The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Royden Sharp, Conan Doyle’s own preferred suspect, was by consensus a thoroughly charmless young man with a propensity for violence. The number and frequency of the pub brawls he was involved in would probably cause comment even today. He knew something of the Edaljis’ domestic arrangements, and had received enough of an education to qualify him as a writer of reasonably coherent vulgar letters. Were he or his brothers collectively also the mad ripper? That is a harder question to answer. The police never believed that they had enough evidence against the Sharps to bring before a jury, and Doyle thought it best not to publish his suspicions for fear of being sued for libel.

  Even so, Captain Anson was sufficiently moved to write to the Home Office for the record in November 1907, acknowledging that Sharp’s brother, Walter, ‘played pranks in the writing line’. A subsequent police visit to the Sharps’ home produced what Anson called ‘dirty postcards’ similar to those used in the Greatorex correspondence of 1903. There were marked coincidences in timing between Royden Sharp’s tours overseas and the sequence in which the poison letters were received. Anson eventually wrote to Doyle to admit that Royden’s handwriting ‘b[ore] similarities’ to some of the hate mail, but that even so ‘this [was] no proof of his involvement’ in the maimings, a presumption of innocence that would seem not to have been applied quite as strenuously to Edalji himself.

  In the looking-glass world of the Edalji case, where nothing was quite as it seemed, all we can now say with certainty is that Conan Doyle, once provoked, was an indefatigable campaigner for justice, and one never afraid to speak his mind. Perhaps he could sometimes seem a little too confident of his position. Writing to The Daily Telegraph he offered to ‘fully and utterly’ convince the Home Office committee of George’s innocence within half an hour, and concluded, ‘He did not write … those letters. Of that I am absolutely certain, and there is no room for doubt whatever.’ But Doyle had a redeeming humour, and was quite capable of deflating his reputation as a detective, as opposed to a fighter for criminal and social justice. ‘I am more Watson than Holmes,’ he once remarked to Reverend Edalji.

  Doyle would continue to worry away at the case until the outbreak of the war that took the life of both his only brother and his oldest son, an ordeal from which he understandably never quite recovered. Doyle and Edalji, between them, are often said to have stung the authorities into finally establishing an English Court of Appeal, although the work to do this had actually begun shortly after the royal pardon and £5,000 compensation awarded to Adolf Beck in July 1904 as a result of his five years of wrongful imprisonment. Perhaps the real credit for this landmark development in British judicial history belongs to Thomas Gurrin, the hapless government handwriting expert who appeared for the prosecution in both cases.

  In November 1934, Enoch Knowles, a 57-year-old day labourer from Darlaston, a mining community about 8 miles south of Great Wyrley, was sentenced at Stafford Assizes to three years’ penal servitude for sending menacing and obscene letters through the post. It was said in court that he had written to ‘many prominent or notorious people’ over the course of some thirty-five years. Knowles had joined the army in 1916, and from then on ‘matters were all quiet’, The Times reported:

  But in 1931 he got implicated in a county court action, and he apparently had this curious desire again, sending letters to a bailiff who had been in the case. Later he wrote to people on matters that had nothing to do with him at all. On one occasion he wrote a very cruel letter to a member of the Royal Family. The police and the Post Office authorities had been for years trying to find out who was responsible.

  At his trial, it emerged that Knowles had been the individual who sent the 1903 anonymous letters to the Staffordshire Police warning them that there was ‘a looney’ afoot, and that he would ‘soon start on little girls’. He was the only person ever to be convicted of the relatively more benign part of the Great Wyrley outrages of 1888–1907. Conan Doyle himself had died before he could see Knowles brought to justice, but George Edalji lived for another nineteen years, continuing to protest his innocence to the end.

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  4 Doyle’s rebuke of Captain Anson is well taken, although within only a few years the same author was convinced that there were those, like Harry Houdini, who in fact possessed some miraculous dematerialising power that allowed them to pass through solid objects and reassemble themselves on the other side.

  6

  THE LOST WORLD

  Conan Doyle’s principal mission in life, at least until he began communicating with the dead, was to ‘engage mind and pen for the noblest human purposes’, which he saw as distinct from the ‘humbler plane’ of his detective fiction. Lovers of the Sherlock Holmes canon can be grateful that he had bills to pay.

  In October 1909 Doyle embraced another controversial cause when he published his booklet The Crime of the Congo, which over time would tragically become something of a perennial crisis. The horrors of Belgian colonial rule in the area had first been brought to public attention in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, and would still exercise the main protagonists in the Cold War more than sixty years later.

  In public, Doyle described the sufferings of the Congolese as ‘the greatest crime which has ever been committed in the history of the world’. Privately, he sometimes remarked that it struck him as being much like one of his periodic attacks of gout, ‘apparently cured, only to flare up again with renewed vigour’. His book on the Congo took him eight days to write, and sold 60,000 copies in Britain alone. Doyle met with government ministers, lobbied the American President and the German Kaiser, and publicly admonished the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster for ‘falling out of line with the rest of Christian Europe over this scandal’.

  His differences with the established Church as a whole increased with time, and aroused furious controversy. Within a decade, Doyle himself would be widely regarded as the spokesman if not the founder of a new religion, one devoted not only to ‘irrefutably proving man’s immortality’, but also to the more secular goal of ‘exposing the idiocy that frequently attends our clergy, judges and other men of affairs’. Doyle’s fellow doctor-turned-author, Henry de Vere Stacpoole, later wrote of him:

  His motto was that of Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords’, and he lived up to it … Conan Doyle was the finest man I have ever met, taking him by and large.

  As Doyle himself remarked, there were those who made prisons for themselves out of their ‘ignorance or prejudice [towards] Spiritualism’s message of hope and comfort’. And there were those whose confinement was of a more material kind. On 18 October 1910 Doyle’s attentions again turned to a sensational true-life crime when he travelled up from his new Sussex home, Windlesham, for the opening of the Old Bailey trial of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen for murdering and dismembering his wife.

  Crippen had been born in Coldwater, Michigan, in 1862 and qualified there as a homeopath before moving to London with his second wife, a 22-year-old New Yorker named Kunigunde Mackamotski. Cora, as she preferred to call herself, had ambitions to become an opera singer, but conspicuously lacked both the talent and the training to carry the plan off. One early review in the north London paper The Clarion referred to Cora’s ‘towering nest of auburn hair’ and ‘Brobdingnagian appearance upon the stage, [which] was not wholly matched by the force of her voice’. There were only a few other public notices over the years, none of them as good as this one. There seems room for disagreement about whether in time Cora had supplemented her income by prostitution. The couple had moved around frequently before settling in 1905 at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in north London’s Kentish Town, where they took in lodgers to help pay the bills. Part of the morbid appeal of the eventual trial surely came from the comic disparity between the mousy, bespectacled Crippen and the widely displayed photograph of his well-padded wife, whom the Globe correspondent described as ‘decked out like a galleon in full sail’.
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  In early January 1910, Crippen, having been sacked from his job selling Dr Munyon’s Patent Medicines, was working under the name ‘Cuppen’ at Drouets Institute for the Deaf, a quack enterprise located in Finchley, north London, where he befriended an attractive 27-year-old secretary named Ethel Le Neve. The court would hear that they had gone on to ‘adopt terms of some familiarity’. Cora, too, strayed from the monogamous ideal with a succession of lovers, some, apparently, of her own sex. She and her husband had struck Le Neve as ‘sometimes friendly, often hostile, but strangely inseparable’.

  In 1937, a young American psychologist called Abraham Maslow published a paper on sexual dominance. One of his conclusions was that there was an ‘alpha female’ type, whom he characterised as:

  … enjoying sexual experimentation, often of a [lesbian] nature, narcissistic, promiscuous, and prefer[ring] a man of equal self-assurance … When such a woman forms an alliance with a lesser personality, the results can be violent and destructive.

  Again, such generalisations should be applied with care to any individual, but, as Maslow wrote, ‘they seem to closely fit the known facts of the Crippens’ strained marriage’.

  When Cora disappeared from her home early in 1910, her husband simply told friends that she had gone back to live in America. It seemed plausible enough to them. Then Le Neve started to appear in public wearing Cora’s clothes and jewellery, and the police called on Dr Crippen at Hilldrop Crescent. Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard later remarked that the ‘suspect … had at first been in command of the situation. He kept his apparent good humour, and artfully dodged traps that we set for him.’

  They got to him eventually, however, and he referred to ‘excessive, vicious, distorted … loaded, outrageous questioning’. When the inspector next called, he found that Crippen had now also disappeared. A search of the premises revealed a badly decomposed human torso, of indeterminate sex, wrapped in a pyjama top, concealed in the basement. Bernard Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist and Doyle’s fellow Crimes Club member, identified the remains as those of Cora Crippen. She had evidently been poisoned and then dismembered.

  On 31 July, in an early use of radio telegraphy, Crippen and Le Neve were arrested on board the liner SS Montrose as it docked in Canada. They had passed themselves off to fellow passengers on the Atlantic crossing as a ‘Mr Robinson’ and his son John, though suspicions had been aroused when the former was seen to be armed with a gun and the latter strolled on the promenade deck ‘wearing a stylish blue coat studded with tiny silver stars [while] at his neck was knotted a scarf embroidered in many colours … He was elegant to a fault.’

  Ten weeks later, Conan Doyle attended Crippen’s trial as the guest of the original defence counsel, Edward Marshall Hall, a 52-year-old barrister who had made his name as a sparkling courtroom performer in the recent ‘Camden Town Murder’ of a prostitute found naked in a client’s bedroom, her throat cut from ear to ear, among several other such high-profile cases. Hall, who parted company with Crippen over their differing opinions about a possible defence strategy, later went down to Doyle’s house to discuss his theories on the case. These turned on the fact that Crippen had almost certainly given his wife the anaphrodisiac drug hyoscine, but not necessarily intending it as a lethal dose.

  The two men met after dinner in front of the fire in Doyle’s upstairs study, without ladies present, so a degree of plain speech was possible. Hall believed that Cora had been a nymphomaniac, and that her inadequate husband had administered the hyoscine to ‘dampen that aspect of her ardour’. But the feckless Crippen had miscalculated the dose and his wife had died as a result. Seeing his mistake, he had lost his head. So had the unfortunate Cora.

  Crippen would be remembered as a monster, Doyle reasoned, because ‘the idea of decapitation plumbs the depths of horror in the human psyche’. However base and repellent it was, he added, the practice at least showed a logical aspect to the murderer’s mind, which was otherwise ‘not greatly distinguished by any subtlety of judgement’ or even ‘mean calculation’. Doyle agreed with Hall that in all likelihood Crippen had mutilated the body less in an atavistic frenzy and more in the simple belief that it would prevent identification. In the event, this strategy had nearly succeeded, and Spilsbury’s conclusions about the remains would be disputed by DNA evidence nearly a century later.

  The fact that Crippen seemed to have taken a week to dispose of Cora’s head by dropping it off a Channel ferry indicated to the Crimes Club pair that the killing had not been premeditated. And from there Doyle could reconstruct most of the story:

  A pathetically weak man, intimidated by his wife, has a love affair with a young lady at his office. He wishes to subdue the wife, possibly to enjoy an illicit encounter at the marital home. He does this incautiously, to fatal effect. All else that follows is a ghastly series of extemporised deeds which ultimately lead to his flight and arrest.

  That left only the question of Ethel Le Neve. Had she been Crippen’s partner in crime, or merely his passive companion when subsequently absconding to Canada? It perhaps speaks to Doyle’s strong sense of chivalry that he believed the latter.

  Dr Crippen was executed at Pentonville Jail on 23 November 1910. The jury had taken just twenty-seven minutes to reach its verdict. At a separate trial, Ethel Le Neve was acquitted of being an accessory to murder.

  Doyle’s fireside talk with Edward Hall was significant for reasons other than the Crippen case. Unusually for a professional man of the pre-war era, Hall was a practising spiritualist. His first wife had died in 1890 following a botched abortion, and he later became convinced that he could communicate with her with the help of a medium. Hall had ‘urged Sir Arthur to consider the evidence of posthumous communion’ he laid before him, and ‘he responded quite favourably’. We know that around 1911 Conan Doyle began attending séances again.

  The following year, he wrote to Hubert Stansbury to affirm his belief that a man’s spirit survived the decomposition of his flesh. By then Doyle was also in regular correspondence with the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, whose belief in the paranormal his friend hoped would be ‘recognised as a trumpet call for all stragglers’ not yet similarly convinced. Doyle also now resumed his experiments in mental psychic feats such as clairvoyance and telepathy. In time, he would write to his sceptical mother, ‘I do not fear death … for since I became a convinced Spiritualist death [has become] rather an unnecessary thing’. On the eve of the Great War, Conan Doyle, by now 55, was again beginning to reassess his idea of mortality.

  It was typical of Doyle to have increasingly concentrated on the ultimate meaning of life while remaining sharply focused on its material injustices. In the same month that he saw Dr Crippen in the dock at the Old Bailey, he spoke at a dinner given in London for the visiting American civil rights campaigner Booker T. Washington. A week later, he was lecturing on the Congo to a packed house at the capital’s City Temple, the so-called Cathedral of Nonconformity wedged under a railway viaduct close to St Bart’s Hospital, where Sherlock Holmes first met Dr Watson.

  Between times, like most of Britain, Doyle had read of the brutal murder of an old lady of 82 in her Glasgow home one dark winter’s night, a case he soon became convinced ‘represent[ed] an even more outrageous miscarriage of justice than the Edalji scandal’.

  The whole concept of premature or violent death was one that was quite familiar to a generation of men (and to a lesser extent women) in the early years of the twentieth century. As well as the series of wars or revolutions everywhere from Morocco to Bosnia to Mexico, few European nations were immune from the heady atmosphere of patriotic fervour that would later be characterised as the ‘spirit of 1914’.

  There was a widespread sense, if not a universal one, that war was an almost spiritual experience, and that it mattered profoundly how a man behaved when confronted with death. The loss of the Titanic was only one, if the most vividly reported, of the individual human tragedies of the era, ‘and not one without it
s uplifting features,’ Doyle noted. ‘There were many cases of outstanding decency and sacrifice.’ It was another stirring example of how Englishmen could die. Doyle took particular cheer from the way in which the ship’s orchestra had apparently played on to the last. His poem ‘Ragtime’, with its climactic lines, ‘Shut off, shut off the ragtime! The lights are falling low!/ The deck is buckling under us! She’s sinking by the bow’ went some way to immortalising that classic feature of the tragedy.

  Doyle’s preoccupation with the Titanic was at once moral, spiritual and at least potentially criminal. First, as we’ve seen, he took violent exception when George Bernard Shaw went into print questioning the crew’s judgement and integrity. ‘I ask,’ Shaw wrote in a letter to the Daily News and Leader:

  What is the use of all this ghastly, inhuman, braggartly lying? Here is a calamity which might well make the proudest man humble, and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent and mendacious … The effect on me was one of profound disgust, almost of national dishonour.