So there is a strong Irishness in our first vision of Gerard: the ‘Medal’ can be effectively read in a Munster Irish accent, like those of Conan Doyle’s maternal relatives, or with a Scots accent, like that of its author who read it so successfully to audiences in his North American tour of Autumn 1894 just before its publication. ‘I am not a man who is easily daunted, either … Ah, we were great, both Violette and I … Oh, the shouting and rushing and stamping from behind us! … my faith, I soon saw that there was no time for loitering, so away we went …’ It would be good to hear Sean Connery read the stories with true Irish-Scots resonance. The point is that Conan Doyle evidently came on Gerard’s narrative voice from within, and evolved it into its distinctive essence.
III
But the Gerard voice seems to have taken form more easily than did Gerard himself. When we look at ‘A Foreign Office Romance’ it becomes evident that its narrator may have been their creator’s first idea for a series character taking the places of Holmes and Watson whereas the Gerard ‘Medal’ was simply devised as a singleton. The vision of the old raconteur in the cafe´ began with ‘A Foreign Office Romance’, but Conan Doyle soon found that a cunning spy embroidering his memories could not carry the tragedy, as well as the comedy, which he demanded for his Napoleonic series. Sherlock Holmes had been formally killed a year before Gerard’s first appearance, each being enshrined in the December Strand−1893 and 1894 respectively. Holmes had been born in A Study in Scarlet (written 1886, published 1887) with no noticeable intention of a series. Gerard came on the scene when Conan Doyle had already established as a genre the short story series of self-standing episodes with two constant protagonists. The decision to build another series around Gerard and Napoleon seems to have arisen from the success of the ‘Medal’ with Conan Doyle’s American audiences. ‘F.O. Romance’ was syndicated in the USA initially in early November 1804, before ‘Medal’ reached the audiences of the British and American editions of the Strand, but the more obvious singleton was the better prospect: Lacour was a Punch puppet with a fine bag of tricks but already Gerard was a character.
On his return from the USA, Conan Doyle settled down to a set of six new stories for the Strand. The ‘Medal’ had proved a little masterpiece by inverting the Holmes formula (this time the audience realises the solution while the protagonist is taken utterly by surprise), but the first of the new series plunged Gerard into the unknown. Granted that ACD drew one moment from ‘F.O. Romance’−the duel in the carriage−only to make it much nastier than its improbably benevolent precursor, the rest of the story (as was stressed by the greatest of all literary critics of Conan Doyle, the late Professor W.W. Robson of Edinburgh) is a shimmering kaleidoscope of the unexpected with constant shocks, twists and turns of the plot, the emotions, the atmosphere culminating in a conclusion so neat as to be unsurpassable. (And Wellington, who utters it, thereby receives the best line Conan Doyle ever handed a real historical person brought into his fiction.)
Some of the details in the Gerard stories have their source in Conan Doyle’s own background. His use of clerics is clearly grounded on memories of the Jesuits at Stonyhurst boarding school whose benevolent exterior might dramatically be altered for disciplinary purposes. And ACD’s brigand bands obviously owe something to stories he heard while staying with his landlord relations in Ballygally, Co. Waterford. The Irish Land War was at its height, and there were many stories of hideous retribution, hidden identities, oath-bound conspirators, and unknown leaders named ‘Captain Moonlight’. It is a theme which invades his novels of medieval history as well, and it accounts for his aptitude in deploying forces outside the formalities of historical conflict. Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle also mixed literary influences with his own witness, and his guerillas and conspirators owe another debt to sources as divergent as Scott’s Anne of Geierstein and Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ whose lines
Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng
Of Felonye, and al the compassyng; …
The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;
The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibledde …
harmonise with many themes in these stories, notably with the bandit chief called El Cuchillo (‘The Knife’) and another called ‘The Smiler’.
Yet the path ahead was anything but effortless, however elegant the prose and rich its wellsprings. The Holmes stories proved foremost of their kind in sheer scientific professional construction, partly because Conan Doyle was following the formula of Edinburgh medical case-studies with their enunciation, erroneous diagnosis, accurate diagnosis, course of treatment, final resolution with statement from protagonist as well as medical consultant. There was no such blueprint in historical short-story writing.
Probably the best sustained achievement in the field to date had been that of the American Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). But it was not a model Conan Doyle liked. ‘The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect.’ (Through the Magic Door, pp. 119–20.) He could pick up some tricks from Hawthorne, among them the use of terrain he knew and situations preserved through local folklore: ‘How the King held the Brigadier’, the second story of his series, was set in the Dartmoor he knew from his days in 1882 as a Plymouth doctor while the French prisoners in Edinburgh and Penicuik had been a famous tradition retold down the nineteenth century. The next, ‘Ajaccio’, neatly drew on the Irish constitutionalist politicians around Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) and the anger against them from some of the intransigent Fenians from whose secret society certain constitutionalist leaders had made a profitable evolution. One of its finest effects is reworked in ‘Good-bye’, but in a much more profoundly tragic key: the immature Gerard had thought of suicide but the veteran has risen beyond so superficial a gesture. (The last great Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Veiled Lodger’, is a similarly emotive testament against suicide even when hope has gone.) But thenceforward the series became self-sustaining: it is even signalled in the formality with which the next story, ‘Gloom’, opens. Gerard has settled down.
And the occasion marks a new departure in space and time. A set of short stories set in a time when History had been overturned may allow the past to be, as it were, guillotined, by the French Revolution and then beaten into recurring new births and deaths by Napoleon’s armies: and why look for more? ‘Medal’ has no past to give us, even for Gerard, and, as we know, little more future for Napoleon. ‘Brigadier-King’ profits by the Britishness of the Peninusular War, ‘King-Brigadier’ by the more intimate Britishness of Dartmoor. ‘Ajaccio’ opens up the theme of the past, in a direction we do not expect it: we never see Corsica, nor does Gerard, yet however fragmentarily we learn of it, it supplies the past whence Napoleon has escaped, and everyone else’s past is his enemy. Napoleon is above all at war with History. Yet History continues, regardless of dynasties overturned for the beatification of Bonapartes and their artificial aristocracies, and here in ‘Gloom’ is a past working out its hatreds invisibly under the cloak of Napoleonic pacification. Suddenly Napoleon’s synthesis of Ancien Régime and Revolution is twitched away like a checkered quilt, and we are left to witness enthroned Savagery confronted by its Nemesis. And in the close of that encounter Gerard becomes the greater Justice, for despite his life being apparently inseparable from Napoleon or his legend Gerard is momentarily reclaimed by the past, and, quite deliberately, reveals himself as a true knight beneath the Napoleonics:
‘You have no cause of quarrel against me’, he panted.
‘I owe you some little attention’, said I, ‘for having shut me up in your store-room. Besides, if all other were wanting, I see cause enough upon that lady’s arm.’
Sir Nigel could take no higher place than Gerard at that point.
But when Gerard is the agent of Napoleon, he finds himself at war with the past, as in History’s discovery of a new meaning in ‘Kingdom’, or its burial of