Review of “Lot No. 249” by Arthur Conan Doyle: Halloween Countdown

Plot:

Jephro Hastie, a student at “Old College” at Oxford, is visiting with his friend, medical student Abercrombie Smith, in the latter’s third-floor turret room. Hastie warns him about the student in the room below his, Edward Bellingham.

“There’s something damnable about him. My gorge always rises around him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices.”

He continues, saying Bellingham is a “demon” at “Eastern languages,” speaking (among others) Coptic, Hebrew, and Arabic. The “demon” Bellingham is also a good friend of William Monkhouse Lee, who lives below him on the ground floor and is a friend of a mutual friend of Hastie.

“You can’t know [Lee] without knowing Bellingham,” Hastie says. Bellingham is engaged to Lee’s younger sister. Hastie describes the match as a “toad and a dove.”

Okay, Jephro, how do you really feel about him?

One night, a scream arises from Bellingham’s room. Medical student Smith runs down to see if he can be of help. He finds Bellingham in a faint. Odd Egyptian artifacts, including a mummified crocodile and a newly acquired human mummy, fill the room. It’s designated by the auctioneer’s mark, Lot 249.

Lee is with Bellingham and explains that he’s obsessed with such things.

Smith revives Bellingham (brandy is apparently useful for such revivals), who seems nervous and embarrassed, locking a yellowed scroll in a drawer.

Over the next few days, Smith hears shuffling and footsteps in Bellingham’s room when he knows his downstairs neighbor has gone out.

Someone or something jumps out of a tree and attacks a student with whom Bellingham has had a long-standing feud. The student doesn’t see the assailant.

Hmmm… could it be…?

Thoughts:

The suspense builds nicely in this story. The oddball downstairs neighbor who studies suspicious things (not medicine or classics, like the normal red-blooded undergrad), the cries, the embarrassed behavior—what is he covering up?—the charm offensive that alternates with naked aggression. Only people who had a beef with Bellingham get attacked or end up in the river.

Although it begins a bit slowly with some interminable scene-setting, this is an enjoyable little tale. Our hero may be a little slow on the uptake, but once he’s clued in, he’s all in a righteous lather. It’s fun to watch.

The reader sees the mummy in its case in Bellingham’s room (ICK), but when it’s out wreaking havoc (…perhaps…), it seems camera-shy. The opening lines set a tone of uncertainty regarding what actually happened and provide the reader with a date of May 1884, some twelve years before the story was published.

The slang places the reader in an informal college setting. When Bellingham tells Smith he’ll soon leave his rooms and let him study, he says, “Three whiffs of baccy, and I am off.”

Come on, guy. That stuff will kill you, ya know.

Another idiom I had to look up. Smith, in an attempt to avoid visits from Bellingham, “sported his oak.” Apparently, it was common for college rooms in those hoary days of yore to have an inner and an outer door. The outer was often oak. If you wanted to be left alone to study, sleep, or avoid your crazy downstairs neighbor, you closed the outside door or “sported the oak.”

One can’t help wondering if Doyle weren’t remembering his own college days, studying for his medical degree—minus the downstairs neighbor reanimating mummies, of course.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the story is written with young men in mind. There are no women in it. Only Lee’s sister Eveline, the “dove,” is mentioned, but she never appears.

The story is one of the first to feature an evil, reanimated mummy, thus spawning a whole army of wrapped critters of the night. Forty years later, Boris Karloff would thump and strangle his way to a lot of startled faces and bloodshed.

While this might be a little slow to start and hold more surprises for the MC than for the reader, I liked it.



Bio: Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a British author and physician. He is best known for creating the detective Sherlock Holmes, whose deductive reasoning solved many otherwise unsolvable cases. Holmes remains one of the most popular detectives and has become the subject of many books, plays, and movies. Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887. Unlike Holmes, Doyle was a believer in the supernatural. He also wrote some fantasy, such as The Lost World.



This story can be read here:


This story can be listened to here: (1:26:26)


Title: “Lot No. 249”
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
First published: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1892
Length: novelette