The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Striking [how] this beefy and sportif man, who looked like an old rugby player, spoke quite seriously of his belief that there were ‘mysterious sprites and entities’ at play in the woods, and that the recent phenomena at [Hindhead] were somehow down to them. The condition of his seeming to live in two separate worlds at once was one of the most remarkable achievements of Sir Arthur’s mind.

  Exercising the more material side of his nature, Conan Doyle also continued to meet regularly with William Melville, the Irish-born former policeman who went on to become the chief of Britain’s first Secret Service agency. Since Doyle had once helped raise funds for Melville on his retirement from Scotland Yard, it’s possible the spymaster felt himself to be in the author’s debt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no known record of their correspondence. But in the darkening European situation of 1913–14 Doyle would almost certainly have spoken to Melville about his recent experience of driving his new gaudy green and red touring car through Germany as part of an international automobile rally organised by the Kaiser’s brother. As a goodwill exercise, this particular event counted as only a mixed success. Doyle later regarded the rally as a ‘clumsy bit of stage management’ intended to draw attention from German war preparations. ‘I came away with sinister forebodings,’ he recalled. Melville, who died in 1918, lives on today as the prototype for ‘M’ in the James Bond franchise.

  ‘He did a lot of reading – literature, sports periodicals, and bundles of true-crime files,’ Harry Houdini said, suitably impressed at the ‘range and quality’ of Conan Doyle’s mind. By now Doyle had read almost every known work on Napoleonic history. He had read every word that Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe had ever published. He read and re-read Thomas Macaulay’s Essays until the cover fell off his original copy and he had to buy another one. Like Sherlock Holmes, Doyle was also a newspaper obsessive, especially the police and court pages and the agony columns. Papers and journals of all sorts are a recurring plot device for Holmes; time and again, he reads an account of a crime in one of the dozen or so London dailies, runs advertisements in them, or consults their personal columns. He’s sufficiently familiar with the mass media of the day to immediately identify a letter composed of cut-up newsprint that features in The Hound of the Baskervilles as having come from that day’s leader in The Times. Doyle, too, clearly enjoyed reading for its own sake, but like Holmes also took a keen professional interest in the accounts of the various outrages he pored over at the breakfast table each morning.

  Such a case came Doyle’s way in a sensational, if not apparently criminal, story published in the News of the World on 3 January 1915. It concerned the sorry fate of 38-year-old Margaret Lloyd, née Lofty, a vicar’s daughter who had been married only two weeks earlier. Her 42-year-old husband John, apparently a successful land agent, had discovered her lifeless body in the bath of their lodgings at Bismarck Road in north London. The couple’s landlady testified that she had been ironing in her kitchen that evening when the sound of splashing came from the bathroom above. This was followed by the ‘queer noise of hands rubbing [or] slapping a firm surface’, and then by a deep sigh. A few minutes later, she had heard the mournful strains of someone playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on the organ in the Lloyds’ sitting room. Mr Lloyd then came down the stairs and went out, only to ring at the front door a few minutes later, explaining that he had forgotten his key. ‘I’ve bought some tomatoes for Mrs Lloyd’s supper,’ he announced. ‘Is she down yet?’ Margaret’s death was quickly recorded as misadventure, and her widower collected the £700 life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out for her on the day of their wedding.

  In retrospect, it might seem that a set of circumstances involving a husband of somewhat dubious background, an inexplicably drowned wife and a sizable insurance policy, all played out to the doleful soundtrack of the last hymn heard on the deck of the Titanic, would merit a degree of official scrutiny. Nor was John Lloyd in obvious emotional distress at his bereavement. When the hearse drew up to remove his wife’s body, he told the undertaker, ‘I don’t want any walking, get it over as quick as you can’, following which he was heard to say, ‘When they’re dead, they’re dead’. However, the police declined to investigate the affair.

  As with the Edalji case, events unfolded with what now seems almost breakneck speed: Margaret Lloyd died on the night of 18 December 1914; the official inquest took place on 1 January 1915; and John Lloyd pocketed his wife’s estate in full nine days later.

  Although the coroner saw nothing suspect about Margaret Lloyd’s death, which was ruled a domestic accident, Conan Doyle immediately made the connection to a similar tragedy he had read about almost exactly a year earlier. This had involved Alice Burnham, a plump and pretty young nurse who, in November 1913, had married a George Smith in Portsmouth. On their wedding day, Smith had taken his bride to a doctor who certified that she was healthy enough to take out a £500 insurance policy, with her husband the beneficiary. The couple had then gone to Blackpool on a delayed honeymoon.

  On the evening of Friday, 12 December, Alice had asked if she could have a bath and their landlady, Margaret Crossley, had filled it for her. A few minutes later, Mrs Crossley noticed small drops of water seeping through her kitchen ceiling immediately below the bathroom. At that point, George Smith had called down the stairs, ‘My wife can’t speak – go for a doctor’. The death certificate was signed at 10.30 that night and the inquest convened at 11 the following morning. It returned the verdict that 25-year-old Alice had ‘Accidentally drowned through heart failure when in the bath’. Three days later, after a perfunctory funeral, her husband applied for probate of his wife’s estate, which he collected in time for Christmas.

  Conan Doyle was not only struck by the coincidence of the two newly married women drowning in the bath with their husbands nearby. As a doctor, he also knew the practical difficulties of a fully grown adult dying in this way – ‘in any conventional episode,’ Doyle wrote, ‘the body would have been convulsed and then pushed up’ with the onset of a medical event such as a heart attack. In both recent cases, the tub had simply been too small for the victims’ heads to slip below the level of the water. It seemed to Doyle in a letter written in January 1915 to Detective Inspector Arthur Neil of Scotland Yard that ‘some degree of coercion’ must have been applied.

  In time, Alice Burnham’s father Charles and Margaret Crossley’s husband Joseph both wrote to the police with similar suspicions. Thus began the downfall of George Smith, who was found to be one and the same as John Lloyd, and also presumed responsible for the death in July 1912 of Bessie Munday, a young Kent woman with a £2,500 legacy from her late father. She, too, had drowned in identical fashion after her husband, a man calling himself Henry Williams, had gone to the trouble of visiting a local hardware shop in order to rent a cast-iron bathtub for their home.

  On 23 March 1915, George Joseph Smith was charged with the murder of all three women, although he was tried only for that of Bessie Munday. In court it emerged that he had entered into at least six bigamous marriages over the years. The jury took eighteen minutes to find Smith guilty. After his appeal was denied, he was hung at Maidstone Prison on Friday, 13 August. Charles Matthews, the Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard:

  I feel I ought not to allow any interval of time to pass without expressing the acknowledgement which, in my opinion, the administration of justice is under to Divisional Detective Inspector Neil, and to the officers who served under him, for their untiring, able, zealous, insightful and intelligent efforts, which played so conspicuous a part in securing the conviction which was this day obtained.

  As Doyle has Holmes remark to the callow Inspector Forbes when rebuked for stealing the limelight in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’:

  On the contrary, out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine. I don’t blame you for not knowing this, but if
you wished to get on in your new duties you will work with me, and not against me.

  Bigamy also played a part in a case brought to Doyle’s attention while he was in Chicago for what he modestly called a ‘not inconsiderable programme’ of forty-two lectures in a ten-week tour of North America. It involved the death of 18-year-old Frank Westwood, who had answered the doorbell of his family’s comfortable suburban Toronto home at about nine o’clock one wet Saturday night. Upstairs, his parents had heard a ‘sharp report’ followed by a thud as their son fell to the floor.

  ‘Mother, mother, I am shot,’ he cried. His parents rushed downstairs to find the hallway full of smoke and Frank lying across the doorstep, bleeding profusely, a bullet hole in his waistcoat. At that point, Mr Westwood had fired his own gun in the air, apparently in the hope that it would summon the police. Frank died three days later, having told the detectives who visited him in hospital that he thought his assailant had been a ‘dark, slender young man’.

  The ‘Parkdale Mystery’, as the press dubbed it, was as sensational in its way as the case of the serial drowned brides in England. The grounds and the street outside the Westwoods’ home were filled with reporters and sightseers on the day of Frank’s funeral. The Toronto World wrote, ‘Half the feminine population of town was present. Young girls, children and mothers of families who came with baby carriages waited in the melancholy drizzle to see the procession.’

  Hector Charlesworth, an enterprising young editor at the World, sent Conan Doyle some cuttings on the case, adding that Mr Westwood, a wealthy fishing tackle manufacturer, was rumoured locally to be ‘excessively uxorious – that is, faithful to three or four wives at once’. There was also the hometown sleuth named W.H. Hornberry, whom the Toronto press referred to somewhat derisively as ‘our Sherlock Holmes’. In due course, Hornberry told the inquest into Frank Westwood’s death that he had meticulously searched the grounds following the tragedy, seeking clues, and had found a scrap of paper on which was written, ‘If you do not – I will’. His Holmesian powers seemed to have deserted him at that point, however, because he had thrown the message away.

  Conan Doyle’s response to the World, though guarded, was enough for it to be splashed by the paper on its front page. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, ‘I shall read the case, but you can realise how impossible it is for an outsider who is ignorant of local conditions to offer an opinion. Thanking you, I am, Faithfully Yours, A. Conan Doyle.’

  By the time Doyle arrived to speak in Toronto a month later, the police had arrested a suspect in the case – not a ‘dark, slender young man’ but a half-caste 32-year-old woman named Clara Ford. Among other unusual habits, she was known to dress in men’s clothing, and had once passed herself off as a member of the Toronto Baptist boys’ choir. She had apparently become infatuated with Frank Westwood, and shot him after he rejected her. There remained some question whether the police had coerced Ford’s confession. Hector Charlesworth recalled that Doyle, though exhausted from his journey, had asked:

  … immediately on his arrival that a reporter be sent to him who could tell him all subsequent developments [in the Westwood case]. When I talked with him he laughingly said that he was the last man in the world to offer answers in murder mysteries, because in the Sherlock Holmes stories he always had his solutions ready-made before he started to write and constructed his narratives backward from that point.

  Speaking to reporters after his lecture that night, Doyle added:

  It is a strangely absorbing mystery, and I discussed it at length with my brother after reading it … I can quite understand how, in the first instance, the public may have thought that the family knew something more of the affair than they stated, but I concluded that the father’s story was so unusual that it must be true. As to the present prisoner, Clara Ford, I cannot offer an opinion. I never met with such a case as hers. The system of closeting a woman with an officer and cross-examining her for hours savours more of French than English methods of justice.

  Doyle was not alone in his misgivings about the police treatment of Clara Ford. At her trial, she withdrew her confession, claiming it had been made in a ‘sweat-box’ under conditions of extreme duress. Her interrogators had been ‘vultures in human form’, Ford added. It took the jury just thirty-five minutes to find her not guilty, after which an impromptu municipal street party had broken out. Charlesworth wrote:

  I saw [Ford] proceed in a carriage through town followed by a cheering throng, and in gratitude she asked the jurors to supper at the negro restaurant where she had boarded. The invitation was accepted, and the presiding judge, Chancellor Sir John Boyd, told me later that it was the most disgusting example of the weakness of the jury system he recalled in a long experience.

  Clara Ford later toured North America in ‘Sam T. Jack’s Creoles’, a black burlesque show, and was advertised as ‘A Damsel who killed a Worm in pursuance of “The Unwritten Law”’.

  Conan Doyle would have been familiar with the concept of a woman avenging herself on a man who had seemingly mistreated her. It features prominently in the 1904 Holmes story ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’, when Milverton is shot by a veiled figure he is attempting to blackmail. Holmes and Watson happen to be hiding behind a curtain, and witness the crime. ‘I was about to spring out,’ the latter remarks in Doyle’s voice, ‘when I felt Holmes’ cold, strong grasp upon my wrist. I understood the whole argument of that firm, restraining grip – that it was no affair of ours; that justice had overtaken a villain.’ Later in the story Holmes declines a police request to investigate the killing, telling Lestrade, ‘My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case’.

  Strikingly, there’s also a certain amount of cross-dressing to be found in Doyle’s work: a woman disguises herself as a man in 1891’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, while the reverse formula applies in 1908’s ‘The Man with the Watches’. Doyle later said that it was ‘sometimes almost impossible to view with equanimity the sheer stupidity and cruelty of the police’ when seeking to extract a confession from their prime suspect.

  On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Conan Doyle received an unsettling letter from ‘an old friend and fellow scribbler on the plight of Central Africa’, the Anglo-French journalist Edmund Morel. Morel wrote with the news (which Doyle may already have seen in his daily paper) that their one-time colleague Sir Roger Casement, who was 51 and thought to be either emotionally disturbed or homosexual – in so far as society then made the distinction – had been arrested in the ruins of a Roman fort on the west coast of Ireland, with a German rail ticket in his pocket. The police also relieved Casement of a bag containing ‘a green and yellow flag, with a representation of a castle in the centre and some foreign language underneath, some maps, a pair of field glasses, a flash-lamp and forty rounds of ammunition’.

  The events that had led the former British consul and distinguished humanitarian campaigner to this pass rivalled anything that Doyle could have conceived in his fiction. Three days earlier, a German U-boat had landed Casement on the moonlit coast of Banna Strand in County Kerry. His passage there had not been without incident. There had been engine trouble and heavy seas, and during the six-day crossing from Wilhelmshaven Casement had become semi-delirious on his ship’s rations of schnapps and tinned salmon.

  Casement had planned to return to the land of his birth to foment an uprising that would win what he called ‘Irish self-determination and manifest destiny’ with the help of a consignment of some 15,000 German rifles and ten machine guns. In the event, most of the arms were lost at sea. Even if deployed, they would seem to have been pitifully inadequate to the task. Already doubtful about his prospects of success, the seasick Casement had been able to stagger only a few yards onto dry land before being arrested by two police constables summoned by local villagers. Within hours he was taken to the Tower of London on charges of treason, sabotage and mutiny against the British Crown in a time of war.

  Cas
ement’s trial began at the Old Bailey on 26 June 1916, featured an Irish cab driver named Moriarty for the prosecution, and ended three days later in a guilty verdict and the death sentence. It took some courage for Conan Doyle to publicly support a reprieve for Casement, whom, like the shoplifting Ella Castle twenty years earlier, he deemed ‘more in need of treatment than punishment’. This was the month of the appalling losses on the River Somme, and there could be no presumption of public sympathy for a quixotic Irishman of ambiguous sexuality who appeared to be in armed cahoots with the enemy.

  Doyle shared the widespread distaste for the ‘foulest traitor who ever drew breath’, as he was popularly known, but for all that believed Casement could not be held mentally responsible for his crime. The Irishman’s actions struck him as ‘simply inexplicable’ from any rational standpoint. ‘We would call attention to the violent change which appears to have taken place in the prisoner’s sentiments towards Great Britain,’ Doyle wrote in his petition to the government, asking that Casement’s life be spared:

  We should desire to point out that the prisoner had for many years been exposed to severe strain during his honourable career of public service, that he had endured several tropical fevers, and that he had experienced the worry of two investigations which were of a peculiarly nerve-trying character.

  Acknowledging receipt of Doyle’s petition, the Home Secretary Herbert Samuel replied:

  As you are good enough to say that you desire to leave it to the discretion of His Majesty’s Government whether the appeal should be made public, I am writing to inform you that the Government prefer that it should not.