This episode, we discuss one of Conan Doyle’s little-known post-war stories, ‘The Nightmare Room’ from 1921.
Read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Nightmare_Room
Listen to an audiobook reading by Greg Wagland here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFZwsEE8ua8
Listen to the episode below:
The episode will be uploaded to our YouTube channel soon,
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Synopsis
The air of an ordinary if luxuriant and curiously incomplete
living room hangs heavy with an atmosphere of sinister expectation. Its
occupants, Lucille and Archie Mason, have reached a dangerous impasse in their
society marriage. She is a famous dancer who gave up her art and career for the
sake of love; he, a young and successful man of business. But there is also a
mutual friend, a soldier named Jack Campbell. A source of poison, perhaps? But
who then is the fourth figure watching from the shadows, watching and
controlling…
Writing and publication history
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| W. T. Benda |
To fund this campaign, Conan Doyle turned once again to
Sherlock Holmes. In August 1921, The Crown Diamond, his one-act Sherlock
Holmes play, was first performed at the Coliseum Theatre in London. In October
1921, the short story version, ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’, was first
published in The Strand.
Meanwhile, Conan Doyle found he was able to make more money
from Sherlock Holmes by selling the adaptation rights. At the end of 1920, he sold
the rights to the Stoll Picture Company, who made 47 films starring Eille
Norwood as Holmes. In September 1921, around the time the story was probably
written, Conan Doyle was a guest at the Stoll Convention Dinner at the
Trocadero, London.
‘The Nightmare Room’ was first published by the Strand
in December 1921. Eight months later, it appeared in the USA in the August 1922
issue of Hearst’s International Magazine, with illustrations by Polish
illustrator, Władysław Teodor "W.T." Benda (1873-1948).
The story was first anthologised in Tales of Terror and
Mystery (1922), aka The Black Doctor and Other Tales of Terror and
Mystery (1922), the John Murray collections that brought together Conan
Doyle’s short stories in (vaguely) thematic volumes. It was also included in
the 1930 Crowborough Edition.
Post-War themes
The theme is also reflected in ‘The Bully of Brocas Court’ (1921),
a Regency boxing story, in which the sport is said to be at a crossroads, with
the old British style of boxing about to be supplanted by the technical boxing
of American John Sullivan.
Conan Doyle goes some way to contrast the masculinity of
Jack with the austere Archie. In so doing, he is reflecting a further concern
about the (fighting) state of the nation and the health of the population in
general.
The new woman and the femme fatale
 |
| Illustration from Salome by Aubrey Beardsley |
Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) is a good example of the femme
fatale and may have influenced Miss Penelosa in The Parasite. Originally
published in French, the play was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain’s
Office in London and was not performed in Britain until 1931.
One can see the same archetype in the near-contemporaneous Sherlock
Holmes stories ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’ (1926 - Isadora Klein) and ‘The
Problem of Thor Bridge’ (1922 - Mrs Gibson). In the latter, the character of
Grace Dunbar, who exerts a positive influence over Neil Gibson, is a reverse of
the femme fatale.
Early American cinema cemented the popular image of the seductive
femme fatale with actresses like Theda Bara (known as “The Vamp”) and
Greta Garbo becoming synonymous with the role. Bara portrayed one of history’s
classic femme fatales, Cleopatra, in 1917. In detective fiction, the
femme fatale would become a trope of the hard-boiled school as seen in
the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Mickey
Spillane.
 |
| Theda Bara as Cleopatra |
The trick ending
Conan Doyle’s story rests on the trick ending, a technique deployed
successfully by one of his favourite writers, Guy de Maupassant, and arguably
less successfully here.
Conan Doyle lays several clues to the trick ending
throughout the story. The room is unreal and has an otherworldly quality,
reflecting a film set. The dialogue is stilted and constrainted, like the
captions in silent films. There are also several silent exchanges between the
three characters. Unfortunately, the story being told by the filmmakers is a mundane
melodrama and the characters, as cyphers for the plot, are necessarily
unbelievable and fail to engage.
The moment when the director appears has a shocking, almost supernatural
quality to it that could have been extended throughout the story. Once Conan
Doyle’s provides the reveal, he very quickly brings the story to a conclusion.
Conan Doyle and early cinema
 |
| Eille Norwood and Conan Doyle |
The first Doylean film was Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900),
a comic short by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Between 1908-1911,
a series of Danish films, mostly made by and starring Viggo Larsen as Holmes, were
released by the Nordisk company. The first British Sherlock Holmes film was George
Pearson’s A Study in Scarlet (1914), starring James Brantingham.
It is not clear when Conan Doyle became aware of these Sherlock
Holmes films, but he was certainly aware of the copyright considerations. In
1911, copyright in adaptations was recognised after a court upheld the claim by
the estate of Lew Wallace against the filmmakers of Ben Hur (1907). Conan
Doyle thought cinema would offer good returns for authors, but he felt that the
reliance on plot and action made it ill-suited to the adaptation of more
serious works.
Conan Doyle sold the Sherlock Holmes film rights to the
French company Éclair around 1911 and to Stoll in 1920. This was not without
its problems: the Goldwyn Company, who had inherited the rights to the Gilette
play, attempted to sue Conan Doyle for selling the rights to Stoll, claiming
that in granting permission to Gilette, he had given away the rights to all in
person representations. Goldwyn’s case was thrown out in the New York courts.
Conan Doyle licenced other works including Brigadier
Gerard (1915), Rodney Stone (1920), The Croxley Master (1923)
and The Tragedy of Korosko, filmed as Fires of Fate (1923). In
1922, he used the rough cuts of Willis O’Brien stop-motion animation sequences for
The Lost World (1925) to startle the Society of American Magicians at
their annual dinner.
Conan Doyle appeared on screen in The $5,000,000
Counterfeiting Plot (1914), a drama filmed by American detective William J.
Bryan, in which Bryan starred as himself. He also appeared in two episodes of the
serial Our Mutual Girl (1914), a Pygmalion story which featured cameos
by many famous individuals.
In 1923, Conan Doyle visited Hollywood and met Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
 |
| The Conan Doyles in Hollywood (1923) |
Next time on Doings of Doyle…
We are joined by Roger Luckhurst, editor of the new
Edinburgh Edition of Round the Red Lamp (1924), to delve into medical gothic...
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our
supporters on Patreon and Paypal.
Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan
Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support
the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.
Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
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