The Creeping Man

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

The best way to describe this story is to talk about a pastiche first. Bear with me for a bit.

In Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Watson declares in his “Introductory” section that “I will speak not here of forgeries by other hands than mine, which include such drivel as ‘The Lion’s Mane,’ ‘The Mazarin Stone,’ ‘The Creeping Man,’ and ‘The Three Gables.’” The fact that other players in the Great Game have latched onto this as a potential explanation of the quality of these stories is telling. “The Mazarin Stone” has already shown its own failings from top to bottom, so it’s hard to discount Meyer’s attempt to simply discount those four stories. (Although, to be fair, “The Sevn-Per-Cent Solution” is probably one of the best Sherlock Holmes pastiches ever written, so it’s hard to discount Meyer regardless. I highly recommend it, as well as his other two works, “The West End Horror” and “The Canary Trainer.”)

I cannot so easily dismiss this story as Meyer does, however. The flaws in “The Creeping Man” aren’t as visible at the start, but the end puts the story firmly in the realm of science-fiction — it reads closer to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or even one of Doyle’s own Professor Challenger stories than a Holmes story. However, this story is perhaps the seed that allowed for more fanciful Holmes pastiches involving the supernatural and the fantastic, and there have certainly been a number of anthologies on that topic in recent years (including the most recent, “Gaslight Arcanum,” which I just finished reviewing for FlamesRising.com — it should be up soon). Like many of Doyle’s later stories, however, that is a strong chance that this one is inspired by real events — in this case, Serge Voronoff, a Russian-French surgeon who grafted ape testicle tissue into humans under the hypothesis that it rejuvenated the patient. As such, I have to take the stance that Doyle may have considered this story to be scientific instead of “romantic,” and that the “science” presented here is as flawed as phrenology, but still considered to be accurate in the minds of the characters. The amount of discussion attempting to reconcile the facts in the story, however, is immense.

Regardless, it is not my role in these essays to rule on the validity of a story — only its quality. As such, it is canonical, and from a canonical stance, there are plenty of trivial details to make it worthwhile. For one, it ties itself well to other stories, between the mention of the tin box from “Thor Bridge” and expounding on a point presented in “The Copper Beeches.” Holmes also repeats a quote from “Thor Bridge” (which, despite the insistance of pastiches, actually only happens this directly once): “We can but try.” We learn that this is one of Holmes’ last cases in 1903,¹ and that Watson is not only not living at Baker Street any more, but he also has a practice again. We get our first mention of Holmes’ post-Watson organization which will come up again in upcoming stories: The mysterious “Mercer” mentioned in this story, as well as Shinwell (mentioned in “The Illustrious Client”) and Langdale Pike (in “The Three Gables”). And it contains my favorite telegram from Holmes to Watson:² “Come at once if convenient — if inconvenient come all the same. S. H.”

One of the more interesting canonical bits, though, comes when Watson talks about their relationship in the later part of their friendship, about how he had become an institution. Specifically, Watson’s role not only as an ally when a case is active, but also as a foil, someone to sound ideas out with. At first, this seems like a simple explination of the implicit relationship between Holmes and Watson, but it’s more subtle than that — Holmes naturally has to explain his mindset as a narrative device, and this allows for a bit of character development simultaneously, turning a narrative necessity into an expansion of the dynamic. More fascinating to me, however, is that I read this after being told by a programmer friend at work about “rubber duck debugging,” a method in which a programmer explains his code line-by-line to a small rubber duck sitting at his desk, which helped him to find flaws in his reasoning. This idea of “thinking out loud” isn’t new, but it’s still just as useful today as it was in the early 20th century.

For all of this, the ending completely ruins what could have been a solid Holmes story. Even attempting to frame it as “Victorian science” makes it hard to take this story seriously. Which is a shame, because it could have been so much better if history had judged it less harshly.