Conan Doyle’s earliest Dartmoor story was ‘The Winning Shot’, published in ‘Bow Bells’ in 1883 following his failed attempt to establish a medical practice in Plymouth in 1882.
Until the final paragraph’s twist, its narrator is Lottie Underwood, fiancée of Charley, elder son of Colonel Pillar of Roborough. She and her mother, other family and friends are his guests. Lottie portrays her prospective father in law, a Crimean War veteran, as reactionary but warm-hearted. His compliment – ‘Charley’s a lucky dog, egad!’- emerges in ‘a very port-winey whisper’. No Mrs Pillar is mentioned.
The couple go for a walk on a warm August evening. Doyle’s Dartmoor geography is imaginative: one infers that the Dewerstone is their destination. It is almost dark when they reach their favourite pool. By moonlight, they spot a tall figure on the high rock above them. He climbs down to them. A Swede, he is Dr Octavius Gaster, wandering alone on the moor. Gaster rubbishes Charley’s admonition that many unwary and lost perish on Dartmoor. He has survived an open boat crossing from Morocco to the Canaries!
This claim arouses Charley’s interest. When Gaster, whose ‘thin face of ghastly pallor’ is not improved by a half-healed scar at the side of his mouth, asks for the nearest hotel, kind-hearted Charley invites him to stay. As they walk, Gaster recounts the harrowing details of his survival in the small boat. His companion, starving and maddened, had died: having cut off his ears to eat.
Gaster is well-travelled, a polymath and raconteur. He knows Crimea better than the Colonel, who likes him. His stories enthral the company. But after several weeks his talents show disturbing sides. He tells Lottie and Charley that the book – in Arabic – he is reading describes ancient ways to employ willpower: to ‘mould all things’. He demonstrates his own mastery of willpower on a fierce bulldog that, unchained, cowers before him.
Worried that a remark might have offended Gaster, Lottie goes to apologise. His bedroom door is open. Unnoticed, she sees him gloating over a newspaper cutting. He writhes in silent laughter. His face expresses ‘savage exultation’. Not having seen her, he leaves his bedroom by its other door, abandoning the cutting on the table. It describes the death in an English port of a Swedish ship’s captain. A man of ‘violent temperament’, the deceased had quarrelled with the ship’s doctor, calling him a necromancer and devil-worshipper. The doctor had fled on deck. The captain had later been found dead in his cabin, his death attributed to heart disease and ‘excessive passion’.
Lottie is puzzled that Gaster should have cherished this story but dismisses it: as she does her mother’s warning that the Swede loves her. Gaster corners her when alone, seizes her and violently avows his love. Charley intervenes, punches Gaster to the ground and throws him out of the house.
Days before their wedding, there is major local event: a shooting competition between the Roborough Volunteers and a team from the Plymouth garrison. Charley is the Volunteers’ captain. Crowds of locals and Plymothians attend. Lottie is in support.
Charley spots Gaster standing alone, just above the riflemen’s positions. He ridicules Lottie’s pleas to quit the contest.
The competition is tight, resting on the final shot: Charley’s. The Volunteers need a bullseye. Local pride, a silver cup, money – bets have been laid – all rest on him. Charley takes aim but says he cannot shoot. Someone is standing in front of the target.
Lottie sees sweat streaming down Gaster’s face, his eyeballs ‘gorged and prominent’, his gaze concentrated on the midpoint between Charley and the target. She overhears a local farmer’s comment on Gaster: ‘Blessed if he bean’t foamin’ like Farmer Watson’s dog – t’bull pup whot died mad o’ the hydropathics’.
The crowd becomes restive when Charley again rises, asking his sergeant if there isn’t someone between him and the target. ‘Not a soul, sir’, says the sergeant. Charley resumes his position but, rising again, insists that someone in Volunteer uniform is in his line of fire. The regulars accuse Charley of being drunk. They insist: either he shoots, or they will claim victory.
‘But I’ll shoot him!’ cries Charley. ‘Rubbish! Shoot him then!’ responds the impatient crowd. Charley groans, aims – ‘I’m aiming through him!’- and fires. Bullseye! A cheer ‘which echoed across the moor’, but Charley lies dead on the grass.
Lottie swoons, semi-conscious for three weeks. She describes a dim memory of a ‘gaunt bloodless face peering through the half-open window’ saying: ‘I have dealt with thy so beautiful lover, and I have yet to deal with thee’. Her narrative ends with the assertion that, if on a bridge with a tiger at one end and Gaster at the other, she would run towards the tiger.
Lottie’s account disparages her mother: ‘sitting in a corner… purring forth some truism which the dear old soul believes to be entirely original’. The shock final paragraph is, though, a newspaper announcement posted by her. Lottie has disappeared, two weeks after completing her story. A station porter’s deposition – that someone like Lottie boarded a train with ‘a tall, thin gentleman’- is the only clue. Mrs Underwood writes: ‘It is too ridiculous that she might have eloped after her recent grief. Detectives are investigating’.
This early tale never featured in Doyle’s collected works before his death. Was it too jejune? It lacks his later clever plotting. It begins, as it ends, with a newspaper warning of Gaster’s evil. ‘Detectives are investigating’ notwithstanding, there is no Sherlockian mystery. Did Doyle, with his lifelong interest in telepathy, consider Gaster’s powers overwrought?
What of Dartmoor? Sometimes lyrical: ‘…the great wilderness … glowing in the light of the sinking sun, save where some rugged tor stood out… against the scarlet background’ contrasts with Gothic description: – ‘something ghastly in the…appearance of this wanderer … coupled with the weird nature of the scene’ to establish Dartmoor’s potential terrors.
William Fell
Image: Lottie and Charlie spot Dr Gaster