Another Holmes discussion group eve at the North Peoria library, and always some new treat from an old story from one of our regulars. Tonight Dale pointed out the oddest part of phrases regarding how the victim was dressed:
"He was clad only in a pink dressing gown . . ." is a plain enough phrase. The dead guy only had on a pink dressing gown, right? But then you finish the sentence, and find " . . . which covered his night clothes."
Don't night clothes count as clothes? But it doesn't stop there!
"There were carpet slippers on his bare feet." How could his feet be bare if he had slippers on?
And in both cases: Why does Watson seem to want his corpse to be naked so badly? It's almost as if he is giving us hints to the answers to this mystery. The dead man came wearing different clothes and got shot in the face. Then somebody stripped him down, so he was naked at one point, at which point one of the men who stripped him down also got naked. Is there a secret Sidney Paget drawing somewhere where the naked dead man is laying there while the naked live man starts to dress the dead one in his clothes?
Or of the naked live man putting the naked dead man's clothes into the moat before scampering off naked to find more clothes?
Should we even let children read The Valley of Fear with all this shocking implied nudity!?!
And John Douglas went immediately into the hidey-hole of his after the clothes-switch, and Watson never states he was wearing anything but a wedding ring when he comes out, so are we to then surmise that the entire final scene of the mystery has a naked man in the middle of it?
Watson's narration is quick to leave that scene and move on to the flashback part of the novel, possibly so he doesn't have to describe John Douglas finally getting dressed again.
There were a lot of other comments about The Valley of Fear tonight, and the fact that Allan Pinkerton seems to have thought about suing Conan Doyle for turning a private conversation into a novel really fascinates me. But the true surprise was finding out just what the naked truth of this novel was.
It's practically the Poor Things of its day!
Ah! An article worthy for a 'Rambling Wit'! This reminds me - I hadn't sent you a copy of my 'The Valley of Transvestites.' Beware! You're sounding a bit like me!
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of the old saying "I'm naked!...under all these clothes," as well as these three levels of spooky:
ReplyDelete1.) There's a spooky skeleton
2.) There's a spooky skeleton RIGHT BEHIND you.
3.) There's a spooky skeleton INSIDE YOU, RIGHT NOW!!!