The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  To Diana Villar

  Front cover images: Baker Street sihouette. (oversnap/iStock)

  Scottish writer and inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan

  Doyle, (1859–1930) smoking a pipe. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  First published in 2017

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2017

  All rights reserved

  © Christopher Sandford, 2017

  The right of Christopher Sandford to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8456 0

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

  Some judge of authors’ names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.

  Alexander Pope

  Essay on Criticism

  ❖

  Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Greek Interpreter

  ❖

  You know my methods, Watson.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Crooked Man

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  1 The Doll and its Maker

  2 ‘The Darkness of Doyle’s Mind’

  3 Duet with an Occasional Chorus

  4 The Creeping Man

  5 ‘You Never Forget the First Nick of the Razor’

  6 The Lost World

  7 A Case of Identity

  8 ‘As Brutal and Callous a Crime as Has Ever Been Recorded’

  9 Is Conan Doyle Mad?

  10 The Final Problem

  Sources and Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is not a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, nor of Sherlock Holmes. Anyone interested in reading more about either one of them will find some suggestions in the bibliography at the back of the book. Nor would I ever be rash enough to enter the briar-patch of a debate on, say, the prevalence of certain sorts of human tattoo in one part of Victorian Britain as opposed to another one, or on the precise location of Dr Watson’s war wounds, or the order of his marriages, or on any number of other matters best left to that devoted cult of followers going under the banner of ‘Sherlockians’. Nor, in particular, could I comment with any presumption of authority on Doyle’s famously mixed feelings about Holmes, who clearly belonged to that ‘different and humbler plane of literature’ that the author himself sometimes pursued and sometimes mocked, although my old English master and friend Alan Kennington, who at one time actually knew Doyle, always liked to quote Macbeth on these occasions, ‘We but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor’.

  Instead, I’ve tried to show the ways in which Doyle himself consistently applied both the intellect and innate sense of justice (if not always the mercurial powers of observation) of his immortal creation. In at least two cases, that of the young Anglo-Indian solicitor George Edalji, imprisoned for a bizarre series of cattle mutilations near his home in the English Midlands, and of Oscar Slater, a German-born Jew who served eighteen years (and narrowly avoided execution) for having bludgeoned to death an elderly spinster in her Glasgow flat one night in December 1908, Doyle found himself at the centre of events every bit as outlandish as any he devised for Holmes. Although these would be the two great set-piece mysteries of Doyle’s detective career, he brought a similar blend of basic investigative ability and campaigning zeal to several other cases drawn to his attention, on both sides of the Atlantic, over the course of forty years. As we’ll see, they continued even after the author himself modified his materialist beliefs and began to commune with the spirits of the dead following the heavy toll of his family losses in the First World War.

  Although Doyle was always at pains to separate ‘the doll’ and his ‘maker’, as he called Holmes and himself, both characters shared an intriguing mixture of the coldly scientific and rational on one hand, and the morally keen and chivalrous on the other. It’s this seeming contradiction, along with a generous helping of those peculiarly foul crimes that seemed to predominate as Victorian Britain splashed around in a sea of immorality, that help to give Holmes his enduring appeal, and hopefully also apply here in the real-life adventures of his author.

  For archive material, input or advice I should thank, professionally: AbeBooks; Alibris; the American Conservative; Atlantic Monthly; the late Saul Bellow; Birmingham City Council; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Bonham’s; Book Depository; Sophie Bradshaw; the British Library; the British Newspaper Library; Chronicles; Stephen Cooper; the Cricket Society; the Daily Mail; the Dogs of War Theatre; the FBI – Freedom of Information Division; Dominic Farr; the General Register Office; Glasgow City Archives; Hansard; the History Press; Michael Hurley; Jane Jamieson; Roger Johnson; Barbara Levy; the Library of Congress; Sue Lynch; Barbara McLean; the Magic Circle; Magicus; Marcia Markland; Michigan State Department of Health; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; the National Archives; the National Records of Scotland; the 1976 Coalition; Mary Pilan; Premier Tutors; Renton Library; Rebecca Romney; St Martin’s Press; Seaside Library, Oregon; the Seattle Times; the Sherlock Holmes Society; Staffordshire Record Office; Zoe Stansell; Liz Street; Andrew Stuart; Thomas Toughill; Cynthia Tyrrell; University of Montana; University of Puget Sound; Vital Records; the William Salt Library; Windlesham’s Manor; and Qona Wright. I would also like to thank Robin B. James for indexing.

  And personally: Lisa Armstead; Reverend Maynard Atik; Pete Barnes; Jane Blunkell; the late Ryan Boone; Rocco Bowen; the late David Bowie; Robert and Hilary Bruce; Jon Burke; Don Carson; the late Pat Champion; Changelink; Hunter Chatriand; James Clever; Common Ground; Christina Coulter; Tim Cox; the Davenport; Monty Dennison; Micky Dolenz; the Dowdall family; John and Barbara Dungee; Reverend Joanne Enquist; Explorer West; Tom Fleming; Malcolm Galfe; the Gay Hussar; Gethsemane Lutheran Church; James Graham; the late Tom Graveney; Jeff and Rita Griffin; Charley Grimston; Grumbles; Steve and Jo Hackett; Hermino; the late Frank Hinsley; Alex Holmes; the Hotel Vancouver; Hyde Park Executive Apartments; Jo Jacobius; the Jamieson family; Lincoln Kamell; Terry Lambert; Belinda Lawson; Eugene Lemcio; the Lorimer family; Robert Dean Lurie; Les McBride; Heather and Mason McEachran; Charles McIntosh; the Macri family; Lee Mattson; Jim and Rana Meyersahm; Missoula Doubletree; the Morgans; John and Colleen Murray; Kaiyo Nedd; Greg Nowak; Phil Oppenheim; Gary O’Toole; Robin Parish; Owen Paterson; Peter Perchard; Chris Pickrell; the late John Prins; Robert Prins; the Prins family; Scott P. Richert; Ailsa Rushbrooke; St Matthew’s, Renton; Sandy Cove Inn; Susan Sandford; Peter Scaramanga; Fred and Cindy Smith; Reverend and Mrs Harry Smith; the late Thaddeus Stuart; Jack Surendranath; the late Ben Tyvand; Mary Tyvand; Robert Valade; Diana Villar; the late Peter Way; Karin Wieland; Soleil Wieland; West London Chemists; Debbie Wild; the Willis Fleming family; Aaron Wolf; the Woons; and Zoo Town Surfers.

  My deepest thanks, as always, to Karen and Nicholas Sandford.

  C.S.
r />   2017

  1

  THE DOLL AND ITS MAKER

  Who was Sherlock Holmes?

  One of the paradoxes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s indestructible sleuth is that he seems both to embody the past and belong to the present. Although there’s a generous amount of period detail to the Holmes stories, with their soupy miles of cobblestone streets, he’s also a thoroughly modern, even futuristic human calculating machine, who takes full advantage of such emerging disciplines as psychiatry, forensics, toxicology, ballistics, analytical chemistry and anthropometrics – the use of precise body measurements to ‘profile’ criminals – to complement his legendary powers of observation. Although Conan Doyle, like most authors, deplored the habit of identifying ‘real-life’ models for his characters, he also took the opportunity to pay Dr Joseph Bell (1837–1911) the compliment of calling him the ‘true Holmes’.

  The frock-coated Bell was 39 years old when Doyle, an impoverished medical student, first attended one of his lectures at Edinburgh University. Described as a ‘thin, white-haired Scot with the look of a prematurely hatched bird, whose Adam’s apple danced up and down his narrow neck’, the doctor spoke in a piping voice and is said to have walked with a jerky, scuttling gait ‘suggestive of his considerable reserves of nervous energy’. Bell was a keen observer of his patients’ mental and physical characteristics – ‘The Method’, as he called it – which he used as an aid to diagnosis. A lecture in the university’s gaslit amphitheatre might, for example, open with Bell informing his audience that the subject standing beside him in the well of the auditorium had obviously served, at some time, as a non-commissioned officer in a Highland regiment in the West Indies – an inference based on the man’s failure to remove his hat (a Scots military custom) and telltale signs of tropical illness, among other minutiae. Added to his impressive powers of deduction, Bell also liked to bring an element of drama to his lectures, for instance by once swallowing a phial of malodorous liquid in front of his students, the better to determine whether or not it was a deadly poison. (He survived the test.) For much of the last century, Bell has been the individual most popularly associated with the ‘real Holmes’.

  That notwithstanding, there would be several other ingredients in what Conan Doyle called ‘the rather complex chain’ leading to his detective’s creation. Pinning down Doyle’s real-life models should be a straightforward matter of checking the known facts of his life in the years prior to March 1886, when he put pen to paper on the first Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet. We know that he read voraciously, and that he drew heavily on the analytical-detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau. It’s also known that Doyle was concerned with finding a narrative way to show the potential of forensic science for solving crime. And it can be safely said that he brought a moral dimension to the stories, at the end of which, however outlandish their plots, affairs were successfully restored to their rightful, late Victorian order. Many of these strands came together in the person of Joe Bell, who in 1878 picked Doyle out to serve as his outpatient clerk, the beginning of a relationship between the brilliant man of reason and his somewhat stolid accomplice that would foreshadow that between Holmes and Dr Watson. As we’ll see, there are also various other candidates whose individual talents and eccentricities mirrored those of the fictional inhabitants of 221b Baker Street.

  At this point, one begins to see why so many readers are convinced that the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories was really one Dr John Watson, and that Conan Doyle was merely a kind of glorified literary agent behind the scenes. (There are many more strange theories about the series than that.) But writing, to Doyle, was very much an imaginative or moral exercise, and not just a parlour game where the intellectual elite would try to identify the models for his best-known characters. Sherlock Holmes, it seems fair to say, was a composite of several historical, living or invented figures. We’ll touch on some of these in later pages. But, critically, Holmes also reflected the personality of his creator, a man who combined a lifelong passion for scientific inquiry with a finely honed sense of honour and justice and, just as important, an absolute willingness to offend the political or religious orthodoxy of the day.

  This, then, is a tale of two detectives. The first one is the mythological figure of Sherlock Homes, a combination of several pioneering Victorian professionals, and of his author’s imagination. The result is a character who has endured for some 130 years, and whom we still associate today with wearing an Inverness cape, smoking a calabash pipe and uttering the immortal line, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, none of which appear in any of his sixty originally published appearances. Along the way, Holmes has survived everything from his creator’s periodic attempts to kill him, to being hijacked for countless literary sequels and knockoffs – including one, with the title A Samba for Sherlock, in which a nearly blind detective gropes his way around the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, and another, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which outs him as a feminist.

  Part of Holmes’s appeal, surely, lies in Conan Doyle’s skilful creation not just of a memorable leading man, but also a dramatis personae that helps sustain our interest in the series as a whole. The characters ‘ring well’, as the author Saul Bellow (something of a closeted gothic-crime fan) once told me. ‘They may not be realistic, but they feel real and they feel right … If it isn’t what the Victorian underworld was like, it’s what we like to think it was like.’

  As well as the pairing of Holmes and Watson that would become the prototype of a whole raft of comically mismatched yet interdependent double acts, from Jeeves and Wooster to Morse and Lewis, we’re perhaps equally drawn, with a shudder midway between joy and revulsion, to that ‘Napoleon of crime’, Professor Moriarty. Like Holmes’s deerstalker hat and signature cape, the notion of Moriarty far exceeds his physical presence in the published stories, where he appears just twice, but even so he’s insinuated himself into our consciousness as the archetypal evil genius. It’s all part of the process of bringing the series closer to real life than Doyle himself might admit.

  Today there are thriving clubs and societies and, thanks to the internet, enjoyably spirited long-distance discussions that try and establish such matters as which train, exactly, Holmes might have taken to Baskerville Hall, or the correct location of the wound Watson suffered in the Afghan War. It’s in no way intended as a slight to note again that there may be no other characters in English literature, not excluding those of P.G. Wodehouse, who continue to excite such fanatical and, at times, slightly dotty devotion.

  Sherlock Holmes is an austere masterpiece; a universally recognisable character made up of several true-life or imagined ingredients. But he’s also the literary embodiment of his author. Conan Doyle was eminently well qualified to write about the horrors of Victorian urban life, having worked as a young medical assistant in 1870s Sheffield and Birmingham, among other character-forming experiences. Fifty years later, Doyle could still shock audiences with a variety of macabre tales of his youth, such as the time he was led into an ill-lit back parlour where a ‘grotesquely misshapen form, with pitted complexion, hooded eyes and a face gnawed by pox’ lay pathetically awaiting his care. Nor was his subsequent six-month spell as the ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler without its colourful incident, as seen by his 1904 story, ‘Black Peter’.

  While this whole period was grist for Conan Doyle’s later career, it also touched off or accelerated his lifelong dread of drunkenness – the ‘great frailty’ that afflicted his own father Charles, who spent several years as an inmate of the Montrose Lunatic Asylum before his premature death in another institution. In short, the man who invented Sherlock Holmes was on terms of more than passing familiarity with the forces of social and criminal darkness.

  Joseph Bell may have been the basic template for the character, but Holmes also reflected Doyle’s own mixture of scientific reason and almost monomaniacal pursuit of justice in the face of the blundering and often corrupt Establishment. It’s true that in Dec
ember 1912 Doyle rebuked a critic with a poem ending in the lines, ‘So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle/The doll and its maker are never identical’. It’s also true that Joseph Bell himself – not a man to unduly shun any available credit – once wrote a letter to Doyle stating, ‘You are yourself Sherlock Homes and well you know it’.

  The machine-like impersonality of Holmes’s methods mirrors the impenetrability of Holmes the man. Even to scholars and those countless ordinary fans around the world who devote themselves to a close textual study of the series – the so-called Holmesians or Sherlockians – there are still tantalising gaps and unresolved discrepancies. To this day, apparently well-adjusted and intelligent minds eagerly debate the character’s family background (solidly British, although related to the Vernet dynasty of French painters), or matters such as where he went to university, and whether he was truly a confirmed bachelor or, rather, one of those tragic literary figures who have had their hearts broken earlier in life and turn their backs on romantic love as a result.

  Might Holmes have been schizophrenic? Was he a practical joker? Or totally humourless? Did he vote? Enjoy a night out? Could he have suffered the childhood trauma of seeing one or both of his parents killed by street robbers, an event that, as in the case of Batman, served as the motivation for his whole subsequent crime-fighting career? In all likelihood, we’ll never know. Nowhere in the roughly three-quarters of a million words Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes do we ever learn the character’s exact age, his birthplace, or his birthday. In 2015, eighty-eight years after his last official appearance, Holmes seemingly made a comeback in a story that had allegedly lain undisturbed for decades in a Scottish loft. Entitled ‘Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by Deduction, the Brig Bazaar’, the tale in turn became a mystery – a true addition to the canon, or merely a pastiche by a hand that may or may not have been Doyle’s? To review the books, monographs, films, and other, more ad-hoc projects inspired by Holmes today is not to note a revival of interest, but simply to let down a bucket into a bottomless well.