The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

"The Adventure of the Devil's Foot"
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Released	1910
Series	His Last Bow
Client(s)	Mortimer Tregennis
Set in	1897
Villain(s)	Mortimer Tregennis, and arguably, Dr. Leon Sterndale

"The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of eight stories in the cycle collected as His Last Bow. Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" ninth in his list of his twelve favorite Holmes stories.

Synopsis

Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves in Cornwall one spring for the former’s health, but the holiday ends with a bizarre event. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, a local gentleman, and Mr. Roundhay, the local vicar, come to Holmes to report that Tregennis’s two brothers have gone insane, and his sister has died. Tregennis had gone to visit them in their village (Tredannick Wollas), played whist with them, and then left. When he came back in the morning, he found them still sitting in their places at the table, the brothers, George and Owen, laughing and singing, and the sister, Brenda, dead. The housekeeper had discovered them in this state, and fainted. The vicar has not been to see them yet. Tregennis says that he remembers one brother looking through the window, and then he himself turned to see some "movement" outside. He declares that the horrific event is the work of the devil. Mortimer Tregennis was once estranged from his siblings by the matter of dividing the proceeds from the sale of the family business, but he insists that all was forgiven, although he still lives apart from them. The doctor who was summoned reckoned that she had been dead for six hours. He also collapsed into a chair for a while after arriving.

Holmes goes to the house in question and, apparently carelessly, kicks over a watering pot, soaking everyone’s feet. The housekeeper tells Holmes that she heard nothing in the night, and that the family had been particularly happy and prosperous lately. Holmes observes the remains of a fire in the fireplace. Tregennis explains that it was a cold, damp night.

The case

Afterwards, Holmes lays the case out to Watson thus:

• Quite obviously, there is no point in attributing the tragedy to the Devil; therefore, what took place can only be the work of a person.
• Whatever happened to those people happened right after Tregennis left, for they had not moved and everything was in the same place;
• Mortimer Tregennis went swiftly back to the vicarage where he lives (a footprint sample was obtained in the watering pot “accident”);
• The only suggestion of an explanation — the "movement" — comes from Mortimer Tregennis;
• Given the weather, anyone appearing at the window and doing something horrifying enough to instantly kill someone would have had to trample the flowerbed, which is still intact, and come right up to the window;
• What on earth could this person have done to cause such horror?

None of this seems to make for an elementary case, but soon, new questions are raised. Dr. Leon Sterndale, the famous hunter and explorer, has chosen to miss his ship out of Plymouth to come back at news of this tragedy, the Tregennises being cousins of his. The vicar wired him with the news. He asks Holmes what his suspicions are, and is displeased when Holmes will not voice them. Holmes follows him discreetly after he leaves.

The morning after Holmes comes back to his room, apparently none the wiser for following Sterndale, the vicar arrives in a panic with the news that Mortimer Tregennis has now died in the same way as his sister. The two men, along with Watson, rush to Mortimer’s room, and find it foul and stuffy, even though the window has been opened. A lamp is burning on the table beside the dead man. Holmes rushes about, examining many things. The upstairs window seems especially interesting. He also scrapes some ashes out of the lamp, and puts them in an envelope. Holmes has already deduced how the victims died or went mad. It explains why people arriving later fainted or felt unwell in each case (a servant at the vicarage has also become sick).

Solution

He tests his hypothesis by buying a lamp like the one in Tregennis’s room. He lights it and puts in some of the "ashes" that he collected from the other lamp. The effect is immediate. It is clear that the smoke from this powder is a potent poison. Watson is able to resist and drags Holmes out of the room just in time.

It also seems clear to Holmes that Mortimer Tregennis was guilty of using the poison on his siblings, but who killed him? Holmes’s investigation has made that quite clear. It is Dr. Sterndale. He left physical evidence at the vicarage clearly implicating him. All that Holmes does not know is why Sterndale did it. Sterndale explains that he loved Brenda for years (but had been unable to marry her because of the current marriage laws which prevented him from divorcing his wife even though she abandoned him years ago) and killed Mortimer for what he had done. It also turns out that he knew about the poison long before Holmes. It is called Radix pedis diaboli (“Devil’s-foot root” in Latin), and he brought it from Africa as a curiosity, never meaning to use it. The toxic contents of the plant root are vapourised by heat and diffuse into the local atmosphere. However, he once explained to Mortimer what it was and what it was capable of, and he apparently stole some to murder his siblings, throwing it on the fire that evening just before he left. Mortimer thought Sterndale would be at sea before news reached Plymouth. Sterndale, of course, recognized the poison’s effects from the vicar’s description of the tragedy, and deduced right away what had happened.

Holmes’s sympathies in this matter lie with Sterndale, and he tells him to go back to his work in Africa.

Other media

"The Devil's Foot" served as the basis for a 1921 short film starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes,^[1] episode of the 1965 television series Sherlock Holmes starring Douglas Wilmer,^[2] and a 1988 episode of The Return of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett.^[3] Also, the 1944 film The Spider Woman is based on several of Doyle's Holmes stories, among them "The Devil's Foot."^[4]

References

1. ^ The Devil's Foot (1921) - IMDb
2. ^ "Sherlock Holmes" The Devil's Foot (TV episode 1965) - IMDb
3. ^ "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" The Devil's Foot (TV episode episode 1988) - IMDb
4. ^ The Spider Woman (1944) - IMDb

Text in Wikisource

Works related to The Adventure of the Devil's Foot at Wikisource

"Sherlock Homes Adventures, "The Adventure of Devil's Foot"" (html). Discovering Arthur Conan Dolye. http://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu/2007/notes10_1.html. Retrieved 2008-03-15.