The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  This was perhaps to underestimate the author’s obstinacy and resilience once embarked on a crusade for justice. Doyle soon rallied influential friends such as John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, William Butler Yeats, John Masefield and G.K. Chesterton, among others, to Casement’s cause, although he seems to have parted from the more broadly pacifist Edmund Morel, whose tactics he called ‘a policy of murder’. (George Bernard Shaw characteristically circulated his own rival petition.)

  On 2 July, Doyle wrote to his fellow campaigner, the literary journalist Clement Shorter. ‘Personally, I believe Casement’s mind was unhinged,’ he reasoned:

  His honourable nature would in a normal condition have revolted from such an action … I am entirely against his execution. I am sure it is wrong. It seems to me that the line to go upon is to absolutely acknowledge his guilt & the justice of his sentence and at the same time urge the political wisdom of magnanimity. It should be signed so far as possible by men who have shown no possible sympathy for Germany or pacific leanings.

  On 13 July:

  Dear Shorter, The summons to the Foreign Office proved to be about Casement. They told me that his record for sexual offences was bad and had a diary of his as proof of it. I had of course heard this before, but as no possible sexual offence could be as bad as suborning soldiers from their duty, I was not diverted from my purpose. None the less it is of course very sad, and an additional sign of mental disorder.

  The record shows that Doyle again wrote to the authorities on 25 July, at which point he believed there were still ‘some weeks’ before the date of Casement’s execution. But the prisoner’s ‘black diaries’, as they became known, soon countered any appeals for clemency. Circulated in parliament and the press, no one who read them, according to the News of the World, would ‘ever mention Casement’s name again without loathing and contempt’. He was hung at Pentonville Jail on 3 August 1916.

  In his autobiography, Doyle was both generous and not entirely free of authorial pride on the subject. He wrote:

  Casement, whom I shall always regard as a fine man afflicted with mania, has met his tragic end, and Morel’s views upon the war have destroyed the feelings which I had for him. But I shall always maintain that they both did noble work in championing the wrongs of those unhappy and helpless negroes … My own book The Crime of the Congo, which was translated into all European languages, had also, I hope, some influence towards that end.

  Like Holmes, Doyle was not one to let a cognitively demanding role like petitioning the authorities on a matter of life and death prevent him from accepting a variety of other calls on his mental resources. Both characters combined a clarity of mind with the ability, perhaps rarer than it is now, to multitask. In 1915 alone, Doyle wrote comprehensive accounts of the battles of Mons and Le Cateau, both to fall foul of War Office censors; contributed an internationally syndicated article that appeared under the optimistic headline, ‘Conan Doyle Sees Victory for England – One Successful Pounce Will Win’; wrote to The Times insisting that Britain should retaliate in kind for Zeppelin air raids against civilian targets; busied himself in improving lifesaving armour for Allied soldiers; and tirelessly marched a volunteer force around the Sussex Downs.

  He also showed a more distinctly Holmesian touch when he came to develop a secret correspondence with captured British troops held at the prison camp at Magdeburg in Saxony. ‘I took one of my books,’ Doyle recalled:

  And beginning with the third chapter – I guessed the censor would examine the first – I put little needle-pricks under the various printed letters until I had spelled out all the news. I then sent the book and also a letter. In the letter I said that the book was, I feared, rather slow in the opening, but that from Chapter 3 onwards [the reader] might find it more interesting. [He] missed the allusion altogether, but by good luck he showed the letter to Captain the Honourable Rupert Keppel, of the Guards, who had been taken at Landrecies. He smelled a rat, borrowed the book, and found my cipher. A message came back to his father, Lord Albemarle, to the effect that he hoped Conan Doyle would send some more books.

  This was just the start of a continuing three-year programme of secret communication with captured Allied troops. In time, Doyle provided one of his correspondents with a Bible, a work he felt ‘even the Germans’ unlikely to forbid. Later variants on this came to include the Encyclopaedia Britannica and several volumes of Dickens. Doyle then fashioned his messages by periodically writing a page number, a line number and the number of a word, which he took from an identical edition of the book in his library. His letters were largely composed of seemingly innocuous accounts of the current weather conditions or the result of a local sports event, which allowed him to use the groups of numbers without unduly raising suspicion. Thus, the German censor might think he was reading about the score in a cricket match, while in reality Doyle’s letter conveyed news of a recent British offensive, or the intervention of the Americans.

  ‘Our household suffered terribly in the war,’ Conan Doyle wrote in his memoirs. By the time the deadly summer of 1916 began – with Doyle still lobbying on behalf of Roger Casement – the honour roll already included ‘two brave nephews, Alex Forbes and Oscar Hornung, shot down with bullets through the brain’ and his ‘gallant brother-in-law, Major Oldham … killed by a sniper during his first days in the trenches’.

  On 1 July, Doyle’s 23-year-old son Kingsley was seriously wounded on the blood-sodden first day of the Allied ‘push’ at the Somme. ‘He is in God’s hands,’ his father wrote. Although Kingsley was able to return to the front line just two months later, it was an understandably ‘profound jolt’ to the family, who by then had begun to hold regular drawing room séances under the mediumship of their house guest, Lily Loder-Symonds, a ‘sensitive’ who had discovered her gift following the loss of three of her own brothers in combat.

  Despite these blows, many of Conan Doyle’s letters continued to almost exult in the joys and dangers of battle, while his public writings retained their note of patriotic idealism. Donning an outfit ‘which was something between that of a Colonel or Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-straps’, Doyle successively visited the Italian, French and British front lines. ‘I confess that as I looked at those brave English lads,’ he wrote, ‘and thought of what we owed to them and to their like who have passed on, I felt more emotional than befits a Briton in foreign parts.’ Doyle’s faith in the essential merit of the Allied cause survived even a subsequent visit to the front at Saint-Quentin, near the Somme, where he wrote of a scene of almost apocalyptic horror, with a pyre of mangled equipment and dead horses, beside which ‘a man with his hand blown off was staggering away, the blood gushing from his upturned sleeve’.

  Christianity had not been in slow decline for 1,900 years but was ‘a vital living thing still growing and working,’ Conan Doyle had written in his unpublished 1884 novel The Narrative of John Smith, the manuscript of which had been lost in the post. In November 1916, as his family losses mounted in the fields of France and Flanders, Doyle again took up the questions of God and man’s relationship to Him in an article published in the psychic magazine Light, widely reprinted under the headline, ‘Author Says We Can Talk with the Dead’.

  Doyle asked:

  Are we to satisfy ourselves by observing phenomena with no attention to what the phenomena mean, as a group of savages might stare at a wireless installation with no appreciation of the messages coming out of it? Or are we resolutely to set ourselves to define these subtle and elusive utterances from beyond, and to construct from them a religious scheme which shall be founded upon human reason on this side and upon spirit inspiration on the other?

  According to Doyle, this emerging data should be the basis of a new religion ‘in some ways confirmatory’ of ancient truths and in others a clean break from the past.

  Conan Doyle’s own spiritual beliefs had been forged in the crucible of experience. As we’ve seen, he dabbled in psychic activities l
ike clairvoyance and telepathy from his earliest days as a young doctor in Southsea. His famously rational mind had long allowed for the possibility of ‘generous amounts [of] non-observable phenomena’ at work in the universe. Even then Doyle had been a ‘respectful and frequent’ visitor to the séance room. Now, as the war dragged on, it would provide him a near daily consolation.

  Doyle also consistently sought out intellectual support for his beliefs, perhaps reflecting the nagging sense of insecurity and a need for respect that seem to have set in at the time of his father’s long and, to some, shameful decline. Early in his article in Light, he cites such men as ‘Crookes, Wallace, Flammarion, Barrett, Generals Draycott and Turner, Sergeant Ballantyne, W.T. Stead, Judge Edmunds, Vice Admiral Usborne Moore [and] the late Archdeacon Wilberforce’ as corroborating his views. From late 1916, Doyle was to enter into steadily closer correspondence with his ‘wonderfully distinguished’ friend Sir Oliver Lodge, a pioneering scientist and prolific inventor who ultimately lost out to better funded rivals, among them Hertz and Marconi, when it came to converting his theories on radio transmission into a practical household wireless set. A year earlier, Lodge’s son Raymond had apparently spoken to him in a séance, describing his ‘supremely comfortable’ afterlife in a place he called ‘Summerland’.

  Soon Conan Doyle was writing to Lodge as a man of science to enquire about the Crewe-based ‘spirit photographer’ William Hope, who claimed to be able to register images on photographic plates simply by holding them in his hand. Doyle appeared eager to believe, noting that Hope was in ‘very poor circumstances’ and a deserving case for subsidy. Even so, the creator of Sherlock Holmes clearly hadn’t abandoned his analytical faculties entirely. In his earliest discussions with Harry Houdini, Doyle wondered only whether the occult would one day prove useful in solving crimes, and Houdini acknowledged that this might be the case, not mentioning that he himself had once toured the American music halls in a double act with his wife Bess, the climax of which came when Bess fell into a ‘trance-like communion’ with the soul of some recent murder victim (though never successfully identifying the individual’s killer) in each town where they performed. There were other signs, too, that Doyle retained a certain respect for what he called the ‘honest, earnest, materialist’ approach to life. Writing to Lodge in May 1917, he spoke of having tried to ‘scientifically verify’ the messages given to him by a medium named Miss Wearne, and that in every case these were ‘absolutely wrong’.

  Nonetheless, Doyle’s life was now ‘absorbed in advanc[ing]’ the spiritualist cause, and his literary career soon followed suit. Alongside his war history he was to publish works such as The New Revelation (1918) and The Vital Message (1919) that understandably came as a surprise to those who knew him only as the author of crime fiction and rollicking Napoleonic dramas. Before The Vital Message was even published, letters began to arrive at Windlesham addressed to ‘Chief Devil, Spiritualist Church’, among other equally unappreciative titles. The saner correspondents contented themselves with remarking sadly that Conan Doyle’s recent output was more Watson than Holmes – ‘that great man would never have sat down with spooks,’ wrote one, a view the author himself evidently shared.

  Increasingly, Doyle was once more the preacher that at heart he arguably always had been. On 25 October 1917, he gave a widely reported speech to the London Spiritualist Alliance, chaired by Oliver Lodge, in which he spoke unambiguously about his beliefs. Several well-attended public lectures followed. Meanwhile, readers of The Strand magazine, who had long enjoyed a privileged first appearance of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, would come to find themselves puzzling over articles entitled ‘The Absolute Proof’ and ‘The Evidence for Fairies’, contributed by the same author.

  Doyle’s sense of mission also took more earthly form. As by the cases of George Edalji and Roger Casement, his crusading instincts were roused by the ‘tragic human consequences’ of alcohol, and the distressing prospect of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers returning on leave to ‘harlot-haunted’ London.

  Perhaps no single event shook Doyle’s public reputation as the creator of English literature’s greatest human calculating machine quite as much as the long, often tragicomic, saga of the Cottingley fairies. When the young Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths returned from their photographic expedition behind the Wrights’ home that hot Saturday afternoon in July 1917, it was recalled that they did so ‘in high spirits’, having had ‘wonderful fun’ with their camera. That this particular account of their adventure was true cannot be doubted. In time the photographs they claimed to have taken came to the attention of first Light magazine and then Conan Doyle, who was not slow to pronounce on them as proof of a ‘primitive missing link’ in the evolutionary chain. ‘I have something far more precious [than spirit photographs]’, Doyle wrote to Houdini:

  Two photos, one of a goblin, the other of four fairies dancing in a Yorkshire wood. A fake! You will say. No, sir, I think not … The fairies are about eight inches high [and are] beautiful, luminous creatures. Yes, it is a revelation.

  There were to be several further twists and turns to the story, to which we’ll return in a later chapter, but the ultimate result was that Doyle went into print in a December 1920 front-page article entitled ‘The Evidence for Fairies’.

  The reaction to this was mixed. The newspaper Truth expressed a widely held view when, on 5 January 1921, it wrote, ‘For the real explanation of these fairy photographs, what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children’. Even this was mild compared to some of the popular jokes that made the rounds, including the one where Doyle was said to have appeared at the climax of his friend Barrie’s Peter Pan to lead the audience in a chorus of ‘I do believe in fairies!’ Other wisecracks were less elevated.

  It was a credit to Doyle, never one to abandon his position lightly, that he persevered in his beliefs even when much of the spiritualist world took issue with him. In March 1922, he published his full-length book, The Coming of the Fairies, which laid out the story of the photographs, their supposed provenance, and his conclusions about this ‘subhuman’ and ‘miraculous’ life form. It remains his most notorious literary act, not excluding his killing of Sherlock Holmes. It’s arguable that Doyle’s public reputation never quite recovered from the controversy. As Houdini noted in a letter to their mutual friend Orson Munn, owner of the Scientific American:

  The authority of an evangelist such as Sir Arthur is like that of a trainer in a wild-animal act. His mastery depends on never being challenged, [and even if] he survives an assault, his aura of invincibility is gone forever.

  In September 1918, Conan Doyle paid his brief but indelible visit to the British lines at Saint-Quentin. Describing his experiences there to the public was hardly a cheerful task – his image of an incarnadine shambles of men and animals is among his most vivid writing – but at least it appeared that the tide was finally turning in the Allies’ favour.

  But then he learnt that Kingsley, who had eventually been posted home, both due to his original war wound and to complete his training as a doctor, had been taken to St Thomas’s Hospital in London, suffering from influenza. He died there on 28 October, just two weeks short of the Armistice and of his own twenty-sixth birthday. His father saw him in the mortuary, ‘looking his brave steadfast self’, and oversaw the arrangements to bury Kingsley next to his mother in the village churchyard near Undershaw.

  Barely twenty-four hours after receiving the ‘stunning’ news, Conan Doyle went on stage to deliver a spiritualist lecture in Nottingham. Composing himself, he told the audience that his oldest son had ‘survived the grave, and there was no need to worry’. Less than four months later, on 19 February 1919, Doyle’s younger brother, Innes, organising relief supplies in Belgium, also succumbed to the influenza epidemic that would eventually account for some 60 million victims worldwide. Innes, who was 45 at the time of his death, had long ago been his brother’s perennial
ly cheerful companion and boy Friday in Southsea, making the years of struggle bearable and forging a real-life relationship that foreshadowed that between Holmes and Watson. It was another ‘terrible, shattering’ blow.

  On 7 September, 1919, Conan Doyle shared a platform at a spiritualist rally in Portsmouth with a 38-year-old Welshman named Evan Powell, a colliery clerk who was also a ‘very powerful’ medium. After several spirits had been summoned, the speakers agreed to hold a more private session. Around midnight, Doyle, his wife and five friends adjourned to a room in a nearby hotel, where they searched Powell, tied him to a chair, and turned off the lights.

  ‘We had strong phenomena from the start,’ Doyle wrote to Oliver Lodge:

  The medium was always groaning, muttering, or talking, so that there was never a doubt where he was. Suddenly I heard a voice.

  ‘Jean, it is I.’

  My wife cried, ‘It is Kingsley!’

  I said, ‘Is that you, boy?’

  He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, ‘Father!’ and then after a pause, ‘Forgive me!’

  Conan Doyle, who assumed Kingsley was referring to his earlier doubts about the paranormal, concluded his account by saying that he had then felt a strong hand pressing down on him, followed by a kiss on the forehead. ‘I am so happy,’ his dead son assured him.

  7

  A CASE OF IDENTITY

  The murder of the 82-year-old spinster Marion Gilchrist in the dining room of her home on the rainy midwinter night of Monday, 21 December 1908 was savage even by the most depraved standards of Edwardian Glasgow.

  At around 7 that evening, the victim’s young maidservant Helen Lambie stepped out from the middle floor flat they shared at 15 Queens Terrace, West Princes Street, close to the city centre, to buy groceries and a local paper. She left her mistress sitting in a chair drawn slightly away from the dining table, her back to a coal fire, reading a magazine. A court later heard that the home had been dimly lit, ‘the gas in the kitchen turned down, and that in the hall half-on’, and that ‘all the windows were fastened except that in the kitchen, which was open two or three inches at the top’. No one else was on the premises.