Arthur Conan Doyle - The Game Is Afoot!

The Game Is
Afoot!

"I've been checkmated in London.
I can only wish you better
luck in Devonshire."
&mdash Holmes, Ch. 5

Not only did Arthur Conan Doyle return from service in the Boer War with high honors, but he also caught himself a rather nasty virus. Thus he resolved to go on a golfing holiday to Cromer, Norfolk to recover from his illness, and invited a friend he had made during his overseas adventures, a journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson. During that trip, Robinson told a myriad of tall tales from his South Devon to a delighted Doyle and the two made plans to collaborate on a novel. That novel would eventually grow into The Hound of the Baskervilles.

For research purposes, the two planned several excursions into the heart of the moor. Basing themselves at the Duchy Hotel of Princetown, they traveled by foot and by pony to Fox Tor Mire and Grimspound, among other places. However, this excursion was not Doyle’s first encounter with the moor. He had ventured up once or twice during his brief co-practice with an old school friend, Doctor Budd, in Plymouth. The following year he led a small expedition and published a photographic essay for The British Journal of Photography.

Above all else the world that Holmes and Watson venture into represents a fictionalized patchwork of the fact and fiction of the actual Dartmoor. Yet, fans of the Holmes stories take part in great numbers every year in what has come to be known as “the Game.” The point of the exercise is first to imagine Holmes and Watson as though they were real historical figures. Just like groupies following a rock star idol on the road, readers then take to the streets of London and the Home Counties in pursuit of the actual locations that gave rise to the great detective’s greatest triumphs. Some go as far abroad as the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, where Holmes and the arch-fiend Moriarty held their confrontation in The Final Problem.

Whereas the streets of London present a very clear set of locations, Holmes’ adventures in the Southwest do not follow the same strict realism. Silver Blaze, for example, takes Holmes and Watson out to Tavistock, but the locations described do not correspond at all to sites actually within the small Devon township. Doyle goes so far as to suggest that Tavistock lies in the middle of Dartmoor in order to elevate the tale's sense of mystery. Rather, it lies on the far western edge.

Back on Baker Street, however, everything finds its place. Even though the actual address 221B never existed during Doyle’s time, for example, he placed the fictional apartment on Upper Baker Street near Regent’s Park, where the numbering system would eventually expand to include the 200s. The Sherlock Holmes Museum now occupies a space not far from this location, and goes by the fictional address.

A simple explanation for the attention paid to Holmes’ London might offer that his London readership would not accept major lapses in city geography, but the Holmes stories gained as much popularity abroad as in the capital. On the topic, Doyle once conceded in a personal letter that for “short stories it [had] always seemed to [him] that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of details matters little.” This sentiment appears in The Hound of the Baskervilles in many forms. Holmes observes in the third chapter that Baskerville Hall lies fourteen miles from “the great convict prison of Princetown,” yet no part of Dartmoor whatsoever lies that far from Princetown; the whole of the moor only stretches 17 miles east to west.

So where does this leave those among us who hope to follow the daring detective through the steps of his ultimate adventure? As Phillip Weller, the former head of the Holmesian Society, describes in his book on the subject, the best solution must sometimes be to recognize the fictionalized landscape of Doyle’s stories, and explore the many possibilities that would eventually meld together into one world: Grimspound and Fox Tor Mire, the many estates that claim a spot as “the real Baskerville Hall.”

The latter case has candidates spread as far as a couple hundred miles. One had better get started, then.
Ah! Once again, the game is afoot!