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| Illustration from The People, 21 December 1890 |
This episode, we return to the Feldkirch plateau in Austria where a small village is terrorised by a serial killer in ‘A Pastoral Horror’, first published in 1890.
You can read the story here.
We previously discussed Feldkirch in Episode 23 on ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’. After completing Stonyhurst, ACD spent the academic year 1875-76 at the Stella Matutina Jesuit college in Feldkirch, in the Austrian Tyrol. It was a happier time and appears to have restored some of ACD’s good will towards the Jesuits, at least by the time of writing his autobiography in 1924. ACD clearly loved the location and borrowed from his letters home when describing Laden in the first paragraph of ‘A Pastoral Horror’.
It is likely that Father Baumgartner, ACD’s German tutor at Stonyhurst, recommended Feldkirch to the young ACD. Baumgartner had been a pupil and teacher at the Stella. ACD used Baumgartner’s name – in disguised form as ‘Baumgarten’ – in several stories.
The story is set in May-June 1866 during the Austro-Prussian War, aka the Seven Weeks’ War. The war was manufactured by Otto von Bismarck to settle the ‘German Question’, i.e. whether Germany should include Austria (Greater Germany) or exclude it and settle around Prussia (Lesser Germany). Austria looked to be the stronger on paper, but Prussia allied with Italy, which forced Austria to fight on two fronts. The war was settled swiftly at the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa – referenced by Hudson at the beginning) on 3 July 1866.
Maul is found murdered which immediately casts suspicions on Cellini, who is arrested and taken into custody. Maul is found to have been struck on the back of the head with a sharp-headed pyramidal instrument which Father Verhagen suggests may have been caused by a mattock, a small pickaxe ‘such as are to be found in every Alpine cottage’.
Father Verhagen is on commanding form at a service held to give thanks for his escape and that of Frau Bischoff. When he raises his hand to give the blessing, Frau Bischoff screams, and it is revealed that Father Verhagen has an injured wrist. The image is so strong that one suspects ACD arrived at it first, then worked the story out in reverse.
Listen to the episode here:
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Synopsis
Following the collapse of a city firm and the loss of his capital, John Hudson is forced to find an affordable place to live while he waits for legal restitution. He fixes upon the Austrian Tyrolean village of Laden where he settles into a contented if somewhat dull existence, enlivened to some extent by the presence of the intellectual village priest Father Verhagen. This placid atmosphere however is shattered by the gruesome murder of one of the villagers. At first, the killing is blamed on an itinerant Italian pedlar with whom the victim had quarrelled, but the police have to release their suspect when a second and more prominent villager is also murdered and a reign of terror begins…
Writing and Publication History
‘A Pastoral Horror’ was first published in 1890 but letters confirm it was written in early 1884. Originally titled ‘The Man with the Mattock’, ACD described it to his mother as “a fine thirty page sensational hair-raiser and vitality absorber.” Conan Doyle hawked it to Cornhill and Belgravia, but neither published it and it languished for six years.
It has long been thought that it first appeared in the newspaper The People on 21 December 1890, but it actually appeared a day earlier in the special Christmas number of the Nottinghamshire Guardian, under ACD’s name and with a clear ‘All Rights Reserved’ disclaimer.
The difference between the time of writing and of publication is significant. Had it been written in 1890, one might have accused ACD of cashing in on the Jack the Ripper murders (1888). Written before, it looks alarmingly prescient. And if we place it in the writing of the story in the timeline of ACD’s crime novels, it was written before A Study in Scarlet and is therefore a milestone on his journey to popularising detective fiction.
The story was never anthologised, but was included in the Gibson and Green Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories in 1982, Darryl Jones’s collection of ACD’s Gothic Tales, and you can read it today on the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia.
Feldkirch
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| Stella Matutina, Feldkirch, c. 1877 |
It is likely that Father Baumgartner, ACD’s German tutor at Stonyhurst, recommended Feldkirch to the young ACD. Baumgartner had been a pupil and teacher at the Stella. ACD used Baumgartner’s name – in disguised form as ‘Baumgarten’ – in several stories.
It was in Feldkirch that ACD wrote for and edited The Feldkirchian Gazette, a school newsletter, that he proudly shared with his uncle Michael Conan. The manuscripts of its first two (and most likely only) issues (Oct and Nov 1875) were sold by the estate in 2004 and purchased by the British Library. Philipp Schöbi has written an article on the Gazette, the Stella and Father Baumgartner that will be published on our website very soon.
The narrator, John Hudson
Another fairly anonymous ACD narrator, but with a few interesting twists. The name itself, while banal, predates ACD’s creation of John Watson. The character is also distinctly misanthropic of the types we have previously seen in ‘The Surgeon of Gaster Fell’ and ‘The Man from Archangel.’ Perhaps there was a touch of the misanthrope in the young ACD.
As for other comparisons with ACD, Hudson is older, at 47 years, and independently wealthy - although on the verge of ruin if Sprynge, Wilkinson and Spragge do not honour their debts. He has spent two years at Guy’s Hospital, and owns a Navy revolver. Physically, he is quite different from ACD: ‘The manners and customs of the red-bearded Englander, his long walks, his check suit, and the reasons which had led him to abandon his fatherland, were all fruitful sources of gossip…’
The Seven Weeks’ War, 1866
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| Victory march in Berlin, June 1866 |
This scene-setting may appear irrelevant but it provides the context for the first murder. An Austrian called Maul has an argument with an Italian pedlar, Cellini. ‘Hot words had been exchanged, and the Italian had eventually left the room, saying that he would not stay any longer to hear his country decried.’ It is likely that the argument was on account of Austria and Italy being on opposing sides.
The first murder
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| Austrian Tyrol c. 1880 with mattock in foreground |
As early crime fiction goes, the first murder has its problems. Maul is said to be found face down with his hands clenched into the earth as if in shock, and yet when the body is turned over his face is placid and undisturbed. Similarly, the inquest is befuddled that Cellini could have obtained a mattock, when it is stated earlier that they can be found in every home. These obvious inconsistency show ACD still learning his craft.
The murder leaves the villagers in shock, not last Father Verhagen who complains of being ‘considerably stirred by recent events. His hand trembles and his face is pale.’
The second murder
The village is horrified by a second murder, days later. Freckler of the post office, one of the panel at the inquest, is found dead by the same means. Cellini is now cleared of the crime. Freckler is found to have had a shocked expression on his face, his hand out in greeting. Meanwhile, footprints reveal that the murdered bounded up the stairs, three at a time.
The second murder has early examples of some of the cliches or tropes of crime and detective fiction. Not only do we have the innocent man cleared by virtue of having been in custody at the time, there is also the suggestion that Freckler knew his killer.
A rather more comical trope is the establishment of time of death by means of a broken cuckoo clock! Fixing time of death this way is commonly associated with the 1920s and 1930s Golden Age of crime writing, and this is an early example. While it may appear a fanciful notion, the trope has real-world origins: in California in 1867, Joseph Humphrey was found murdered and time of death fixed by a broken silver watch in his pocket that showed 11pm. By a curious coincidence, Humphrey was killed by an unknown assailant with a hammer.
The near miss and ‘double event’
Two nights later, one of the villagers, Andreas Murch, narrowly escapes the murderer. The assailant – now said to be a tall, dark figure with a scarf over his face – sweeps the undergrowth where Murch hides but loses his prey and disappears into the night…
The sequence is one of the best written parts of the story and shows ACD’s emerging capabilities as a writer of horror and suspense. It is characteristically ‘filmic’ and would easily translate to the screen.
Hudson seeks out Father Verhagen, only to find he has gone out for the evening. While waiting for him to return, Hudson sees an evil face at the window. He shoots and misses, and pursuing the villain discovers that the man had previously made an attempt on the life of Frau Bischoff, the landlady of the Gruner Mann, who fought him off, leaving him with an injured wrist.
ACD tells the ‘double event’ in reverse order, a technique that builds tension and suggests to Hudson, after the fact, that he was perhaps in more danger than he expected. It also provides another breadcrumb in case.
The finale
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| Father Baumgartner |
Father Verhagen is on commanding form at a service held to give thanks for his escape and that of Frau Bischoff. When he raises his hand to give the blessing, Frau Bischoff screams, and it is revealed that Father Verhagen has an injured wrist. The image is so strong that one suspects ACD arrived at it first, then worked the story out in reverse.
Renaming the story, he alighted on ‘A Pastoral Horror’ which we now understand to be both hiding the killer in plain sight and a terrible pun. It is another example of the ‘least likely suspect’ trope of later crime fiction.
‘A Pastoral Horror’ cannot lay claim to being the first serial killer story. It had notably forerunners in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scudéri: A Tale of the Times of Louis XIV (1819), often cited as the first crime novel, and in the Sweeney Todd story A String of Pearls (1846-7), which appeared in “penny dreadfuls.” But, unlike the others, ‘A Pastoral Horror’ offers a primarily medical explanation of the crimes, with Verhagen having said to be suffering from ‘overwork and brain worry’ which led to mental collapse. This was one of the explanations in the Ripper case, particularly as regards Montague Druitt.
Verhagen’s illness points to another influence on the story: the sad case of Charles Altamont Doyle. It was while in Feldkirch that ACD heard his father had lost his job in Edinburgh, which marked the start of Charles’s very rapid decline. While aware of his father’s condition, ACD seems to have been kept in the dark while at school, at least to some extent. By 1884, Charles had been admitted into a mental health institution.
It has often been suggested that ‘A Pastoral Horror’ is a werewolf story, but it is hard to conclude that from the evidence. There is no evidence of blood lust, nor of physical transformation, and the village is characterised by an absence of light rather than the glare of a full moon.
Verhagen certainly has a second personality, but this is rather more akin to the doubles of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (which first appeared two years after ‘A Pastoral Horror’ was written), and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The idea was definitely in the air in the 1880s and 1890s, and Verhagen is another example of ACD’s evil doubles.
‘A Pastoral Horror’ can be read as ACD processing his estrangement from the Catholic faith and his Catholic family, a pre-occupation in the 1880s. One might read into the dual nature of Father Verhagen ACD’s two different experiences of the church, the liberal intellectual and the fire and brimstone.
Earlier, we mentioned Father Baumgartner who seems to be an influence on Verhagen, at least the positive aspects of his character! Verhagen was, in his youth, a liberal who got into trouble over an early publication and became a noted authority on Western Literature, his mammoth six-volume (of ten planned) history being nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also loved Edgar Allan Poe, an enthusiasm he no doubt shared with his protégé.
Next time on Doings of Doyle…
We head back into military life where a game of cards erupts into ‘A Regimental Scandal’ (1892). Read it
here.
here.
Acknowledgements
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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/
YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.
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