The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  But perhaps the greatest enigma of all is how a morally austere Scotsman who had barely set foot in London before his thirtieth birthday, and who was convinced his true literary calling lay in Napoleonic-historical romance, could have created a thoroughly contemporary dramatic hero, who also happened to be a bipolar drug addict given to shooting up cocaine three times a day to overcome his lassitude, and whom we associate with an intimate working knowledge of the English capital’s underworld and back streets. It’s a tribute to Doyle’s powers of improvisation that London, which he knew largely from the contemporary Post Office Directory, the nearest thing to Google Maps of the day, is often described as another character in the stories.

  It’s also well known that Doyle, unlike the detective’s millions of diehard fans, soon grew weary of Holmes, once admitting, ‘I feel towards him as I do to pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day’. Having brought the character to life in 1886, he was trying to kill him again as soon as 1890. Holmes’s apparent watery end in ‘The Final Problem’, published in the December 1893 edition of The Strand magazine, scarcely two years after his debut there in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, triggered the perhaps apocryphal story that bereaved readers had walked around the streets of England wearing black armbands. Doyle himself was more stoical, jotting only the words ‘Killed Holmes’ in his notebook.

  He took a similarly laconic approach when the American Collier’s Weekly offered him the fabulous sum of $25,000, or roughly £6,000, to revive Holmes in a series of six stories. ‘Very well, ACD’, he scribbled back on a postcard. Even so, Doyle was always shrewd enough to see a long-term future for Holmes. Rather like an iconic 1960s rock band contemplating a reunion, there would be periodic hints of a one-off comeback, if not a full-scale return to public life. Although Holmes the detective remained dead, there was ‘no limit to the number of papers he left behind or the reminiscences in the brain of his biographer,’ Doyle wrote in The Strand’s sister paper Tit-Bits in December 1900. The inevitable followed with the first published instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles just eight months later. When the American actor William Gillette brought the character of Holmes to the stage at around the same time, Doyle allowed, ‘It’s good to see the old chap again’. The old chap would continue to appear in periodic new adventures until as late as 1927, taking Holmes up to an era when fictional detectives were dealing with pushy leading ladies and fascist spies. By then he had outlived many of the late Victorian conventions and physical trappings (gloaming and gaslight, swirling river fogs) of his heyday, and Doyle himself survived the character he had long felt so conflicted about by just three years.

  Holmes’s own ‘Rules of Evidence’ tell us that, around 1885, Conan Doyle, a modestly successful provincial doctor with literary ambitions, was growing tired of the standard detective yarn which relied more on plot devices such as divine intervention, coincidence or intuition than on systematic thought or scientific analysis to achieve its result. Doyle had the idea to do away with the haphazard and instead to present the whole story as an intellectual challenge to the reader, giving him or her an equal opportunity with the detective to solve the mystery. All that then remained was a leading man who was not only logical but troubled as well, thus allowing us to identify with at least some of his humanising contradictions.

  As we’ve seen, Doyle’s old mentor Joseph Bell was the basic prototype, but there were others who clearly influenced the final product. One of the true pioneers of forensic medicine, Dr Henry Littlejohn (1826–1914) was an unmistakable figure around Victorian Edinburgh, where among other duties he advised the police in a number of high-profile criminal cases. In January 1878, for example, he was able to determine that the ‘vomited data’ of a woman found dying in her bed were more in keeping with narcotic poisoning than gas exposure, as the rather cursory official examination had concluded, with the result that the victim’s husband was charged with her murder. (Some years later, Littlejohn’s son Harvey, also a forensic scientist, crossed swords with Conan Doyle in their contrasting interpretations of a sensational Scottish murder case: see Chapters 7 and 8.)

  There are those who claim also to see glimpses of Holmes in Jerome Caminada (1844–1914), a legendary figure in the history of the Manchester Police who was known both for his logical faculties and unorthodox methods. Over the years, the burly, luxuriantly bearded Caminada employed a variety of imaginative disguises, including that of a visiting Tanzanian warlord, a drunken, one-legged sailor and various working-class roles, in order to infiltrate the local criminal classes. He even once successfully impersonated a female opera singer. Like Holmes before him, Caminada went on to investigate a seemingly well-educated, aristocratic woman who was actually a consummate forger and crook, before becoming infatuated by her, and in time he found an arch-nemesis with a number of similarities to the academic turned criminal fiend, Professor Moriarty.

  There are vocal schools in support of several other names as being the ‘real Holmes’. Some see a touch of the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947) in the character, although he could only have influenced the later stories, while others confer the mantle on one Francis ‘Tanky’ Smith (1814–88), who bestrode the Leicester CID at the time Conan Doyle was growing up. Also partial to disguises, Smith’s most famous assignment came when as a private detective he solved the disappearance of his county’s high sheriff, whose lifeless body he eventually found floating in the River Moselle in Germany. As well as the above, there are literally dozens of other candidates said to have inspired Doyle from among the ranks of the official or semi-official forces in Italy, Belgium, Spain, Luxemburg, Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Barbados and the United States; the list is far from exhaustive.

  Unlike most of these characters, Conan Doyle himself presents a figure of comparatively conventional temper and settled habits, spending long hours each day at his desk, as disciplined in his writing routine as he had been as a doctor, an instinctive Tory, a teetotaller, devoted to his widowed mother, and with little that could be called truly nonconformist or even eccentric about his private life, at least until he started regularly communing with ghosts at around the age of 58.

  Doyle’s appearance seemed thoroughly correct. He was tall, squarely built, heavily moustached, with plastered-down brown hair. He carried his umbrella at the furl; his bearing was military; and for long stretches of his life he lived in a series of suburban villas stuffed with mahogany tables, marble busts and hunting prints. He loved cricket, and once succeeded in dismissing W.G. Grace, the titan of the Victorian game, an achievement he ranked ‘above any prize the literary world could confer’.

  When Doyle sat down to work he often prepared sheets of paper with multiple versions of individual scenes, or specific lines of dialogue, intended for whatever story was under construction. One version might show a certain amount of archaic if energetically sustained idiom like ‘quothas’ and ‘windage’, another one favoured a perfectly serviceable, ‘flat’ style devoid of any noticeable technique, and the third draft typically betrayed some modestly experimental touches such as the omission of inverted commas in direct speech. Doyle chose the middle course in almost every case, before going on to neatly write out the manuscript, with minimal further revisions, in a text ‘always as clear as print’, as his editor at The Strand remarked appreciatively.

  Doyle’s patient, bricklaying method when it came to his writing reflected his essentially practical, temperate approach to life as a whole. ‘There was nothing lynx-eyed, nothing “detective” about him,’ wrote the American journalist Harry How, who interviewed Doyle in his first flush of fame from the Holmes stories. ‘He [was] just a happy, genial, homely man; tall, broad-shouldered, with a hand that grips you heartily, and, in its sincerity of welcome, hurts.’

  That the ‘automatic writing’ view of Conan Doyle and his immortal detective appears something of a simplification the following pages will, perhaps, show. Conversely, the
re are those who depict Doyle as a classic case of a journeyman author who merely stumbled onto a winning formula and practised it, with little variation, practically throughout his life, repeating the ritual phrases and stock plot devices, while rigorously maintaining his own outward appearance of stuffy moral and social conformity until the last. This, too, is an inadequate picture of the man.

  Conan Doyle may not have ‘been’ Sherlock Holmes. But there’s abundant evidence that the detective conformed to a fundamental logic and precision of thought in his maker’s mind. The presentation of the Holmes stories was sometimes clumsy, and the writing wooden. They could be justly criticised for their frequent technical lapses and faulty grip of their subject matter, just as much as they could be praised for their pervasive sense of atmosphere and their many unforgettable individual scenes or bursts of dialogue. The adventure of ‘Silver Blaze’, published in 1892, demonstrates both these extremes. Although Doyle’s all-important grasp of the world of horse-racing is shown as only fair (as he later admitted, if the events had taken place in real life as he described them, half the characters would have been arrested, and the other half ‘warned off’ for life), we continue to quote the deathless exchange between Holmes and the befuddled local police inspector:

  ‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

  ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’

  ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’

  ‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

  The satisfying thing is not only the neat twist of the line, but the obvious contrast it creates between the subtle, insightful mind of the maverick consulting detective and that of the plodding official investigator. Clichés now, Doyle’s treatment of such matters showed his originality in the 1890s. Any writer who dares to think up and carry off such a persuasively anti-authority theme as embodied by Holmes in his dealings with Scotland Yard would not, in all probability, be a slave to the judicial or governmental orthodoxy when it came to matters of real-life miscarriages of justice.

  ‘A few of the problems which have come my way have been very similar to some which I had invented for the exhibition of the reasoning of Mr Holmes,’ Conan Doyle wrote in his 1924 Memories and Adventures. ‘I might perhaps quote one in which that gentleman’s method of thought was copied with complete success,’ he added, for once throwing modesty to the winds. Almost all the contemporary accounts show how confident Doyle was in his own powers of calculation and deduction, even if in public he generally chose to play the role of a sort of anonymous medium who had just happened to summon Sherlock Holmes into being.

  The case began at London’s Langham Hotel – that great Victorian pile that still ‘sits atop Regent Street like a grand yet faded dowager’, to quote the Smithsonian, and one of those places where Sherlock Holmes and his creator frequently overlap. In August 1889, Doyle went to dinner there with the managing editor of Lippincott’s magazine, and left again with a commission for the second Holmes novella, The Sign of the Four, which itself name-checks the hotel.

  One of the perennials of the Holmes canon is the individual who mysteriously vanishes, and the case here had most of the essentials. ‘A gentleman had disappeared,’ Doyle wrote:

  He had drawn a bank balance of £40 which was known to be on him. It was feared that he had been murdered for the sake of the money. He had last been heard of stopping at [the Langham], having come from the country that day. In the evening, he went out to a music-hall performance, came out of it about ten o’clock, returned to his hotel, changed his evening clothes, which were found in his room [the] next day, and disappeared utterly. No one saw him leave the hotel, but a man occupying a neighbouring room declared that he had heard him moving during the night. A week had elapsed at the time that I was consulted, but the police had discovered nothing. Where was the man?

  Doyle’s subsequent investigation showed both deductive reasoning of a high order and a degree of something closer to common sense than to true forensic science. The man had evidently meant to disappear, he rapidly concluded. Why else would he draw all his money? More than likely, he had come back to the hotel late that evening, changed his clothes, and then slipped out again unnoticed in the crowd of other returning theatregoers. The police inspector who called Doyle in on the case assured him that he and his men had undertaken the ‘most diligent researches’ into where the man might have gone in London at eleven or twelve o’clock at night.

  Their enquiries did not, however, extend to checking the railway timetables for the day in question. Doyle did this, and quickly deduced that the man had departed on the midnight express bound for Edinburgh. The abandonment of his evening suit suggested that he had then intended to adopt a life free of the conventional social niceties. By a similar process of deduction, or perhaps more of a working knowledge of human nature, Doyle further determined that there was a woman involved other than the missing party’s wife. At this point the police belatedly turned their attention to Edinburgh’s less fashionable suburbs, and soon found the man in the circumstances described. The fellow guest who believed he had heard his neighbour moving around his room at night had simply been confused by the normal sounds of a large hotel. Once explained, as in any good Sherlock Holmes story, it was all so simple – if you knew how.

  In a broadly similar case, Doyle again demonstrated that what he called the ‘general lines of reasoning advocated by Holmes’ had a practical application to real life. A young woman had become engaged to a French businessman, living in England and known to be reticent about his past life, who had then abandoned her at the altar. On their wedding day, several witnesses had seen the groom set off for the church to meet his bride, but he had never arrived. The police investigated, apparently believing that foul play was involved, possibly touching in some way on the Frenchman’s extensive business interests.

  Doyle looked into the matter, and quickly reached a sadly different conclusion. The man had never seriously intended to marry his English fiancée, for the simple reason that he already had a wife waiting for him at home in France. He had ‘disappeared’ by simply stepping in at one door of a hansom cab and out at the other – oddly enough, a plot device identical to one in the 1891 Holmes tale ‘A Case of Identity’. ‘I was able to show the girl very clearly both whither [her fiancé] had gone and how unworthy he was of her affections,’ Doyle wrote, combining his coldly analytical and profoundly moral sides in one neat summary.

  Time and again, whether in fiction or real life, Conan Doyle brought this old-fashioned sense of chivalry to bear in his detective exploits, never quite coming to terms with what he deemed the ‘sophisticated decadence’ of the modern age. For the Scotsman born in 1859 and raised in a religious household, the protection of the vulnerable members of society was a matter of ‘honour’, a word that resounded deep within his Victorian soul. To Doyle, the fairer sex conjured up images of the defenceless young girl, the cruelly abused wife, the jilted lover, and the ‘fate worse than death itself’. When investigating such cases, he made up for any shortcomings he may have had as a forensic detective by a fiercely moral sense of the particular iniquities that often befell young women, and how these same victims were failed by the criminal justice system.

  Doyle’s reaction to the affair of the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, demonstrated this lifelong propensity to take up the sword on behalf of the young, female or otherwise supposedly weak members of society. In 1848, Margaret Fox, aged 14, and Kate, 12, had apparently begun to hear nocturnal ‘bumps and raps’ in the bedroom of their small farmhouse. The girls’ mother became convinced that an unseen spirit she named ‘Mr Splitfoot’ was communicating with them, and that ‘distinct manifestations of an undead soul’ continued even when she and the children moved home.

  Within a year, the sisters and their mother had become a popular music-hall attraction up and down the American east coast, and won over a number of influential backers, including Horace G
reeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who took up their cause in a series of sensational front-page articles. As a result, the young Fox girls effectively launched the modern spiritualist movement. They kept the act going even as grown women, although the abstemious Greeley was left to regret that by then Margaret and Kate had regularly ‘taken a sip’, the beginning of a serious drinking problem in their later days.

  In time, Conan Doyle would come to cautiously endorse the Foxes’ ‘apparent mediumship’ and their ‘strong sense within their own minds of communion with worlds unseen’. While on a lecture tour of the USA in 1923, Doyle announced his intention to erect a monument to the sisters, both of whom had died in poverty in the 1890s. The public response to this was only ‘sparing’, he was forced to admit. ‘The reaction to my appeal for some central memorial of our Cause has been so scanty that I cannot bring myself to present it,’ he wrote in the psychic journal Light. ‘I am, therefore, returning the money to the various subscribers, whom I hereby thank.’

  Although Conan Doyle evidently had doubts about whether the young Fox sisters had been truly channelling some diabolical agency, or merely engaging in a juvenile prank, he leapt to their defence when the magician Harry Houdini publicly insisted that the girls had done no more than ‘lie abed and crack their own toe-joints … thus producing the unworldly “rapping” … an effect any fool can reproduce by clicking two coins together over the head of a blindfolded person.’ Doyle was incensed at what he called ‘this viciously partisan assault upon virtual infants’, reasoning that ‘at such tender age they could hardly have been such practiced hoaxers’. According to his friend and fellow spiritualist Oliver Lodge, when Doyle subsequently discussed the Foxes with Houdini they fell into a ‘noisy debate’, at which time ‘the iron had entered Sir Arthur’s soul; he swore that he would never stand by while an innocent’s name was besmirched … He would hit at the villifiers and sceptics, and hit hard.’