Old College, Oxford, 1881: a mummified – sorry, rarefied – world of moustachioed men jogging around quads in white shorts. Men who understand the significance of men who drink “Scotch in the jug, Irish in the bottle”. (Me neither.) Men who dabble in the dark arts of – shiver – “eastern studies”. Basically, men … plus one mummy of the dead rather than the female variety. Auction lot no 249. About 40 centuries old. Bad teeth. May be under the command of Ned Bellingham, the kind of fanatical Egyptology student you definitely don’t want to come across in an Arthur Conan Doyle story. Could this “bag of bones” be responsible for the attempted garrotting and drowning of two students, both of whom happen to have crossed Bellingham? Great Scot, it’s Mark Gatiss’s Christmas ghost story!
Conan Doyle is to Gatiss what Sherlock is to Watson or, indeed, empire was to the Victorians. So there is something fitting about the chap who brought Sherlock back to life resurrecting a Conan Doyle horror story for the trad Christmas Eve slippers-and-scares slot. Once again, Gatiss gets it tonally bang on. His adaptation of Lot No 249, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1892 and considered to be the first mummy revenge story, is creepy, clever, hammy and camp, with as many delectable moments as a box of Lindt chocolates. It makes my festive bones ache for Sherlock the movie. The mummy, in full throttle, is terrifying. And, in the spirit of Inside No 9, which it also evokes, it is as tight as a pair of Victorian breeches, coming in at a very satisfying half hour.
Abercrombie Smith (Kit Harington) is the quintessential Victorian hero: square-jawed, rational, destined for a promising future in medicine (and Game of Thrones). Lot No 249 opens with him “unmanned” by fear, banging on the door of his brilliant pipe-smoking, dressing-gowned friend. (Yes, exactly who you think he is.) He points to a lamplit figure outside the window who, he insists, chased him here. Takes a little brandy. Prepares to tell his friend “the whole black business”.
Seven weeks earlier … Smith is discussing Bellingham with another neighbour, the unworldly foreign student Monkhouse Lee (Colin Ryan) (it’s always the foreigners who are unworldly in Victorian Britain). Lee appears to have been seduced, then discarded by Bellingham, a bright but bad-tempered student immersed in “arcane bits and bobs” among other things. “Drink? Cards? A cad?” Smith enquires. Worse. Eastern studies! When we finally lay eyes on Bellingham (Freddie Fox in suitably louche, floppy-haired form), he appears to be dead. Apart from his heart, which is going “like a pair of castanets”. Smith blames the heathen pipe … or could it be the influence of Bellingham’s newly acquired Egyptian mummy?
It is all long shadows across wood-panelled rooms and robust calls for hip flasks of brandy. The score is suitably melodramatic, and the performances just straight-faced enough to preserve the irony, so it teeters on the brink of pastiche without toppling over. The most enjoyable moment, notably not in Conan Doyle’s story, is when the action loops back to the scene when Lot No 249 opens: Smith visiting his friend for help. At which point things get ur-Sherlockian. Once Smith has stopped shaking like an aspen leaf, he asks his friend: “Are you still set on returning to London?” “I have my eyes on a suite of rooms at Baker Street,” he replies. Gatiss also uses this scene as a chance to whip out one of Conan Doyle’s great lines, also not in Lot No 249, but who gives a deuce: “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” Brilliant.
Conan Doyle penned Lot No 249 when Victorian Britain was in the grip of Egyptomania. A fascination that led to the excavation, export and loot of ancient treasures to museums all over Europe. By the century’s end, a greater awareness of the fate of the Egyptian dynasties was also contributing to the growing Victorian fear of the decline of their own empire. Ancient Egypt, then, represented a source of inspiration as well as a warning from the past.
“You’re just the sort of chap to keep the flags of empire flying,” Bellingham praises Smith, his hand snaking round the back of an Oxford bench. “I can see you putting down a native uprising in Sudan.” Gatiss, always brilliant on the particularities of 19th-century homoeroticism, has also gifted us a Victorian Christmas ghost story that regards itself as an end-of-empire chiller. Conan Doyle chose to express the doubt and fear inherent in Egyptomania through the form of a mummy on the rampage in the centre of the establishment. More than a century later, perhaps the most sinister aspect of Lot No 249 is how powerful its symbolic relevance remains. The ghosts of empire continue to haunt this country, even, perhaps especially, at the most wonderful time of the year.
• A Ghost Story for Christmas Lot No 249 is on BBC Two and iPlayer.
