are literally frightened to death by the imagined worlds in their own minds. But what kind of person would kill in such a way and, more to the point, how could he do it?
SUMMARY
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, exhausted from their numerous cases in London, travel to the Cornish countryside for a much-needed rest. Holmes' health is particularly fragile, and Watson insists on a period of relaxation. They take up residence near the village of Tredannick Wartha, where Holmes occupies himself with studying the local people and landscape. However, their peaceful retreat is interrupted when a local man, Reverend Roundhay, visits them with a disturbing case involving the mysterious deaths and madness of a prominent Cornish family, the Tregennises.
Roundhay explains that Mortimer Tregennis, a local gentleman, visited his three siblings—George, Owen, and Brenda—the previous night. They were in good spirits, playing cards as usual. However, when the household servant arrived in the morning, she found a horrifying scene. Brenda was dead, her face twisted in terror, while George and Owen sat gibbering in insanity. There was no sign of forced entry or violence, yet the tragedy had unfolded overnight under inexplicable circumstances.
Holmes and Watson accompany Roundhay to the house.
Holmes carefully examines the setting, noting that the room had remained locked from the inside and that the siblings had been seated around a card table. A lamp was on the table, but there was no evidence of poison in their food or drink. The siblings' facial expressions suggested they had witnessed something horrific. Holmes collects some ashes from the lamp, suspecting that something had been burned to produce an effect.
Holmes and Watson visit Mortimer Tregennis at his home. He claims he left his siblings in good spirits the previous night and was shocked to hear of their fate. He suggests that some supernatural force or ancient Cornish curse might be responsible. Holmes remains skeptical, suspecting that Mortimer knows more than he admits. He also learns that a well-known explorer and scientist, Dr. Leon Sterndale, has been staying in the area and had close ties to Brenda Tregennis.
Before Holmes can make further progress, another tragedy occurs. Mortimer Tregennis is found dead in his room, his face contorted in terror just like his sister's. Holmes and Watson rush to the scene and find no signs of a struggle. However, Holmes quickly deduces that Mortimer’s death was caused by the same mysterious force that struck his siblings. He closely examines the room and gathers further clues, reinforcing his theory.
Determined to uncover the cause of these deaths, Holmes sets up a dangerous experiment with Watson's reluctant assistance. He reconstructs the conditions of the crime scene, burning some of the ash-like substance he collected. Almost immediately, they experience its horrific effects. Watson feels a terrible sense of suffocation, dizziness, and overwhelming terror materializing in a wave of primal, existential dread.
He catches a glimpse of Holmes’ face, rigid and pale with terror, and finds the strength to push through his own hallucination, grab his friend and drag them both to safety before they are overcome.
'Upon my word, Watson!' said Holmes at last, with an unsteady voice, 'I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for oneself, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.'
'You know,' I answered, with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes's heart before, 'that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.'
They deduce that the substance is a rare and deadly plant-based toxin.
Holmes sets a trap for Dr. Leon Sterndale, who tries to leave the country abruptly. Confronting him, Holmes accuses him of murdering Mortimer Tregennis. Initially reluctant, Sterndale finally confesses. He had been deeply in love with Brenda Tregennis and was devastated by her death. Upon investigating, he discovered that Mortimer had deliberately poisoned his siblings by burning a toxic African root known as the "Devil’s Foot" powder, intending to inherit the family wealth. Learning this, Sterndale took revenge by subjecting Mortimer to the same horrific fate.
Sterndale explains that during his travels in Africa, he encountered a rare and lethal poison derived from a root known as Radix pedis diaboli, or the "Devil’s Foot" root. When burned, it releases a powerful toxic vapor that causes intense fear, madness, and death. Mortimer had secretly acquired some of this poison and used it against his own family for personal gain. Sterndale, upon discovering the truth, avenged Brenda’s death by turning Mortimer’s weapon against him.
Although Sterndale has committed murder, Holmes, moved by his passionate love for Brenda and the justice of his revenge, decides not to turn him over to the authorities. He allows Sterndale to leave, reasoning that no jury would convict him for avenging an innocent woman’s murder. Holmes’ moral compass, in this case, prioritizes poetic justice over the strict letter of the law, showing his deep understanding of human emotions and motivations.
With the case solved, Holmes and Watson prepare to leave Cornwall. Holmes, despite his usual detachment, appears affected by the case, recognizing the power of love, loss, and vengeance. Watson, as always, is left in admiration of his friend’s brilliance and unique sense of justice. Their retreat to the countryside, meant for relaxation, has instead led them into one of their most eerie and unsettling adventures, reinforcing the ever-present allure of mystery in Holmes’ life.
This story is one of the most atmospheric in the Sherlock Holmes canon, blending gothic horror with detective fiction and showcasing Holmes’ unwavering logic in the face of supernatural-seeming events.
ANALYSIS
There is no such vegetable as the “devil’s foot root,” although that hasn’t prevented Holmesian science-buffs from offering a number of possible inspirations. Radix pedis diaboli is physically similar to a mandrake (a root which looks like a human body and is surrounded with superstition); it has toxic properties somewhat similar to the Calabar bean (a primitive form of P.C.P. used as an ordeal poison in some Nigerian tribes); and its name is essentially identical to that of the harmless devil’s claw root (which is, however, also known to cause trippy hallucinations if infested with ergot fungus). But the sorts of mental horrors it represents are all too real, and can be suffered at the hands of far less exotic poisons.
The 1988 Granada TV adaptation of this story (starring the unparalleled Jeremy Brett) graphically depicts Holmes’ brush with this drug as a nightmarish bad trip, juxtaposing it with his narcotic addiction. We are allowed into his hallucinogenic haze – a surreal vision haunted by sinister childhood memories, macabre intrusive thoughts, streams of blood running down his face, emblems of death, the taunting voice of Moriarty, and the traumatic memory of his near-fatal plunge into Reichenbach – upon which he sputters into desperate consciousness, madly flailing about for Watson. Brett made the decision to change his cry of “Watson!” to a more intimate “John!” claiming that:
“It really was the one time that he could call him John. I think in extremis he might have said ‘John.’ It gives another slant to it. I slipped in ‘John’ just to show that, underneath it all, there was just something more than what they say, that Holmes is all mind and no heart.”
Doyle doesn’t go nearly so far in the way of making his Great Detective emotionally vulnerable, but he is certainly more rattled by this experience than any other peril, and Watson notes with barely restrained emotion that he had “never seen so much of Holmes's heart before.”
II.
While the horror of “The Devil’s Root” is purely neurological and psychological in nature, there is something approaching the Lovecraftian about Watson’s description:
“[Behind the smoke] lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul.”
It is a description which leads us to question whether the “vague,” invisible dwellers of this hideous world were the personified phantoms of mental disease, a philosophical metaphor, or – perhaps – whether the good doctor is suggesting that exposure to this mind-peeling drug nearly opened his third eye to an unseen dimension of reality.
In an essay on this story in Re-examining Arthur Conan Doyle, Nils Clausson makes the convincing argument that one of the reasons this story – like so many of Holmes’ adventures – strikes an unsettling tone, one in defiance of the logical tradition of detective stories or even at odds with Holmes own personal brand – is because it is not a rationalist detective story with a logical ethos at all; rather, it is an anti-rationalist detective story, a Gothic subversion of the trope:
“The Gothic view of crime, in contrast to that of the rationalist detective story, is that it is bred in the bone, not the result of modern social conditions or purely personal motives. It is predetermined. Criminals in Gothic tales bear little resemblance to the nephews in whodunits who murder wealthy aunts before they change their wills. The Gothic cuts much deeper. Modern man, the story implies, is only superficially civilized. Thus the Cornwall horror is evidence, from the perspective of the Gothic, that ‘strife’ and violence are always lurking just below the civilized surface; the criminal, from this perspective, is not a rare anomaly, a throwback, as late nineteenth-century criminology hypothesized, but yet another instance of the sudden eruption of man’s primal nature within a modern society that is only superficially civilized.”
In any case, the lunging specter of human frailty stalks throughout the tale, darkening the Cornish landscape with presentiments of horror and misery. The Great Detective represents all that is intellectual, rational, and cool, so it is no stretch of the imagination to say that he faced a far grislier fate – the blowing apart of his mind in an explosion of devolved madness – in this adventure than in any other, including the crashing waters of Reichenbach, which – like the far more innocent-seeming smoke of the devil’s foot root – nearly swallowed him up, body and soul...
Comments