Arthur Conan Doyle's Lot No. 249: A Two-Minute Summary and a Literary Analysis
Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in the evolution of the “malevolent mummy” trope was just as fundamental as Stoker’s contributions to the vampire, Stevenson’s to the werewolf, and Shelley’s to the science fiction monster. While “The Ring of Thoth” succeeded in breaking the mummy out of its quaint roles as a romantic curiosity or a satirical mouthpiece – bringing it into the realm of somber supernaturalism – “Lot No. 249” dragged it over the threshold into abject horror. The tale is almost single-handedly responsible for our perception of mummies as potential terrors – combined with the rumors surrounding the Curse of Tutankhamen, and Bram Stoker’s horror novella, The Jewel of Seven Stars – and was loosely adapted into one of Boris Karloff’s seminal roles: the nefarious immortal wizard (and revitalized mummy) Imhotep in Karl Freund’s splendid 1932 masterpiece, The Mummy. Infused with the romantic plot from “The Ring of Thoth” and the reincarnation device from “Through the Veil, the screenplay was virtually co-written by Doyle, who had died just two years before.
“Lot No. 249” is one of my favorite horror stories: it combines the cozy, sitting room atmosphere of Baker Street with the bucolic, intellectual setting of Oxford University, but is subtly darkened by the shadow of a strange and terrible horror that baffles England’s brightest and best. It is, however, far from a simple tale of terror, and has the same rich subtext – mostly sexual, cultural, and social – of the Poe and Hoffmann’s wildest tales. The story is even more steeped in homoerotic overtones than “The Silver Hatchet,” openly brooding – without excuse or artifice – on the nature of British masculinity and its ideal manifestation. The four main characters represent four elements of manhood: the “robust” athlete, the profound scholar, the effeminate victim, and the craven villain.
The story revolves around these men as they attempt to define and demonstrate their manliness, at times quite brazenly, fearing all the time that they might be – as Abercrombie Smith puts it – “unmanned.” The mummy in question is closeted away in the villain’s room, leading to open speculation about his sex life (they assume it to be a “kept woman”), little imagining the truth: it is a revived zombie employed to stalk, dominate, and strangle (a very intimate means of murder) his male enemies. It remains a brilliant commentary on Victorian manhood, with all manner of fascinating symbolism surrounding closeted men, sexual victimhood, and the anxieties of passing as "manly" in a homosocial environment like all-male Oxford in 1884. For Doyle, who stewed over same-sex friendship, masculine rituals, and the “robust” sporting life, it is a vulnerable – if narrow-minded – thesis on the perils, pursuits, and anxieties of the single British male.
SUMMARY
The story begins at Oxford University where three students live in the three apartments stacked on top of each other in a medieval turret. Abercrombie Smith, an athletic, unimaginative medical student, lives on the top apartment. He is something of a blend between Watson and Holmes, enjoying solitude and pipes as much as a good boat race or boxing match. Below his apartment is the loathsome Edward Bellingham, a flabby, antisocial scholar of Eastern languages and metaphysics who has been travelling in Egypt recently. On the bottom story of the turret is the passive and anxious Monkhouse Lee, to whose sister Bellingham is engaged. The three apartments share a staircase, and while Smith remains engrossed in studies above, he often overhears encounters between his suite mates on the stairs or under his floorboards.
One evening Smith is talking with his friend Hastie, who seems to have a crush on Lee’s sister, and Hastie passionately warns Smith against befriending Bellingham, relating the story of how he once shoved an old woman into the river when she was too slow for his pace. Smith thinks Hastie is jealous of Bellingham’s engagement, but takes his words into consideration.
Later in the evening, he hears a strange hiss from below, followed by his door being flung open by a physically shaken Lee who begs him to attend Bellingham. Smith follows him to the middle apartment and finds Bellingham in a faint. His room is cluttered with all sorts of Egyptological relics – scrolls, urns, pottery, and even a crocodile suspended from the ceiling. In the middle of everything, however, is a table with a sarcophagus, and its occupant – a blackened, skeletal mummy – is laying inside it with one arm draped over the lid. Nearby is an ancient scroll, at Bellingham’s feet. Smith revives Bellingham, who attempts to laugh everything off, but is disturbed by Bellingham’s collection and his apparent dabbling in the occult.
As the weeks pass, Smith keeps hearing strange, mumbled conversations below him, and the turret’s man-servant slyly intimates that he hears walking inside the room while Bellingham is gone. Both assume that it is a woman (a strict violation of school rules) and that Bellingham is cheating on Lee’s sister. Soon after this, another student named Norton is attacked at night and nearly strangled by what he describes as an impossibly lean and strong figure. Norton had recently humiliated Bellingham, and while Smith doesn’t yet suspect that the mummy may be the attacker, he decides that his neighbor must somehow be responsible and begins watching his movements more closely.
A few days later, Lee informs Smith that he has moved out of the turret and is staying at a cottage. He warns him against spending time with Bellingham, whom he has warned against ever seeing his sister again, and encourages him to leave the turret, too. Smith asks him to explain his change in heart (before this, Lee was almost Bellingham’s disciple: a fawning, awe-inspired servant to the grotesque Egyptologist), but Lee claims that he can’t reveal the reason, only that Bellingham revealed something to him which he swore to keep secret. Smith claims that he knows the secret, which excites Lee, but when he claims that Bellingham is hiding a woman in his room, Lee shudders in disappointment and denies this. Later, Smith leaves his room and passes Bellingham’s, the door to which is open. In the dark Smith can see the upright sarcophagus, and thinks it looks empty.
That night Lee is rushed back to campus after being half-drowned in the Thames by an unseen attacker. Hastie and Smith successfully revive him, and Smith assures him that he now understands: in spite of his Holmesian materialism, he is now positive that Bellingham is animating the mummy and employing him as an assassin against his enemies. While it has not yet resulted in a murder, Smith feels duty bound to end its reign of terror. He bursts into Bellingham’s museum-like apartment and charges him with his suspicions. Bellingham tries to control his outrage, but is clearly seething with anger, he denies involvement in the Norton and Lee attacks and Smith leaves in a huff, letting Bellingham know that he is now a marked man.
The next day Smith leaves campus to visit his friend, Dr. Peterson, who lives in the country. As he passes through the moonlit lanes, he is startled by the sound of someone running behind him. Turning around he sees the black and skeletal mummy, eyes glowing like coals, and claw-like hand extended towards him. Smith sprints as fast as he can with the mummy in hot pursuit. He barely makes it to Peterson’s house and shocks the professor with his story. While Peterson isn’t quite convinced, he agrees to sign a paper witnessing Smith’s testimony in the event of his death.
The next morning, Smith bursts into Bellingham’s quarters and flashes a revolver in his face. Handing him a bonesaw, he gives him five minutes to cut up and burn the mummy before Smith plasters the wall with his brains. Clearly outraged but deeply frightened, Bellingham cooperates, destroying the mummy, which fills the room with the smell of resin, and begrudgingly follows it with the ancient scroll (which Smith has deduced contains the spell that awoke the mummy). Warning him that Peterson has his signed testimony, Smith demands that Bellingham depart and never return, which he does, disappearing to the Sudan. Smith, meanwhile, returns to his precious solitude and engrossing studies.
ANALYSIS
Tragically, Doyle appears to have had a word limit to meet, because the story – which had been smooth up to the point where Smith threatens Bellingham – ends on a clunky note. It almost feels as though he misjudged the amount of his writing and suddenly reeled it in. The character of Plumptree serves no real purpose after his final appearance, the final confrontation is rushed and inorganic, and worst of all – for this cozy, character-driven piece – there is no real resolution with the main characters: did Hastie – as would be fitting – marry Lee’s sister? How did Lee recover? What of Long Norton? Under what circumstances did Bellingham leave? What did Plumptree think of the whole matter? What about Styles?
I have often regretted the fact that Doyle wrote such a weak ending to a short story that may have been better served in novella form. But these are merely my complaints, and we must move on and accept the story for what it is. “Lot No. 249” remains – in spite of its faults – a beautiful narrative rich in setting, mood, character, and subtext, and is perhaps the seminal literary treatment of mummy fiction – as foundational to the genre as Dracula or Frankenstein are to theirs. The Egyptological craze of the nineteenth century was still burning hot after its commencement with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and would continue to blaze until World War II. Egypt represented something dearly coveted by the Victorians and the Edwardians. It was a grand society of passionate, elegant people, more ancient than Rome, nobler than Greece, more mystical than Babylon, and after
Doyle wrote his pair of mummy stories, fantasy and horror writers began to plumb its depths for material. Bram Stoker, E. F. Benson, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, H. Rider Haggard, Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Sax Rohmer, and Anne Rice all generated fantastic tales surrounding animated mummies, haunted Egyptian relics, revived curses, and ghostly pyramids. Doyle’s hand, unquestionably, was in some way present in all these works.
At the bottom of his tale, however, is the unavoidable conflict between Smith and Bellingham, and with it come questions which are both uncomfortable and fascinating to a modern audience. There is no question that we should rebuke his portrayal of effeminate men as either domineering villains or submissive cowards, his depiction of British manhood as the ideal, or his suggestion that masculinity is a precious commodity not to be polluted with transcultural cross-pollination, but we must also remember that the time in which he wrote was one of deep concern and uncertainty for the British male. As colonial projects continued to yield embarrassing stories of atrocity, rebellion, and shame, and as domestic scandals such as the Cleveland Street debacle, the Oscar Wilde trial, and the exploits of crossdressers Fanny and Stella, long-held assumptions of the superiority, nature, and definition of British manhood suddenly became elusive.
Today we often applaud the blurring and – as it were – queering of gender norms, but at the time it was an understandable crisis. The Big Brother of British colonialism (as seen in our next story, “The Brown Hand”) had reigned without question for several decades, but by the 1890s it was clear that Anglo-Saxon colonizers had ruined many of the cultures they sought to civilize, had spread disease and misery, and had been agents of abuse and genocide. This was the case in Egypt just as it was in South America, India, and China. H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Sir Roger Casement, and other disenchanted Victorians filled the papers, magazines, and bookstores with tales of colonial negligence, and the myth of the White Man’s Burden began to sour in the minds of the British public – and with it their assumptions about British manhood, for if Father truly knew best, then why were his Indian servants dying of cholera, and why were they being mutilated by his overseers, and why did they want to murder him in his bed?
Doyle’s tale responds to these concerns with a comparatively light-handed description of “noble masculinity”: it need not be domineering or authoritative, but it should be “robust” – well-rounded, physically and mentally stable, and hardy to the core, without pretense, dependence, or intrigue. To him, the most stable form of manhood was that which was self-reliant and forthright (a la Smith), not clingy and helpless (a la Lee) or craven and perfidious (a la Bellingham). This range of masculinity can even be seen in the order in which Doyle organizes their apartments in what we must assume to be an evolutionary ascendance.
Anemic Lee, who is weak, dependent, and uncreative (a virtual stereotype of a masochistic “sub”) is placed at the bottom of the tower. Bellingham, who is intelligent and inspired but jealous, secretive, and physically deficient, is lodged in the middle. Meanwhile, physically and intellectually vigorous Smith – Doyle’s Holmesian ideal of manhood – retains the top spot. This depiction of the well-balanced life comes directly from Poe, who also emphasized the perils of imbalance between the spiritual/psychical and the material/physical self. Lee represents the dangers of being both physically and intellectually effete – you are vulnerable to the predations of evil people who will use either intellect or strength to overpower you. Bellingham (intellectually tough but physically and morally deficient) and his mummy (pure strength devoid of a soul) represent the dangers posed by evil people.
Finally, Smith and Hastie are charged with the responsibility – as well-rounded men – of protecting the Lees of the world from the Bellinghams: while both are physically and intellectually robust, Smith’s strengths are more scholarly and Hastie’s lean towards physique. Together, though – like Holmes and Watson – they form a formidable pair, and – most importantly – they share a moral code (one which Lee has, but is powerless to promote, and which Bellingham rejects and actively attempts to subvert. The most telling part of this model is the way in which Bellingham’s zone quietly bleeds into Lee and Smith’s: he first attempts to convert Lee – who lacks his intelligence but shares his material weakness – but is rejected, causing him to turn up towards Smith, who shares his intellect but also stands to provide the missing ingredient of physical fortitude.
Indeed, the similarities between Bellingham and Smith genuinely unsettle the latter: he recognizes that his own anti-social isolation, self-reliance, and nonconformity – traits shared with his downstairs neighbor – could leave him vulnerable to Bellingham’s temptations. At the end of the story, in spite of his huff and puff, Smith appears shaken by the similarities between himself and the alchemist.
Today Doyle’s thesis seems chauvinistic and vaguely homophobic, and indeed it is. The soulless, sensual mummy can easily be seen as the physical manifestation of homosexuality: a dark and frightening secret hidden in a closet and released at dark to dominate and “unman” its male victims. But to Doyle this was less of a parable about sexual deviancy than a philosophical discourse on what makes an adult a productive member of society: a person who is strong-willed but compassionate, bold but gentle, idealistic but restrained, imaginative but logical, and balanced equally between the physical and mental experiences of life – neither a roughhousing bully nor a socially detached bookworm.
Regardless of gender, class, income, sexual orientation, nationality, or religion, these are the hallmarks of a good citizen of the world, and they needn’t be a “robust,” heterosexual, white, British male to achieve what Doyle has so carefully described here.
You can read the original story HERE!
And you can find our annotated and illustrated collection of Doyle's best horror stories HERE!