That Confounded Mummy

It's hard to overstate the inconvenience of a neighbour who resurrects an ancient mummy to commit serial murders. This is the predicament in which the protagonist of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249" finds himself, another story from H.P. Lovecraft Selects. Longer than most of the other stories in the collection, it's a comfortable read with characters who are a little more amusing and idiosyncratic than anyone might expect who's familiar with Arthur Conan Doyle's work only through Sherlock Holmes. "Lot No. 249" is not the first story about a reanimated mummy but it is apparently the first one about such a mummy killing people.

The protagonist of "Lot No. 249", Ambercrombie Smith, is in some ways like Holmes, a bachelor described as having remarkable intelligence and insight, though described as not quite a genius.

Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius.

Like Conan Doyle, he's a medical man, a man with some rough, edifying field experience under his belt before he went to college to get a degree to make his talents official in the eyes of the rest of the world. He has a Watson of sorts named Hasties and it's a pleasure seeing Conan Doyle indulge in some colloquial college boy lingo in conversations between the two.

"Have some whisky," said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. "Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle."

"No, thanks. I'm in for the sculls. I don't liquor when I'm training. How about you?"

"I'm reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone."

Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.

"By the way, Smith," asked Hastie, presently, "have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?"

"Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more."

"Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don't think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there's much amiss with Monkhouse Lee."

"Meaning the thin one?"

The trouble starts when Smith is compelled to rush downstairs to aid his unconscious neighbour on the storey beneath his own flat. There's a mummy in the room but its ability to walk about on its own isn't revealed yet. Conan Doyle nicely chooses to reveal it slowly, primarily through the deductions of Smith instead of any description of the mummy in action that couldn't conceivably be interpreted as something else by an observer. So a lot of the story compels the reader's imagination to work out surrogate illumination. It works very well.

Grim Stones on a Cold Land

Sherlock Holmes travels to a gloomy prep school to find a missing boy in The Adventure of the Priory School. One of Arthur Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories, collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, it provided the source material for one of my favourite episodes of the great Granada series starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes.

Directed by John Madden, who went on to direct the much cheerier Shakespeare in Love, the episode takes Conan Doyle's ingenious mystery and covers it with heavy gloom appropriate to its locations which include the chilly priory and the surrounding moorland.

With the constant background tension of a missing child whose fate remains unknown, one might expect a frantic pace. Certainly the episode begins, as does the original story, with the school's founder, Dr. Huxtable, appearing in a nervous state at Baker Street, his clothes and beard, Holmes notes, evidence of his great hurry. He's played in the episode by Christopher Benjamin, whom Doctor Who fans would recognise as buffoonish Jago from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Not a face that inspires an atmosphere of gloomy contemplation.

But most of the episode feels much more static than the original story, which is propelled along by Holmes' deductions. These are spread more thinly in a television episode that allows for the realities of travel in 1904 England and the slow process of gathering clues. All this allows the atmosphere of the cold and rocky landscape as well as the squalid inn--renamed Champion Jack from The Fighting Cock for the episode--to sink in and complement the terribly lengthening hours while the child's fate remains a mystery.

A scene is added for the episode of Watson (Edward Hardwicke) laughing at the supper table with school faculty about the boy's family history--his father, a Duke (Alan Howard), resides at nearby Holdernesse Hall. Huxtable is mortified that people would take the opportunity to mock the Duke on a subject over which it's established the nobleman is sensitive. Indeed, it seems a bit out of character for Watson.

Like most of the series, though, the episode takes care to be as faithful an adaptation of the story as possible. It does diverge pretty significantly in its ending mainly, I suspect, for the needs of the more visual medium which finally does require a chase. Conan Doyle's story resolves more quietly but in both cases Holmes is justifiably enraged by the Duke's surprisingly callous attitude about the case. He comes off even worse in the original story, being partly responsible for a murder.

I wished the episode included more of Holmes' deductions from the story but Jeremy Brett is fantastic. His smoking habit probably wasn't helpful next to his terrible health problems but he certainly looks elegant with a cigarette, gazing out the window of that miserable inn, trying to figure it all out.