The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Doyle was equally prolific on the professional level, publishing a new series of Brigadier Gerard adventures in 1902, joining a spirited debate on European free trade (he was against it) in the pages of the Spectator, and shooting off some suitably chilling gothic horror stories that combined a working knowledge of medieval torture techniques with a taste for the occult. Sherlock Holmes had also been revived (with a plot apparently suggested by Jean Leckie), though for once The Strand had editorial reservations about the new stories, two of which, ‘The Norwood Builder’ and ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, got by with no actual crime for Holmes to solve. Certain critics would later carp churlishly that Jean had assumed a creative role in her partner’s work not wholly dissimilar to that played by Yoko Ono some sixty-five years later.

  In early 1904, Doyle was once again to apparently call ‘time’ on the Holmes franchise. ‘I am tired of [the detective]’, he told the New York Times:

  I want to do some solid work. Sherlock and [Brigadier] Gerard are all right in their way, but after all, one gets very little satisfaction from such stuff afterward. Nor do I think I shall write any more short stories for some time to come.

  Doyle’s most ambitious work of the period was his historical novel Sir Nigel, a prelude to The White Company, which won him mixed reviews but a handsome $25,000 for American serialisation rights. The money would have been welcome, because in May 1906 Conan Doyle’s theatrical agent Addison Bright shot himself after it was discovered that he had systematically embezzled some £27,000, most of it from Doyle and James Barrie.

  When Louisa died that July, Doyle sank into another period of depression. He began waking at 4 in the morning, unable to sleep, his mind turning over one seemingly insoluble problem after another. It was a compulsive form of torture. ‘He afflicted himself for months,’ Barrie observed to a mutual theatre colleague:

  Had he done all he could [for] the poor woman? What would become of the children? He became impatient and irritated because of the slowness with which the next phase of life can unfold. He made himself quite unhappy.

  It’s not beyond the bounds of reason to speculate that Doyle suffered some form of temporary mental impairment during this period. At the very least, it seems fair to say that he would have been unusually receptive to the sort of moral and professional challenge offered by the tragedy of the George Edalji case.

  Much has been written on whether or not Conan Doyle experienced a full-scale spiritual crisis at this time, and came to lose his religious belief as a result. Most of it concludes that he did. As we’ve seen, as a young man he was a devout if not strident Roman Catholic. But like many others in the years around the First World War he came to regard the Orthodox Church as repressive and corrupt, and only a few years later he was tearing into the ‘Papist tyranny’ for its opposition to spiritualism, apparently convinced that he, personally, was being persecuted by ‘agents’ from Rome. At the same time, Doyle always believed – more so as he immersed himself in the occult – in the concept of an afterlife. In July 1913, he wrote to Hubert Stansbury, the author of a book debunking the idea of man’s immortal soul, telling him that he ‘trusted utterly’ in a spirit that survived the decomposition of the body.

  Doyle’s wasn’t so much a lack of belief in God as a lack of belief in organised religion. There were clearly some specific milestones on his path away from the established Church. Doyle’s experience of his Jesuit schoolmasters, and his more inflexibly Catholic relatives; his father’s ordeal; and then Louisa’s long and wrenching decline can only have fuelled what was already a marked aversion to accepting most forms of received moral wisdom. This process was well on its way by 1907; a decade later it would accelerate as a direct result of the appalling toll taken by the war on his extended family, and led to his final embrace of the worlds of psychic phenomena such as slate writing, spirit photography and fairies. Perhaps it’s little wonder traditional Sherlock Holmes fans later wished to say little of Doyle’s activities at this time.

  When Doyle interested himself in the Edalji affair, therefore, it wasn’t necessarily in a way that was larded over with ‘religion’ or false piety. Nor was he primarily rallying round what he saw as a case of egregious racial prejudice. The author’s sympathies could certainly be aroused by, for example, the ‘repugnant’ way in which he found many black people treated during his visits to the United States. Major James Pond, the promoter of Doyle’s American lecture tour in 1894, remembered that his client ‘often talked about these things while sitting on a racially [segregated] train running from one city to the next, holding a cigar in one hand and a constantly replenished tumbler in the other’.

  Over the years, Doyle frequently spoke out on a range of such issues that engaged his finely tuned senses of honour and justice. In October 1909, for example, he published his 50,000-word booklet The Crime of the Congo, railing at conditions in that slave state, and later sat on the London committee of the General Jewish Colonising Organisation as well as several other broadly pro-Zionist groups. But while Doyle was prepared to adopt controversial and often deeply unpopular causes – including a crusade against the execution of his friend Roger Casement following Casement’s wartime attempt to run German guns into Ireland – it wasn’t always from the perspective of seeking to ‘advance universal rights [and] the multicultural ideal’, as one later progressive account of his life puts it.

  A careful examination of Doyle’s major campaigns shows that he had a highly developed social conscience, but not one expressly based on the burning conviction that black people were invariably treated like second-class citizens and suffered an existence wholly separated from their white contemporaries. Reflecting towards the end of his life on the Edalji case, Doyle wrote:

  George … was the son of the Parsee vicar of the parish of Great Wyrley, who had married an English lady. How the vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the vicar, I have no idea. Perhaps some catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated.

  When Captain Anson returned from his holiday to visit the scene of the crime in Great Wyrley, he immediately impressed his authority on the proceedings, allowing reporters and sightseers to inspect the field where the poor horse had been assaulted, pointing out bloodstains on the grass, making statements, inserting himself into photographs, and generally parading around ‘to issue instructions [with] an effortless, natural condescension, looking down his prominent nose at men physically taller than himself’.

  It’s somehow tempting to caricature this society policeman as a sort of Edwardian grandee buffoon, stumbling around the English countryside quaffing port and oppressing the proletariat – like a character out of Brideshead Revisited crossed with Inspector Clouseau. But in fact, Anson proved to be a rather diligent investigator by the standards of the day, whatever one makes of his ultimate conclusions. Applying himself to a microscopic study of George Edalji’s house coat, he soon announced that there were ‘numerous’ horse hairs (twenty-nine, in some accounts) to be found concentrated around the left shoulder, although conceding that these were very short and ‘not readily seen without a close inspection’. Similarly addressing the point about the myopic George Edalji threading his way through muddy fields to surgically molest livestock in the dead of night, Anson hit on the expedient of covering his own eyes with a thin gauze bandage and retracing the same route. His official report to the Home Office of 22 December 1903 remarked that he had found it ‘a curiously easy walk, and especially to anyone who knows the ground’.

  Doyle was unconvinced. Anson had shown none of Holmes’s forensic acuity and passion for detail, either in properly securing the crime scene or later. As a result, the field had quickly become a kind of ‘combined carnival and picnic ground, [where] onlookers came for a pleasant summer day’s outing,’ Doyle complained. The disputed jacket should surely have been handed to a ‘referee – the police doctor, or any other doctor,’ he added, and samples o
f the alleged hair sealed in an envelope for analysis by both prosecution and defence experts. Instead of this elementary precaution, Edalji’s clothes had simply been carried off by the police, who then wrapped them in the same brown paper package as a strip of the dead animal’s hide on their way to the laboratory.

  Although the coat showed ‘two stains in the centre of the right cuff, each about the size of a three-penny bit,’ and the police doctor determined these to be mammalian, Doyle countered that ‘not even the most adept operator who ever lived’ would be able to rip up a beast of that size without being liberally drenched in blood. ‘The idea is beyond argument,’ he announced definitively. Much of the other physical evidence could be equally quickly disposed of, even by the technology available at the time. During their search of the Great Wyrley vicarage, Inspector Campbell and his men had seized a set of straight razors belonging to Reverend Edalji. ‘Some were said to be wet – a not uncommon condition when a man has recently shaved,’ Doyle noted witheringly. ‘Dark spots’ were observed on the back of one of the razors, but even the police were forced to conclude that these were nothing more sinister than rust stains.

  Sherlock Holmes is a master of the specific. Time and again, the detective’s case book shows that under sufficiently intelligent examination, the facts of a crime, far from being meaningless, will inescapably assemble themselves into a revelatory pattern; sheer, accumulated detail gets him there in the end. But Holmes is also quite adept at the broader art of profiling a criminal. More often than not, he’s able to recognise and identify various telltale habits or characteristics of the guilty party before actually bringing him to justice. Like his author, Holmes clings to the notion that life has purpose – the perpetrators of most outrages aren’t normal men and women somehow temporarily driven out of their minds, but inherently corrupt, venal or demented social misfits acting out their twisted moral concept of life.

  Here, then, was Doyle seeking to establish the true identity of the culprit in the Edalji case:

  I have no doubt at all [he] is a lunatic, and his destination should be not a prison, but an asylum. The religious mania … is the index of a family weakness which becomes a diabolically mischievous madness … He will be found, when exposed, to be a man of eccentric life and character, with periodic accessions of actual madness, during which he loses all prudence and control … Such a man is a danger to the community in which he lives, as no one can say what turn his destructive propensities may take. That he still lives in the Midlands [here Doyle, as Holmes, reverts to the detail] is made feasible by the postmarks of two of the [recent] letters. I trust that it will not be long before he is under medical supervision.

  A cliché now, when it’s routine procedure for the FBI and other investigative agencies, this sort of psychological analysis shows Doyle’s originality at the time. Like Holmes, he realised both the necessity of getting into the criminal’s mindset, and the danger of proceeding from there without adequate evidence. In this respect, at least, we can say that there was scarcely any distinction at all between ‘the doll’ and its maker.

  On his way to Birmingham Station after his arrest, George Edalji turned to Inspector Campbell and said, ‘I am not surprised at this. I have been expecting it for some time.’ The police made some play of this remark at Edalji’s trial, preferring to interpret it in the light of a guilty man confessing his crime, rather than of a completely blameless party acknowledging their own preconceived bias. Similarly, Edalji later told officers, ‘I won’t have bail, and when the next horse is killed, it won’t be by me’. The prosecuting counsel also quoted this remark at trial, with the suggestion that ‘the prisoner knew perfectly well what he was about when he said it’ – the inference being that some accomplice of Edalji’s would commit a fresh outrage while his friend was incarcerated, thus clearing him of the crime. Oddly enough, something similar did happen: another horse was found disembowelled, although the prosecution quickly accommodated itself to this development by claiming that George Edalji was the mastermind of a gang of maniacal local animal-rippers.

  Confronted with these same facts, Conan Doyle had a very different perspective on them. ‘Edalji believed that there was a strong conspiracy against him,’ Doyle wrote:

  In the face of the letters he had every reason to believe so. So long as he was in his cell he was safe, so he thought, from this conspiracy. Perhaps another crime would be committed, and in that case, he thought, in the innocence of his heart, that it would clear him … In his wildest dream he could never have imagined that such a crime would be fitted in as a link in the chain against him.

  Doyle was equally unmoved by the fine detail of the police inquiry, which he characterised as conducted ‘not for the purpose of discovering the truth, but for the purpose of accumulating evidence against George Edalji’.

  Among other defects in the Crown case, Doyle pointed to the significant absence of bloodstained razors, or weapons of any sort, at the Great Wyrley vicarage; the hotly disputed matter of the late appearing twenty-nine alleged horse hairs; and the fact that the mud scraped from Edalji’s clothes and boots was of a completely different type of soil than that found at the crime scene.

  There was also the issue of sheer physical practicality. As we’ve seen, the best expert opinion was that the horse had been assaulted at some stage between 2 and 6 a.m. on the morning of 18 August, a time at which Reverend Edalji swore his son had been sleeping in his bed just a few feet away from him. It’s true that the reverend testified that he himself had been asleep until around 4 a.m. So, in theory, George could have risen at some point between 2 and 4 that morning and, succumbing to a sudden atavistic frenzy, dressed and armed himself, unlocked the bedroom door, tiptoed undetected out of the house and into the storm, made his way in the dark through half a dozen fields, crossed over the main London and North Western Railway line, expertly mauled the horse, and then retraced his steps, all without being seen by the policemen stationed around the vicarage, or its immediate grounds, specifically for the purpose of watching him. This is exactly what the prosecution alleged had happened, and Edalji paid the full penalty of the law as a result. But for the critical fact that this was real life, it all resembled the sort of classic ‘locked door’ mystery beloved of Sherlock Holmes.

  On Monday, 24 August, George Edalji arrived for his preliminary hearing at Cannock Police Court, although ‘arrived’ somehow fails to convey a progress that combined elements of a municipal street party with the overall atmosphere of a lynching in the American south. Most of the local mining community was on its summer leave (in those days, taken at home), which only added to the general melee. By 8 that morning, 200–300 people had massed tightly at the courthouse door for a glimpse of the accused, who eventually drew up in a four-wheeled police cab with a clutch of excited small children clinging to the rear.

  Local opinion appeared divided between the curious or obsessed on the one hand, and the unappreciative or vocally hostile on the other. As Edalji alighted, the mob pressed forward and somehow wrenched the cab door from its hinges, although most contemporary reports note the generally ‘high-spirited’ and ‘festive’ nature of the occasion.

  The hearing itself was brief, and largely concerned with the question of bail. Captain Anson had some objection to this, so Edalji was returned to the jail in Stafford. Outside the courtroom, Reverend Edalji told waiting reporters, ‘You may as well live in Turkey’, which might have the resonance today of ‘North Korea’. Both then and now, there was some misconception about the nature of the charges against the accused. Despite several exaggerated newspaper reports, there were just two initial indictments: one accused Edalji of wounding a pony, and the other of writing a single threatening note to the police. The Crown quickly decided to drop the latter, although in the event the whole fifteen-year saga of the anonymous letters, and their authorship, would prove a central part of the trial. It remains debatable whether or not it was legally proper for the prosecution to offer quite as much eviden
ce as it did about an offence which was not at issue.

  At the subsequent hearing of 31 August, Edalji surprised both the court and, apparently, his own family by refusing bail when it was offered to him. Here, to Captain Anson, was the first telltale sign of a prearranged conspiracy to fabricate an alibi. On 21 September, the crime was duly committed: another work horse was found maimed, the property of a local farming family named Green. Nineteen-year-old Harry Green, the farmer’s son, eventually confessed to the offence. He and Edalji were acquainted, although there was no evidence that they were particularly close, or for that matter had colluded together.

  A week later, young Green changed his mind and declared that he was innocent; the confession had been ‘bullied out of [him] by the law’. Perhaps he had tried to kill the family’s horse, he conceded, but only because it had previously been injured and he wanted to put it out of its pain. Curiously enough, the Greens had also received a number of anonymous letters following the assault. Some threatened further attacks, while others offered to identify the members of the ‘Great Wyrley gang’ for a consideration of £20 paid in cash. The correspondence was shown to Inspector Campbell, who thought the writing closely resembled George Edalji’s, though even he admitted to ‘practical concerns’ when asked how Edalji could have dispatched the letters from his jail cell.