The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Such theories still did not fully explain the new round of letters that arrived following Conan Doyle’s first visit to Great Wyrley. Variously signed by ‘Molton’, ‘The Nark’ and ‘Lew Is’, they were more cryptic than actively deranged. Several contained intimate details of Captain Anson’s prior investigations of the Edalji family. Some included specific quotations and private remarks of the captain’s that suggested the author had at some time personally interviewed him. Anson seems to have rapidly concluded that Doyle himself had written at least one of the notes, perhaps as a way to intimidate him.

  Curiously, Doyle soon received letters of his own, largely a combination of threats and bizarre religious occultism. Could Britain’s most distinguished living author and the second son of the Earl of Lichfield really have been exchanging vitriolic mail designed to drive the other party off his head? There’s anecdotal evidence that a pockmarked young man had also confronted Doyle one night in a Great Wyrley pub and warned him off the case in tones of ‘agricultural bluntness’. Doyle had held his ground. The man then added enigmatically, ‘You never forget the first nick of the razor.’

  On 15 January 1907, Conan Doyle went by appointment to visit the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, whom he knew socially. Doyle took the opportunity to demand a public inquiry be convened into the Edalji affair, before mentioning his own belief that the local police had failed dismally to arrest the real culprit in the case, whom he named as Royden Sharp. It was agreed that the existing libel laws discouraged his publishing this accusation. When Doyle emerged from the meeting, he told waiting reporters that everything had gone well, and that his esteemed friend the minister would soon act in the matter. This ability to swiftly navigate the political corridors of power, dealing on equal terms with men of prominence and wealth, was perhaps more redolent of Mycroft Holmes than his brother Sherlock.

  Just ten days later, Doyle announced that Gladstone was to appoint a ‘special committee to confer and deliberate’, although in the event this was to prove more of an in-house exchange between civil servants, who concluded that George Edalji was possibly insane, and had very likely written at least some of the anonymous letters over the course of the previous twenty years.

  Meanwhile, in two other developments, Doyle quickly disassociated himself from the official Edalji Support Committee, largely the creation of Roger Yelverton, accusing it of extremism; and, in an unusual twist, the Police Chronicle greeted the news of an Edalji inquiry with almost audible church bells and cannon fire, publicly welcoming a ‘fresh eye’ to review the evidence and ‘immediately correct any errors of judgement’.

  By the spring of 1907, therefore, two separate and sometimes opposing investigations were underway to conclusively determine the identity of the mad slasher of Great Wyrley. In a classic Sherlock Holmes adventure, the same general storyline would portray the detective as rigidly pursuing a line of strict scientific inquiry, stripped of any accompanying emotion and conjecture, and the official force as plodding stolidly ahead in the face of their own technical shortcomings and personal prejudices. It’s a caricature when applied here, but one that has a grain of truth.

  In fact, Conan Doyle soon found himself fighting on two fronts: there was the mystery of the criminal case to be solved, and then the need to draw together publicly all the different bodies that had contrived to put George Edalji in prison, the police, lawyers, judges, civil servants and politicians, and present them as branches of a single conspiracy. In otherwise conventional middle age, Doyle thus found himself cast as a radical judicial agitator and general anti-Establishment zealot, and his opponents as a corrupt and effete aristocratic elite with no real moral convictions beyond the desire to protect their own privileged status.

  George Lewis, the pro-Edalji barrister, shrewdly assessed the tension between Doyle and the official investigator, Captain Anson:

  There is certainly a most serious schism dividing Sir Arthur and the competent police authority; and a schism quite incurable, because founded in the breasts of both is the absolute and unshakable certainty of the rightness of their cause.

  By then Anson had already served thirty-one years successively as an army officer and as Chief Constable of Staffordshire. Neither instinct nor experience had equipped him as one of life’s docile other ranks. Unburdened by self-doubt even then, Anson had once written in his school yearbook, ‘It is not so much brilliance as effort that secures the prize – determination to accomplish something’. Gaunt and austere, yet with an air of languid amusement, habitually clad in an exquisite, dark suit, his signature raincoat and trilby to hand, he seemed to embody a kind of patrician hauteur that could repel as well as attract. Anyone familiar with Anson’s descendant, Patrick Lichfield, the society photographer, need only think of that same character with a more severe haircut to get some of the flavour. When such a man meets an ambitious middle-class Scot like Conan Doyle, and each is convinced not only that he alone is right but that his opponent is mentally deficient, drama generally ensues.

  No one could ever question the passion and intensity with which Conan Doyle pursued the Edalji case, both as an investigator and a tireless author of articles and petitions on the subject. It consumed him throughout 1907, and at intervals for the rest of his life. On 15 September of that year, he wrote to Captain Anson about a fresh outbreak of horse slashings in the Great Wyrley area, vehemently denying that George Edalji could have been personally involved in the crime as he was ‘resident in a home 150 miles away, in the presence of witnesses’. Three days later, Edalji was a guest of honour at the reception that followed Doyle’s wedding to Jean Leckie in London.

  It remains arguable, however, whether Doyle’s unflagging loyalty, peerless narrative skills and undoubted moral commitment to the cause of Edalji’s innocence were matched by equally acute gifts as a forensic detective. We’ve seen that he perhaps made too much of the eyesight evidence, to the extent that the ensuing public debate about myopia and diopters and other such esoteric data began to overshadow more important arguments for the defence.

  In time, Doyle also descended into the thicket of a long and convoluted newspaper exchange in which he presented himself as an expert in handwriting analysis. Holmes, of course, is able to interpret documents with consummate skill, once concluding in ‘The Norwood Builder’ that a murder victim had previously written his will while riding on a train. By comparing facsimile copies of the Great Wyrley letters, Doyle now deduced that there were two or possibly three authors involved, conceivably brothers, and that one of them was a ‘rude and foul-mouthed’ Walsall boy, by inference Royden Sharp.

  Captain Anson, increasingly relaxing his self-imposed ban on press interviews, soon replied through the pages of the Staffordshire Sentinel to deny that the police had ever been in any way prejudiced against Edalji. ‘Various persons were indicated as being conceivably implicated in the offences, but as time went on any grounds for suspecting them disappeared one by one,’ he declared. On the specific matter of the handwriting, Anson noted that the seated Home Office committee agreed with his own conclusions, ‘so there is nothing new in the decision that Edalji wrote the letters’.

  Conan Doyle was on more solid ground when he attacked the police’s handling of the chain of evidence on the morning of Edalji’s arrest. There were two distinct strands to this campaign. First, Doyle pointed out that there had been what could be charitably called honest mistakes in procedure:

  The outrage had occurred just outside a large colliery, and hundreds of miners going to their work had swarmed along every approach. The soft wet soil was trampled. Yet eight hours after the seizure of [Edalji’s] boots, we have Inspector Campbell endeavouring to trace a similarity in tracks. The particular boot was worn at the heel, a fairly common condition, and some tracks among the multitude were down at the heel, and why should not the one be caused by the other? No cast was taken of the tracks. They were not photographed.

  Fully twenty-nine of the sixty Sherlock Holmes stories include foo
tprint evidence. The detective has even contributed one of his periodic monographs on the subject. In this particular case, we can almost hear Holmes’s rebuke of Inspector Lestrade from 1891’s ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’:

  ‘Oh, tut, tut! I have no time. That left foot of yours with its inward twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and there it vanishes among the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all have been had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo, and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party with the lodge-keeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or eight feet round the body.’ He drew out a lens, and lay down upon his waterproof to have a better view … ‘What have we here? Tip-toes, tip-toes! Square, too, quite unusual boots! They come, they go, they come again …’

  Doyle went considerably further than this when it came to questioning the findings of the police surgeon who examined George Edalji’s topcoat on the evening of his arrest. At eight o’clock that morning, Inspector Campbell had confiscated the coat after telling the family – who disputed his claim – that he could see a single hair on it. Ten hours later, this had become twenty-nine hairs. ‘It would be sad indeed to commit one injustice while trying to correct another,’ Doyle wrote in the Telegraph, ‘but when the inevitable inquiry comes this incident must form a salient point of it.’ Later in the article he added:

  Since writing the above I have been able to get the words of Dr Butter’s evidence. They are quoted, ‘Numerous hairs on the jacket, which were similar in colour, length, and structure to those on the piece of skin [cut] out from the horse.’ In that case I say, confidently – and all reflection must confirm it – that these hairs could not possibly be from the general body of the pony, but must have been transferred, no doubt unconsciously, from that particular piece of skin. With all desire to be charitable, the incident leaves a most unpleasant impression upon the mind.

  In other words, Doyle was accusing the police of, at best, colossal procedural incompetence in wrapping up Edalji’s coat in the same bundle as the dead animal’s hide; or, at worst, of wilfully fabricating evidence by planting horse hairs wholesale up and down the jacket’s sleeves. Captain Anson preferred not to address the hair issue, at least in public, although he denied that there had been any significant flaws to the crime scene investigation as a whole. George Edalji could easily have left the vicarage undetected on the night of 17 August, Anson insisted, for the simple reason that:

  The house had not been particularly watched [on] this date … Inspector Campbell, who gave general directions, and Sergeant Parsons, who actually detailed the men for duty on the vicarage side of the road, both stated positively that no one was watching the vicarage, but the [inquiry] has by an extraordinary blunder, converted Campbell’s words, ‘I gave general directions; no one was watching the vicarage that night’ into ‘I gave general directions to one watching the vicarage’.

  There had been nothing improper about the subsequent seizure of George Edalji’s coat, Anson added, nor had the police ever claimed to have found blood on Edalji’s razor. Everything had been done according to the book. There had been no more anonymous letters from 1903 to 1906, Anson later informed his brother Thomas, ‘because their author was sitting in prison at the time’.

  Reviewing the various proceedings today, one is again struck by the speed with which it all happened. Conan Doyle first immersed himself in the case around Christmas 1906. His magisterial two-barrelled blast in The Daily Telegraph appeared the following 11 and 12 January. The Home Office seated a ‘full and final consultative panel’ (including the Chief Magistrate of London, Sir Albert de Rutzen, who happened to be a cousin of Captain Anson) later in March, and this reported back on 23 April. (The reader may wish to compare this to the more measured pace of certain recent inquiries.)

  The Crown in turn exonerated Edalji of the animal attacks, but not of the twenty-year campaign of anonymous letters. ‘He has, to some extent, brought his troubles upon himself,’ the Home Secretary wrote. As a result of this compromise, Edalji received both a pardon and the return of his previously suspended law licence, but no compensation. At that, the venerable English poet George Meredith wrote to Conan Doyle to tell him, ‘I shall not mention the name which must have become wearisome to your ears, but the creator of the marvellous Amateur Detective has shown what he can do in the life of breath.’ The New York Times was more succinct, ‘Conan Doyle Solves a New Dreyfus Case’, ran its headline. ‘Creator of “Sherlock Holmes” Turns Detective Himself.’

  And still the letters came. One could almost be left to wonder if there had ever been such a thing as a completely innocent communication sent anywhere in the Great Wyrley area. In the spring and early summer of 1907, both George Edalji and Captain Anson were on the receiving end of a varied and lively correspondence, though once again it was hard to identify a single unifying theme beyond the obvious psychosis of the writer. Long, rambling prose essays were followed in turn by lacerating, unsigned poems asserting, in earthy terms, that the sworn representatives of the law were engaged in a whole series of unsavoury activities and sexual misdeeds around the West Midlands.

  There were letters to Royden Sharp, too, including one sent from London on 17 April, telling him, ‘They can’t arrest you yet until Edalji’s cleared. Someone preached on you … Doyle setting watch on you. Your wife has told out of spite.’ Since Sharp was a bachelor, this last detail only added to the mystery. A Home Office official named Stanley Blackwell, who examined the Sharp correspondence, came to the conclusion that Doyle himself, or at least one of his associates, was behind it. Blackwell wrote to his minister to tell him that the letters were presumably a ploy to somehow trick Sharp into saying or doing something incautious and thus incriminating himself.

  If so, the first part of the strategy seems to have worked. Early in May, Sharp appeared in Cannock Police Station late one Saturday night to lodge a complaint. The gist of his remarks was that, since he had received another anonymous letter that morning, it occurred to him that the authorities might now enter into a more active phase of their investigation and seek to identify the author or authors of all the calumnies against him. (The actual choice of words appears to have been more colourful.) The desk sergeant on duty replied only that enquiries were being made, and that there was nothing more he could presently add. Still dissatisfied, Sharp brought his fist down on the counter in between them and challenged the man to a duel. The matter seems to have ended with the arrival of several of the sergeant’s colleagues from a back room, at which point the fight suddenly seemed to go out of Sharp altogether, although as he retreated he is said to have shouted back over his shoulder, ‘I could have split him from end to end!’

  There were several more letters for Doyle, too. One read:

  We are narks of detectives, and know Edalji killed the horse and write [sic] the stuff. Edalji is not the right sort nor is Greatorex who killed horses too. Gladstone has proof of his guilty deeds. I so worship Sherlock Holmes I would lose my life to save his neck.

  Doyle put some stock in the fact that this letter was posted in London, where Sharp, according to the head porter at Cannock station, had been just the day before. When Inspector Campbell subsequently went to interview the porter, however, he retracted his statement. Doyle was informed of this development. Then the porter in turn received an anonymous letter, in which the writer politely suggested that he search his memory once more and tell the police that his original account had been correct.

  Another line to Doyle in May expressed the view that Edalji ‘along with his dad and all black and yellow faced Jews’ best belonged behind bars. There was a good deal more in this same vein. Barely bothering to conceal his inside knowledge of the case, the author of another note to Doyle boasted that the police were now examining the possibility that a sailor or traveller of some sort was behind all the letters, and possibly also the rippings, and that ‘Sharpe’ was the leading candidate.

  ‘It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg th
at you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes,’ Sherlock Holmes remarks to Dr Watson in 1891’s ‘The Red-Headed League’, before falling into a tobacco-fuelled reverie. Holmes’s author was equally as absorbed by the Edalji affair as it unfolded through 1907. The temperature of public debate and interest in the case as a whole was such that the newspapers continued to prominently feature it on their front pages for many months after Edalji himself had quietly returned to his law practice. Doyle was consumed by the belief that the police had botched their original investigation, whether through malice or incompetence, or a ‘noxious compound’ of both, and his relations with Captain Anson in particular soon reached a degree of mutual antipathy rarely seen outside marriage.

  It might not be going too far to speak of an obsession. Writing almost daily, sometimes twice a day, over the summer (with a short break during his honeymoon with Jean Leckie), Doyle bombarded his adversary with a characteristic variety of forensic detail and moral indignation. A long letter of 2 September, barely a fortnight before his wedding, discusses the exact properties of the weapon used in the maiming of August 1903, and how ‘the weight of the [horse’s] bowels helped to break an opening in it’. Several other notes made precise allegations against Royden Sharp and his three brothers. ‘Colour prejudice may have been enough to prompt them to bait the Edalji family in the cruel way they did,’ Doyle wrote at one point. Occasionally the author exercised his gift for satire, once enquiring of Anson if he believed Edalji had somehow seeped through the walls or windows of his locked bedroom on the night of 17 August, before ‘lop[ing] around the countryside in a diabolical frenzy?’ Anson wisely declined to trade literary barbs with one of the world’s most commercially successful authors, but stoutly denied that he had any interest in the matter beyond finding the truth. ‘No doubt several persons have at different times been mixed up with writing forged and anonymous letters in the Wyrley district,’ he wrote to Doyle in October 1907, ‘and the more done to clear it up the better.’4