The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories Read Free Page B

Breck Stewart, whose drunken gambling away of his and David Balfour’s assets comes directly from Athos’s similar performance in The Three Musketeers . Gerard himself initially seems more like Porthos than the others, but he acquires something of them all, as in different ways does Allan Breck. Conan Doyle would have been the more conscious of the derivation, anxious as he was to appear French, where Stevenson needed simply to show a Francofying influence on the Jacobite Highlander Allan. But Stevenson no less than Conan Doyle had an Irish godfather alongside their Dumas, for it was the Irish novelist Charles Lever (1806–1872), who inspired Stevenson’s Chevalier Burke ( The Master of Ballantrae ), and who gave Conan Doyle a perspective on the Napoleonic wars with his novels Charles O’Malley (1841) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844). (As a prisoner O’Malley actually sees Waterloo from the French side and Burke is a supporter of Napoleon.)
    So there is a strong Irishness in our first vision of Gerard: the ‘Medal’ can be effectively read in a Munster Irish accent, like those of Conan Doyle’s maternal relatives, or with a Scots accent, like that of its author who read it so successfully to audiences in his North American tour of Autumn 1894 just before its publication. ‘I am not a man who is easily daunted, either … Ah, we were great, both Violette and I … Oh, the shouting and rushing and stamping from behind us! … my faith, I soon saw that there was no time for loitering, so away we went …’ It would be good to hear Sean Connery read the stories with true Irish-Scots resonance. The point is that Conan Doyle evidently came on Gerard’s narrative voice from within, and evolved it into its distinctive essence.
III
    But the Gerard voice seems to have taken form more easily than did Gerard himself. When we look at ‘A Foreign Office Romance’ it becomes evident that its narrator may have been their creator’s first idea for a series character taking the places of Holmes and Watson whereas the Gerard ‘Medal’ was simply devised as a singleton. The vision of the old raconteur in the cafe´ began with ‘A Foreign Office Romance’, but Conan Doyle soon found that a cunning spy embroidering his memories could not carry the tragedy, as well as the comedy, which he demanded for his Napoleonic series. Sherlock Holmes had been formally killed a year before Gerard’s first appearance, each being enshrined in the December Strand −1893 and 1894 respectively. Holmes had been born in A Study in Scarlet (written 1886, published 1887) with no noticeable intention of a series. Gerard came on the scene when Conan Doyle had already established as a genre the short story series of self-standing episodes with two constant protagonists.The decision to build another series around Gerard and Napoleon seems to have arisen from the success of the ‘Medal’ with Conan Doyle’s American audiences. ‘F.O. Romance’ was syndicated in the USA initially in early November 1804, before ‘Medal’ reached the audiences of the British and American editions of the Strand , but the more obvious singleton was the better prospect: Lacour was a Punch puppet with a fine bag of tricks but already Gerard was a character.
    On his return from the USA , Conan Doyle settled down to a set of six new stories for the Strand . The ‘Medal’ had proved a little masterpiece by inverting the Holmes formula (this time the audience realises the solution while the protagonist is taken utterly by surprise), but the first of the new series plunged Gerard into the unknown. Granted that ACD drew one moment from ‘F.O. Romance’−the duel in the carriage−only to make it much nastier than its improbably benevolent precursor, the rest of the story (as was stressed by the greatest of all literary critics of Conan Doyle, the late Professor W.W. Robson of Edinburgh) is a shimmering kaleidoscope of the unexpected with constant shocks, twists and turns of