If you mention the term Gothic to most people, it's likely to conjure visions of teenagers dressed in black, wearing black nail polish and Doc Marten boots. Someone a few years older may think of drugstore paperback racks filled with book covers featuring women in nightgowns running away from sinister mansions. But Gothic originally refers to a type of architecture, an overall aesthetic of the macabre, and a genre of fiction popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gothic isn't the first thing people usually think of when they think of Sherlock Holmes. A world of cold logic and ratiocination hardly seems the place for creepy goings on, or as Holmes himself put it, in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” And no, there isn't an actual vampire in that story. (Sorry about the spoiler but the story was published in 1924.)

And yet, there is a very tangible thread of the Gothic running through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of the consulting detective. What we think of as the Gothic began with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, subtitled, 'A Gothic Story'. Most of the tropes are there. Gloomy isolated castle. Supernatural or seemingly supernatural menaces. Hidden passages. Heroine prone to fainting. It's only lacking what would be one of the Gothic's most enduring traits, a charismatic villain or hero-villain.

It was Ann Radcliffe who cemented the form with her 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. Here the virtuous heroine, Emily St. Aubert, is menaced by the sinister Italian nobleman Montoni and finds herself imprisoned in the remote castle of Udolpho.

Writer Karl Edward Wagner referred to 'Otranto', 'Udolpho', The Monk, and Melmoth the Wanderer as “the standard four” when it came to the Gothics. Ultimately The Mysteries of Udolpho is probably the closest to what most people think of as a classic Gothic plot.

Which brings us back to Sherlock Holmes. Though there are Gothic elements in many of the stories, there are three of the tales that strike me as particularly Gothic in the Radcliffetian mode, “The Speckled Band”, “The Solitary Cyclist”, and “The Copper Beeches”. All three feature women in danger in isolated manor houses. “The Copper Beeches” is probably the one that checks the most boxes, so I'll be focusing on that story.

It begins with the arrival of Miss Violet Hunter, a governess by trade, at Baker Street. She has recently lost her long time position and has been offered a new situation under unusual circumstances. Being an orphan she has no family to consult for advice and so she has decided to ask Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is bemused by this, but always the gentleman, he agrees to listen to her.

Violet explains how she was singled out at an employment agency by a man named Jephro Rucastle, and offered a situation as a governess at a manor house, The Copper Beeches, in Hampshire at a very desirable salary. But there's one odd condition. Rucastle wants Violet to cut her hair very short. He says that it is a little fancy of his wife's and “Ladies' fancies, you know madame, ladies fancies' must be consulted.”

Holmes finds her narrative of interest, but can draw few conclusions without data. He does tell Violet, “I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for.”

In the end, Violet decides she needs the money and must accept the job and cut her hair. Holmes assures her that if she needs his help, a telegram will bring him running.

The story turns truly Gothic once Violet reaches the Cooper Beeches. It is an old house, blocky, and somewhat weather beaten. The name comes from a small copse of beech trees on the property. One wing of the house is disused and locked off, a common trope of Gothic novels.

Rucastle shows Violet his mastiff, Carlo, a huge vicious dog, who can only be controlled by the servant, Toller, and warns her not to set foot out of the house at night. The dog is allowed loose on the grounds to discourage intruders. Violet gets a better look at Carlo later and describes him as being “as large as a calf.” This struck me as being similar to the way “Old Shuck”, the Barghest or hellhound of British legend is often described.

Violet meets the family and finds them unpleasant. Mrs. Rucastle is a subdued, colorless creature, much younger than her husband, and the son is a serial killer in training, a moody child whose chief pleasure is found in the torment of insects and small animals. Despite the family's weirdness, Violet meets “no actual ill-treatment” from her employers. At least, initially.

A few days after she arrives, Violet is asked to wear an “electric blue” dress and join the Rucastles in the Drawing Room. Rucastle has her sit in a chair with her back to one of the windows. Then to entertain her, he tells a series of hilariously funny stories. Here he seems very much the amiable fat man. The performance is repeated a couple of days later. Violet is mystified, but not overly concerned.

Things begin to turn more sinister when Violet, exploring the furniture in her room, finds a coil of hair in the bottom drawer. She had kept her own hair after cutting it, and removing it from her trunk, she compared the two and found them identical in color and texture. Again, Violet wonders what's going on, but still doesn't see any real danger.

That all changes when she finds an opportunity to sneak into the unused wing of the house. In a scene that would do the Bronte sisters proud, Violet finds the wing still, eerie, and cheerless, full of dusty, empty rooms. One room however, is locked and barred over. There is light under the door, apparently from a skylight, and Violet sees a shadow pass the door inside the room.

Overcome by dread, she takes off, only to run into Rucastle as she leaves the forbidden wing. At first, he is his usual jovial self, telling her that he uses the locked room for his photography hobby, but then, “And if you ever put your foot over that threshold again’—here in an instant the smile hardened into a grin of rage, and he glared down at me with the face of a demon—‘I’ll throw you to the mastiff.”

An employer threatening to feed you to his dog seems like grounds for a quick resignation, but maybe that's just me. Violet doesn't quit, but she does request time off the following morning, and contacts Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes and Watson meet Violet at a nearby inn and she gives them all the details. Holmes immediately surmises, as the readers probably have as well, that Rucastle is keeping someone prisoner in the disused wing, and Violet was hired for her resemblance to that person for the purpose of fooling someone, presumably a suitor. This has echoes of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte as well as the unfortunate love interest Valencourt, of The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Holmes hurries to the rescue of course, and all is revealed, but I'll let you read the story for yourself. It's well worth your time, as is most of Doyle's writing. Also seek out the other two stories I mentioned earlier and certainly the novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is fairly dripping with Gothic goodness. Though it has a hero in distress, rather than a heroine, there's a precedent for that. In the original Gothic novels there were male protagonists as well as female.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a well read man, and thus there are many literary references in almost all the Sherlock Holmes stories, both Gothic and otherwise. Sometime dismissed as a mere “popular” writer, Doyle was an accomplished wordsmith, and a man who injected quite a bit of sly humor and social commentary into his “detective stories”.

And he told a good Gothic yarn too.