Arthur Machen and the Sherlock Holmes stories

Arthur Machen suspected that he was not invited to contribute to the flagship journal of the Eighteen Nineties, The Yellow Book, by its editor Henry Harland, after he had praised Conan Doyle’s The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) while sitting next to Harland at a dinner.

This, apparently, was infra dig. He knew other Nineties figures quite well: he dined several times with Oscar Wilde, who praised The Great God Pan as ‘un grand success’, was a friend of Max Beerbohm and of the poet Theodore Wratislaw, was for a time a neighbour and friend of M.P. Shiel, and knew W.B. Yeats both through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and at literary soirees. But these contacts were evidently not enough to overcome his literary faux pas.

Machen’s admiration for the Holmes stories was returned by Conan Doyle, after a fashion, for the Welsh writer’s tales of the macabre. Jerome K. Jerome recalled that he lent Conan Doyle a Machen volume, and the creator of Holmes said: ‘Your pal Machen may be a genius all right, but I don’t take him to bed with me again’. Machen was, however, later to be rather scornful of Conan Doyle’s spiritualism and belief in the Cottingley Fairies. But this was, of course, a metaphysical matter, not a literary one: it did not affect his admiration for the stories.

Machen’s early fiction shows the unmistakeable influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, and not of Henry James, who was the ‘lion’ of The Yellow Book. One of his earliest stories, ‘The Lost Club’, is a Stevenson variation, ‘The Great God Pan’ owes somewhat to the atmosphere of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde, and the framework of The Three Impostors is borrowed from Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, as Machen freely admitted. He was well aware of the influence and records later how he had to work hard to break the Stevensonian manner.

But was there also a Conan Doyle influence? The first Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, appeared in 1887 when Machen was 24, a young man trying to make his way in literary London. The Sign of the Four appeared in 1890, and the short stories in The Strand from 1891. These are around the time that Machen began trying his own hand at contemporary fiction, after the antiquarian setting of The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888). His earliest short stories began to appear in periodicals from 1890 onwards. They were thus being written very much in the context of the success of the Holmes adventures.

Some Holmes influence may be seen in the technique of having two contrasting investigators who play off each other, as in the pairing of Machen’s connoisseurs of the curious, Villers and Clarke in The Great God Pan, Dyson and Phillips in The Three Impostors, and various duos in other stories.  It is true that Machen’s men-about-town are not the same as the Holmes and Watson set-up, where the expert leads the mystified deputy. Machen’s characters are more evenly matched, and they typically represent rival philosophies, Romance versus Realism. But that may be simply Machen’s own variation of the detecting duo formula.

Unlike Conan Doyle, Machen may have made a tactical mistake when he did not stick with the same pair of characters throughout his mystery stories, to win readers’ continuing interest and affection. It is surprising that John Lane, the shrewd publisher of The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895), did not make the point to him. Machen did, however, later begin to settle on the immortal Mr. Dyson as his lead.

Perhaps the stories that may show some particular echoes from the Holmes fiction are two that were written in the Summer of 1895. The first of these, ‘The Shining Pyramid’, pairs Dyson with a different colleague, Vaughan, a friend who lives in the West. He comes to Dyson with a mystery, rather like a client consulting Holmes. As in many of the Holmes stories, the puzzling affair at first seems more incongruous than sinister: a minor sequence of oddities. Dyson uses a Holmes-like phrase about needing more data: and, like the Great Detective, his attention to detail and inspired speculation soon suggest murkier depths.

In the second of the stories, ‘The Red Hand’, the interplay is between two flâneurs, Dyson and Phillips, and is highly enjoyable; the London streets are well-evoked; Machen’s own lodgings in Great Russell Street opposite the gates of the British Museum are given to Dyson; and the latter’s improbability theory is ingenious. But most of all Dyson’s following of clues and reasoning-out of them is a gentle play on the Holmes stories. ‘The Red Hand’ has the authentic Baker Street atmosphere.  

Machen also wrote other stories in this period which he destroyed. He recalled one in which a respectable city clerk turns at night into a werewolf. That doesn’t on the face of it sound like a very Holmes-like plot, but the essential idea, of sinister secrets lurking beneath a conventional veneer, does occur quite often in the great detective’s cases.

The main difference to the Holmes stories is that Machen also introduces an unearthly and folkloric element: in the first story, hints of atavistic survivals linked to legends of the Little People, in the second the idea of a treasure hidden in hills in the West, which still has subterranean guardians. Even this is not all that much of a departure: the Holmes stories have uncanny elements too, but Machen does not explain these away, as Conan Doyle does.

The supernatural is not permitted in the Holmes stories, even where it appears to be present, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). Much as I admire that yarn, I can’t help thinking that a genuine ghostly Black Dog, as in the East Anglian legends, might have made a better story than the actual explanation, which irresistibly reminds me of Edward Lear, slightly adapted: ‘The Dog!—the Dog! The Dog with a luminous Nose!’ Arthur Machen was, I think, wiser to realise that a promise of the supernatural in a tale should not be betrayed by improbable rationalisations. Indeed, he made the mystical the essence of his tales: Mr Dyson is an insouciant advocate of the fantastical and strange. 

After these two stories, Machen made a conscious change in his writing style and to some extent his themes. ‘I shall never give anyone a White Powder again,’ he said, referring to an episode in The Three Impostors. The Stevenson and Conan Doyle influences were never wholly discarded, but they gave way to the struggle to express his vision in his own way. All his energies were now focused on the idea of the Great Romance, first with The Hill of Dreams, then with the unfinished work of which ‘The White People’ and some of the Ornaments in Jade were fragments, and later with The Secret Glory.

(Mark Valentine)