The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Some of these same ingredients were at work in Conan Doyle’s spirited defence of 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, who disappeared with a camera one hot afternoon in July 1917 into the glen behind the Wrights’ home in the village of Cottingley, West Yorkshire, and returned with an image that seemed to show Frances leaning on the side of a small hill on which four fairies were dancing. ‘It is a revelation,’ Doyle wrote to Houdini.

  On 24 July 1928, Doyle appeared as a defence witness in the criminal trial of a Miss Mercy Phillimore and Mrs Claire Cantlon, respectively the secretary of the London Spiritualist Alliance and a medium who practised there, whom the police had charged under the 1604 Witchcraft Act. Doyle was so infuriated at the ‘medieval’ proceedings against these ‘honest, cruelly abused English ladies’ that he went on to make an appointment with the Home Secretary in an unsuccessful bid to change the law as it applied in their case.

  There seemed to be almost no limit to how far he would go, whether by a gift of money, his time, or some other form of public campaign, when he saw one of these ‘honest gentlewomen’ subjected to the same sort of ‘ill-considered and vindictive attack by our ruling class’. ‘Sir Arthur was mesmerising,’ a sceptical Daily Express journalist admitted, after hearing him speak on the subject to a packed house at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘I felt that if he wanted to sell us a house with the roof missing, he would achieve his purpose by an eloquent and sustained eulogy of the features that remained.’

  A few weeks later, while on a speaking tour of South Africa, Conan Doyle was again able to take up the cause of a wronged woman, though ‘wronged’ hardly conveys the fate of 18-year-old Irene Kanthack, who had been raped and stabbed to death while out walking her dog in a park near her family home in a respectable neighbourhood of Johannesburg. The investigating police chief, a Colonel Trigger, seemed to speak in the authentic voice of Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade when he announced that he had swiftly solved the crime by the expedient of arresting a ‘black native’ with a history of petty theft. Some of the circumstantial evidence would seem to have fit the suspect, but rather more of it to completely exonerate him. The man was soon released without charge.

  Other white women then came forward to claim that they, too, had been assaulted over the course of the previous weeks or months, close to the spot where Irene Kanthack’s body had been found. Was a serial homicidal rapist on the loose? Could it have been, as Colonel Trigger theorised, ‘some black man in the grip of his unquenchable urges’? On the day Conan Doyle arrived in town, it was apparently learnt that a voodoo cult was in operation only a mile away from the murder scene, and that this was in the habit of holding ‘messianic services’ including a communion ritual involving the use of freshly shed human blood.

  That was at least one account; but the accounts are as various and lurid as the scenes they claim to describe, and the only certainty is that at the time Doyle arrived in Johannesburg on his lecture tour there had been a thirty-fold increase in the already impressive daily number of local firearm sales, from approximately seventy to 2,100, and ‘no white women, whether singly or together, were to be seen anywhere on the city streets’ after dark.

  By all accounts, Doyle’s investigative antennae were soon alert to the double injustice he saw in Johannesburg. Not only had a helpless young woman been viciously assaulted; the police had clearly concluded that a black man had done it. ‘What confronted one was this rank determination to equate skin colour with criminality,’ he wrote. Doyle and a local journalist named Stephen Black set out to investigate, and soon turned up at least one lead that ‘should have rung loudly, even in the seemingly deaf ears of Col. Trigger’, Doyle remarked. This followed their interview of a janitor at an apartment block near the scene of Irene Kanthack’s murder who had witnessed a white man with a distinctive facial scar wringing out a bloodstained shirt in a washroom there on the evening of the attack. Doyle and his colleague went to the building and persuaded the janitor to show them the room where the mysterious scarred man had lived. It was empty, but not entirely free of evidence. According to Black, ‘Sir Arthur was shocked … The walls were covered by indecent drawings, more or less life size … women in the most clinical and obstetric attitudes.’ Doyle recovered his poise sufficiently to then arrange to pay the rent on the room for a month, apparently hoping that Colonel Trigger might be interested in visiting it.

  We’ll return to the outcome of the case; but for now it again illustrates the lengths to which Doyle would go on behalf of a wronged party, particularly if some form of officially tolerated prejudice or bigotry was involved. As the local Weekend Argus wrote of a speech he gave at the time:

  Sir Arthur’s talk was familiar, often dry, but his more inspired passages throbbed with the heady moral rhetoric of a great avenger, and grew shrill and staccato in their impassioned climaxes, crashing down together in a peal of continuous thunder and lightning.

  Conan Doyle was sometimes content to let the natural crusader in him do the work of the coldly reasoning detective. In some ways, too, he was more of a Dr Watson than a Sherlock Holmes. ‘I am the man in the street,’ Doyle insisted, which surely sums up Watson himself, whatever one makes of his later interpretations by everyone from Nigel Bruce to Jude Law. Attributing all the Holmesian virtues to his author would be to stretch what was only a fair working knowledge on Conan Doyle’s part of matters such as toxicology, ballistics and handwriting analysis.

  Doyle’s 6,000-word investigation in 1907 of a series of anonymous letters that accompanied the George Edalji cattle-maiming case (see Chapters 4 and 5) perhaps owed more to his sense of indignation at the wrongful imprisonment of the young Parsee convicted of the crime than it did to a close textual study of the letters. His subsequent presentation of his findings to a committee at the Home Office was not only unwisely long, but so oblivious to some of the established facts of the case that at least one of the officials present used the opportunity to discreetly take a nap. Doyle’s legendary self-confidence was not, however, impaired: he recorded in his case notes, ‘I trust that I have convinced every impartial man that the balance of evidence is enormously against Edalji having had anything to do with the letters’. Perhaps, at heart, he enjoyed sparring with the Establishment as much as he did fighting for victims of injustice.

  Those who love such sport know that the best place to look for a fight in the late Victorian or early Edwardian literary worlds is on the occasions when Conan Doyle felt that honour – sometimes his own, more often someone else’s – was at stake. Returning by sea from the Boer War in July 1900, he fell into a quarrel with Roger Raoul-Duval, a French novelist temporarily serving as an army observer, over the latter’s claim that the British troops had been in the habit of using the particularly destructive ‘dumdum’ bullets of the kind that tore apart the internal organs on striking a body. According to his first biographer, ‘Sir Arthur turned beetroot-red and called him a liar. The [Frenchman] tendered a written apology.’

  Several other such cases followed over the years. George Bernard Shaw’s public questioning of the bravery of the captain and crew of the Titanic after it went down in 1912 had Doyle figuratively spitting his teeth into his hand and saying that he was distressed to see that such an intelligent man as Shaw lacked ‘that quality – call it good taste, humanity, or what you will – which prevents one from needlessly hurting the feelings of others’. When H.G. Wells later went into print describing a certain medium and her ‘spirit guide’ as ‘wrought of self-deception, [as] pathetic as a rag doll which some lonely child has made for its own comfort’, Doyle again leapt to the defence. The individual circumstances varied, but as a rule the feuds show how Doyle saw himself: a responsible intellectual of rigid moral probity, who if necessary could quietly demolish an adversary.

  If Conan Doyle had the right moral stuff to invest in what he once called his ‘monster’ of Sherlock Holmes, he was also lucky enough to have a vast and receptive market waiting for him. The 18
90s saw the birth or rapid growth of a number of British retail businesses like John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Boots that remain familiar today. Appealing to broadly the same, increasingly urbanised middle class, it was also a golden era of mass circulation family periodicals like the new Strand magazine, at sixpence, half the price of most monthlies of the day, where Holmes found an immediately appreciative audience.

  ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ appeared in The Strand’s July 1891 issue, which enjoyed a total subscription of 485,000 copies, meaning perhaps 2 million readers out of a literate English population of some 17 million men, women and children: a story today would have to be read by roughly 7 million people, which is more than the combined circulation of The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Daily Express, the Daily Star, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, to claim a similar hold on the public. Doyle may have been frustrated that it was his detective fiction, not his ‘lasting work’, that the public craved, but the increasingly lucrative commissions and healthy royalty cheques proved a palliative silver lining.

  Doyle was also fortunate in his timing on another level. The turn of the twentieth century was uniquely ripe for the arrival of a moral avenger like Holmes, and it’s no surprise that so many readers came to think of him as a living person. The truly grisly murder mystery was then a staple of British life. Compared to the farrago of horrors that Doyle and his generation read about or personally experienced on a daily basis, much of today’s high-profile crime seems as innocuous and bloodless as a case of a purloined cow-creamer out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse.

  Doyle’s London was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality. It seemed the various outrages were all absurdly and graphically bloody and gory, the motivations behind them often ghoulish, and the cast of characters uniformly macabre and grotesque. This was the world that Conan Doyle knew was ready for the introduction of a contemporary moral equaliser like Holmes. It was also the one that provided Doyle himself with a wealth of bizarre and often outlandishly gothic adventures to rival anything in his fiction.

  The list that follows is far from exhaustive, but in just the decade from 1904 leading to the outbreak of the First World War there was the case of ‘George Chapman’ (actually a Pole named Klosowski) who joined the long list of London’s notable lady-killers when he was convicted of poisoning three successive wives. A year later a chemist’s assistant named Arthur Devereux murdered his young bride and their twin sons, placed the bodies in a trunk, calmly deposited this at a nearby warehouse and was going about his life as usual until his suspicious mother-in-law investigated; Devereux was tried and hung for his crimes in August 1905. Meanwhile, having been released from custody after murdering his father by bludgeoning him with a chamber pot, a journalist named William Benn would see his wife Florence commit suicide by hanging herself from a tree in their garden. The Benns’ young daughter would go on to become the actress Margaret Rutherford.

  Shortly afterwards there was the doubly poignant case of 13-year-old Thomas Polmear, described as a ‘village idiot’, who drowned and decapitated an infant in the belief that this was a normal thing to do, and then spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life in a lunatic asylum. In 1909 George Joseph Smith, a Londoner, began his practice of marrying and deserting an unspecified number of women before deciding to drown three of them in quick succession; the ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer was in turn executed in 1915.

  Meanwhile, a relatively rare case where the woman was the perpetrator, not the victim, came when 23-year-old Kittie Byron stabbed her lover Reginald Baker to death in the doorway of a London post office; although sentenced to hang, she was reprieved and eventually spent nine years in jail. Framing these various events was the brief but sensational reign of Jack the Ripper in 1888, and the infamous case of Dr Hawley Crippen, who after murdering his wife at their London home in January 1910 fled with a female companion disguised as his son and boarded an Atlantic liner in order to start a new life together in Canada. Crippen became the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy, and was hanged at Pentonville.

  The cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, which follow, were among the most notorious of an era when each successive ‘crime of the century’ appeared to be followed by a greater and even more hideous one with each passing year. It sometimes seems almost surprising that anyone got out of early Edwardian London in one piece, given the prevalence of violent offences, quite apart from the era’s other set-piece tragedies, such as the loss of the Titanic and the discovery seven months later of the frozen bodies of Captain Robert Scott and his companions in the Antarctic ice.

  As a whole, Britons were expected to be phlegmatic about death, and they often were. At the same time, people were clearly ready for someone who could make sense of the spectacular series of stabbings, shootings, poisonings, strangulations, assaults and petty betrayals that seemed to take place on such a regular basis, and so many of which involved a female or (so it was then thought) equally helpless member of society. It was Conan Doyle’s unique genius to provide this service on two levels: as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and as a detective of formidable skills in his own right.

  ‘A writer is a maker, not a man of action’, W.H. Auden once claimed, but even he went on to admit that all fiction is, in a sense, autobiographical. In the case of Conan Doyle, this is more than usually true. It’s difficult to study any individual major crime in Great Britain between around 1890 and 1925 without encountering Doyle in one form or another. His name was either being bandied about as a surrogate for the detective most needed to help redress a grievance, or failing that, Doyle was personally on the miscreant’s trail. He even found time to join a small group of senior policemen, lawyers, pathologists, academics, writers and other invited parties to discuss particularly controversial cases, past or present, where the justice system seemed to have failed.

  Called, simply, the Crimes Club, it met roughly six times annually from its inception in July 1904. It was a prestigious line-up: Doyle himself; Sir Arthur Pearson, founder of the Daily Express; Samuel Ingleby Oddie, soon to be one of the prosecutors in the Crippen case and later the Coroner of Westminster; Fletcher Robinson, the Express journalist who first came up with the basic plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles; and George Sims, a writer who had campaigned successfully for the release of Adolf Beck, a Norwegian engineer twice wrongfully convicted in British courts because of mistaken identity.

  As a rule, the club met in a private dining room of one of the great London hotels like the Langham, but there were occasional field trips: Doyle and his fellow members took at least one tour of Jack the Ripper sites in Whitechapel, where he was said to have inspected the various crime scenes through his magnifying glass – if true, a pleasingly Holmesian touch. Several years earlier, Doyle had visited Scotland Yard and been shown a letter supposedly written by the Ripper, remarking that Holmes would surely have made a facsimile of the signature and published it far and wide in the press in the hope someone would recognise it, an initiative that had escaped the official police force.

  As Sir Basil Thomson, the long-time Assistant Chief Commissioner at the Yard and a widely quoted authority on crime and criminology (until an arrest for public indecency with young girls put an end to his career) noted, ‘Conan Doyle would have made an outstanding detective had he devoted himself to crime detection rather than authorship. There was much of Sherlock Holmes in him.’ It was perhaps the singular tragedy of Doyle’s life that he saw himself as a ‘serious’ author, that with certain notable exceptions the reading public looked on the results with disdain, and that there was also a part of him drawn irresistibly, like Holmes himself, to the ghoulish or macabre. When you add a powerful moral compulsion to see justice served and a later unshakable belief that the living could communicate with the dead, the stage is set for high drama.

  2

  ‘THE DARKNESS OF
DOYLE’S MIND’

  To answer the main question first: about seven. That was how old Conan Doyle was when he first personally encountered a murderer. In September 1866, Doyle was dispatched to Newington Academy, an Edinburgh fee-paying school just three streets away from his latest family home. The building itself, bleak, gabled and weather-stained, was in gothic style, decorated with snarling heraldic animals and a hellfire biblical injunction etched over the front door. It does not make for a sympathetic account in Doyle’s memoirs. ‘A tawse-brandishing schoolmaster [Dr Patrick Wilson] of the old type made our young lives miserable,’ he wrote in a punitive account more than fifty years after the event. ‘From the age of seven to nine I suffered under this pockmarked, one-eyed rascal who might have stepped from the pages of Dickens … Home and books were my sole consolation.’ It was the start of a mutual antipathy, Doyle disliking Wilson for his stupidity and cruelty, Wilson despising Doyle for his literacy and general independence.

  He was a bright enough pupil, although he already showed signs of being both self-willed and resistant to some of the excesses of a traditional Roman Catholic education. Doyle served his requisite two years at the Academy without being expelled, but that was about the best that could be said of his time there. ‘My comrades were rough boys and I became a rough boy, too,’ he wrote.

  Although superficially the most respectable of Victorian educational establishments, the Academy had a viper in its midst. Shortly before Doyle arrived there, the school had appointed an eminently well-qualified Frenchman named Eugene Chantrelle to teach languages. Chantrelle had been born in Nantes in 1834, showed some early aptitude for chemistry, and later toyed with the idea of a career in medicine. In the charged political atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century France he had also developed certain strong republican sympathies.