The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  While still at school, Chantrelle was both wounded and arrested in the course of an anti-government march in Paris. Shortly after his release from custody, he chose to move abroad, first to the United States, then England, and finally to Edinburgh, where he arrived in 1865. Aged 31, Chantrelle boasted among his achievements (and boast he did) fluency in English, French, German, Latin and Greek. He had written at least one textbook, though it remains unclear if this was commercially published or more privately available, and was known to furnish medical and political opinions freely around the Edinburgh pubs.

  To the local young women, Chantrelle must have cut a dashing figure, with his elegant Parisian frock coat, close-clipped, brilliantined black hair, luxuriant side-whiskers and mournful dark eyes. At the Academy, which was co-educational, he was known to stride into class, the gorgeous, if unearned, gown of l’Ordre des Médecins billowing behind him, and address his female students with a suave ‘Bonjour, mademoiselles’.

  By the time Doyle came to know him in the autumn of 1866, Chantrelle was already carrying on an affair with an attractive Academy fifth-former named Elizabeth Cullen Dyer. She was 15 years old. The relationship seems to have gone undetected until the late winter of 1867, when Dyer fell pregnant. This situation was too much for Dr Wilson, who dismissed both parties from his school. Thirty-four-year-old Chantrelle and then 17-year-old Dyer married in Edinburgh on 11 August 1868, and the first of their four sons was born ten weeks later.

  Doyle himself left the Academy at about the same time, and spent the next seven years at successive boarding schools in Lancashire. Although he omits it from his memoirs, he would have known very well about the scandalous affair he left behind in Edinburgh. He could hardly have avoided it, since an exotic foreigner like Chantrelle had inevitably excited gossip at the Academy even before he had seduced one of his students there. Among other things, it was rumoured that he had wives in several North American cities, as well as one at home in France, and that his sexual relations tended to the sadistic.

  The Chantrelles’ subsequent marriage was wretchedly unhappy, and could have served as one of those pitiful accounts of domestic woe that form the prologue to several Sherlock Holmes cases. In the words of the editor of the transcript of Chantrelle’s eventual trial:

  That he ever had any affection for his wife is doubtful. A more melancholy story of married life has seldom been told in a Court of Justice … Through the years, he frequently abused her without reason, made her the butt of his blasphemy, laid violent hands on her, terrified her by his threats, and to her knowledge was systematically unfaithful to her.

  In December 1876, Elizabeth complained to the police that Chantrelle had thrashed her ‘unmercifully’ on her bare buttocks with a horsewhip, which even in the Scotland of those days, where severe beatings of wives were not uncommon, being considered good for the soul, was enough to merit an official caution. The following October, he took out a policy for £1,000 (roughly £90,000 today) with the Scottish Star Assurance Company in the event that his young wife should predecease him. At Chantrelle’s trial it was noted that he had gone to some trouble to understand the definition of ‘accidental death’ in the contract, and specifically whether ‘cramps’ and mishaps with ‘noxious vapours or fumes’ would be included.

  On the morning of 2 January 1878, a servant girl found Elizabeth Chantrelle lying unconscious in her bed. There was a strong smell of gas in the room, apparently caused by a broken valve in a nearby fireplace. After being examined by a local doctor who diagnosed a then not unusual case of coal poisoning, the victim was taken to the Royal Infirmary, where she died later that afternoon without regaining consciousness. Elizabeth Chantrelle was 26 years old.

  This was the case that brought the attention of Dr Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh’s first Medical Officer of Health and one of the pioneers of the use of toxicology in criminal investigations. Littlejohn set himself to closely studying the vomited matter found on Elizabeth Chantrelle’s bedclothes. This showed the presence of opium, which had evidently combined with the effects of gradual gas inhalation to induce death. Eugene Chantrelle was put on trial for his wife’s murder, found guilty, and executed on 31 May 1878. He protested his innocence, but at least managed a note of resignation at the end. ‘If it is to be, it must be,’ Chantrelle remarked as he was led to the gallows.

  Although Conan Doyle plays only a walk-on part in the Chantrelle affair, it sets the scene for several of his later criminal investigations. There was the central fact of a cruelly abused young woman, the starting point for several of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, and always of particular concern to Doyle himself. The London Globe, which Doyle took, published a long account filled with circumstantial detail about the frequent arguments between Elizabeth Chantrelle and her husband, and about how the latter had behaved more ‘smoothly’ towards her in the last weeks of her life, apparently to lull her into a sense of false security. It also alleged that the victim’s ‘intimate organs’ had been horribly bruised, and that there were other signs of ‘vile use’.

  Then there was the question of the actual poisoning, which enjoyed something of a vogue among late Victorian homicides. A few years before the Chantrelle tragedy, a young Glasgow woman named Madeleine Smith had gone on trial charged with serving her lover cocoa laced with arsenic (Doyle’s father Charles had drawn sketches of the courtroom scene for the press), just one of several such criminal adulterations in the Scotland of that time. Thanks to men like Henry Littlejohn and Joseph Bell (who also consulted on the Chantrelles), recent advances in forensic medicine made it increasingly likely that cases of deliberate poisoning would result in a successful conviction.

  Finally, there was Doyle’s personal connection to the Chantrelles; he had known both the husband and wife, he was studying under Joseph Bell at the time of Chantrelle’s trial, and the murder scene at 81 George Street in central Edinburgh was only a short walk away from his childhood home. It’s surely not coincidental that toxins and venoms play such a prominent role in the Sherlock Holmes adventures, or that Holmes was given what Dr Watson calls ‘profound knowledge of chemistry … well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally’, among several other skills of the modern-day medical examiner. Along with the ‘low Toby’ (today’s mugger), the ‘cracksman’ (or house-breaker), the ‘snoozer’ (who specialised in hotel jobs), the ‘inheritance hurrier’, or poisoner, were all criminals typical of the period when Doyle came to create the definitive consulting detective.

  ‘It was the sort of age,’ Doyle later remarked, ‘when you copy out bits of Poe and carry them around as if you’d written them.’ He was referring to his early twenties, when he enjoyed a dual career as a seemingly respectable qualifying family doctor and an author of ‘spookist’ tales like 1883’s ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, a chiller inspired by the real-life case of the Mary Celeste, the brig found drifting unmanned off Gibraltar ten years earlier. ‘It will make a sensation,’ Doyle confidently predicted, suggesting that under the veneer of gentlemanly diffidence he already had a clear vision both of himself and his ability. Although he pocketed a handsome 29 guinea fee for his efforts, a significant step down the road of convincing the 24-year-old author to take up the pen full-time, overnight fame eluded him. The magazine published the story without a byline, leading many readers to speculate that it had been written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Ironically, Conan Doyle was far from pleased at the enormous publicity he duly attracted only a few years later. As early as 1892, when he was 33, he was fretting about having squandered his ‘entire mental life’ on his ‘small creation’ of Sherlock Holmes, returning to the character in later years chiefly to pay his bills. Perhaps just as painful to Doyle as the nagging sense of his slumming it with Holmes was the unwelcome attention of the detective’s curious or obsessed fans. The author complained with some justification that his daily postbag soon brought him dozens of ‘highly charged’ and ‘lunatic’ requests for his services as a criminal investigato
r. Many other applicants arrived in person at Doyle’s home, whose doorstep soon teemed with men and women bearing everything from a pack of slavering bloodhounds on a leash to a deceased loved one’s apparent coded communications from beyond the grave. A number of callers doggedly refused to leave the premises without a personal consultation with Sherlock Holmes.

  In August 1892, when a journalist outed Joseph Bell as the inspiration for Holmes, Doyle immediately wrote to his old professor to warn that he, too, could now expect to receive letters from ‘raving idiots’. He wearily quoted some of his own correspondence, which then included a series of appeals from a merchant in Liverpool anxious to know Holmes’s views on Jack the Ripper; some equally profuse notes from a young man in Glasgow, who would record the exact time of composition – down to the second – of the beginning and end of his messages; and others ‘who believe their neighbours are starving maiden aunts to death in hermetically sealed attics’.

  Conan Doyle’s ambivalence about Holmes was only part of an elaborate tapestry of conflicting beliefs and ambitions that afflicted the author throughout his life. One part of him was content to turn out a stream of thrilling, if relatively undemanding yarns of a gaunt, drug-taking hero saving his clients, and sometimes England herself, from dastardly plots. Another side wanted to be remembered as a great creative artist and historian. There was a Doyle who was eminently sane, solid, clubbable and conservative, a ‘birthright Catholic’, as he put it, whose acceptance of the infallibility and literal correctness of the Bible eventually gave way to a broadly Unitarian faith which held that there was a ‘wonderful poise’ to the universe and ‘tremendous power of conception’ behind it. And there was the formally-trained man of science who struck out in a new direction early in his medical career. Beneath his surface orthodoxy, Doyle was soon attending his first séances and following the reincarnation and time travel theories of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian-born spiritualist who had emigrated to New York and founded the Theosophical Society there, apparently in the belief that the power of the modern state ‘constantly encroaches on our Aryan supremacy’.

  In 1883, Doyle fell in with one of those faintly eccentric polymathic figures so prevalent in Victorian public life. Alfred Drayson, a fellow member of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, was a distinguished former soldier and a prolific author on everything from the game of billiards to the rotation of the earth, on which he wrote a sophisticated, if controversial, monograph.

  One night in January 1887, Doyle, Drayson and some other like-minded researchers met in the darkened dining room of a house in the north end of Portsmouth. The initial results of their séance were disappointing, although after half an hour of silence the dining table itself began to tap up and down in a kind of Morse code they interpreted as ‘You are going too slowly! How long are you going to take?’

  A few weeks later, Doyle met with a local professional medium named Horstead, ‘a small bald grey man with a pleasant expression’, who was apparently able to make household items such as a box of eggs materialise in front of them, as well as to summon the departed. At a sitting in Portsmouth on 16 June 1887, Horstead dropped his head to his chest and began to speak in a low, tremulous voice in which he announced that the spirits were among them. For some time, the group sat staring down at the heavy oak table in front of them. Then, slowly at first, it began to rise up, apparently of its own accord. Horstead waited for a moment, during which the room grew appreciably colder, and then passed Doyle a scrap of paper. The writing on it read, ‘This gentleman is a healer. Tell him not to read Leigh Hunt’s book.’ As Doyle had then been thinking of buying that critic’s The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, it appeared to be a notable feat of psychic prediction. After a few more seconds, the table banged down to the floor again.

  When the lights came back up, Doyle sat silent for several moments. The inquisitive but still devoutly Catholic 28-year-old doctor had just undergone a conversion into a disciple of the occult, who would one day become the de facto head of a new worldwide religion. Doyle would later note that this event ‘marked in my spiritual career the change of “I believe” into “I know’”.

  Conan Doyle’s eight years in residence at No. 1, Bush Villas, Elm Grove, in the Portsmouth suburb of Southsea, not only marked his spiritual reawakening. They proved to be the turning point of his whole life. Arriving there as a ‘feckless’ bachelor GP with less than £10 to his name, he left again as a well-received author and man of affairs, with a wife and young daughter in tow. It was here that Doyle brought Holmes to life when he began A Study in Scarlet in March 1886, finishing the full 45,000-word manuscript in just seven weeks, although it took a further nineteen months before it finally saw the light of day in the popular Beeton’s Christmas Annual.

  Situated between a church and a pub, Doyle’s home was a sooty, three-storey brick house with little pretension to elegance. Although the downstairs consulting room was adequately furnished, the actual living quarters were spartan, asphalt-floored and minimally heated in wintertime. When Doyle first took possession, he had been caught short by the sight in the dimly lit scullery of several rows of human skulls grotesquely smiling up at him. Recovering from his shock, he discovered that they were plaster of Paris models, apparently abandoned by the building’s previous tenant, a dentist.

  Having failed to persuade his mother to allow his 14-year-old sister Connie to live with him in Portsmouth, Doyle successfully asked her to send his 9-year-old brother Innes instead. With the eventual addition of a housekeeper and the regular arrival of messengers knocking at the door, Bush Villas would come to assume at least some of the characteristics of the fictional ménage at Baker Street. By the late 1880s, the household also included a resident cook, a shuffling valet-doorman, and a part-time maid who was paid a shilling a week. A visitor recalled that the upstairs rooms were increasingly cluttered with a ‘medley of the refined and the Bohemian. There were military prints displayed alongside whimsical paintings of fairies, shelves of various chemical apparatus, clouds of pipe smoke’, and a ‘muscular atmosphere’ symbolised by a harpoon, a bear’s skull and a seal’s paw, among other souvenirs of Conan Doyle’s service as ship’s doctor on the whaler SS Hope, all making for another real-life link to the murky pantomime set of Baker Street. When Doyle finally left Southsea in December 1890, he was given a farewell dinner presided over by his friend and colleague Dr James Watson.

  Doyle, like Holmes, valued his privacy, and in addition had the author’s natural capacity for introspection. But as a struggling young doctor, he was always aware of the need to advertise his services. A week after his arrival, the Portsmouth Evening News carried the paid announcement, ‘Dr Doyle begs to notify that he has removed to 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, next to the Bush Hotel’.

  One wet evening later that summer, a young cotton salesman apparently named ‘Hynes’ or ‘Hines’ rode by the house on his way up Kings Road towards the docks. A clap of thunder caused his horse to rear up, and Hynes was thrown to the ground. He fell heavily on the cobblestones and lay there, either unconscious or badly winded, for some half an hour. During this time several patrons sauntered in or out of the door of the nearby pub, but, evidently believing the man to be drunk, they left him undisturbed in the gutter. He was still there as night began to fall, wearing only the light clothes in which he had been making his way across town to the harbour. Eventually, the door of Bush Villas opened and Conan Doyle emerged to perform his nightly ritual of vigorously polishing the brass nameplate on his front wall.

  When Doyle saw the injured man, he went to action. Within a minute he had picked him up and carried him back inside the house, where he swiftly bandaged his head and then sent for a carriage to take him to hospital. Hynes later remembered that his rescuer – ‘a big, square-chested man with a deep Scots burr’ – had passed the time while they waited by speaking, a little incongruously, of his interest in matters such as mesmerism, telepathy and reincarnation. ‘Death cannot end all,’ he as
sured his patient. After a few minutes, two uniformed attendants arrived at the door to bear Hynes off to the Royal Portsmouth Infirmary.

  The second they were safely on their way, Doyle himself jammed on his coat and hat and ran the 2 miles to the offices of the Evening News in order to breathlessly recount the adventure of ‘the bloodstained body in the street’, as the paper put it in their account of the story. Doyle’s own name was prominently displayed throughout. In time the injured salesman made a full recovery and returned to work in his native Liverpool. He received a bill from Doyle for 2 guineas. Some nine years later the first batch of Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in The Strand magazine, marking the moment at which Doyle’s literary vocation decisively overtook his medical career. It was then that Hynes realised that the man who had spoken quietly to him about the paranormal that evening in Portsmouth was also the inventor of a character ‘who dealt in phenomena altogether more solid and earthbound than did his creator’.

  As a career, the writing of world-renowned mystery adventures would seem to be remarkably flexible in accommodating varying personal circumstances. There have been authors like Edgar Allan Poe, the godfather of the modern detective genre, whose profoundly melancholy life and enigmatic early death somehow seem to be of a piece with his published fiction; and others, like Agatha Christie, who with certain rare exceptions (see Chapter 10) have appeared to lead the life of a churchgoing provincial English schoolteacher of the most sound traditional habits. Conan Doyle makes such an interesting case because he seems to embody both these extremes: on the one hand, a solidly Establishment type, patriotic and middlebrow, who as time went on seemed to cut a reassuringly old-fashioned if not mildly fogeyish figure, liking nothing more than to potter around his garden or to get up in plus fours for a round of golf; on the other, a closet radical, a latent occultist and table-tapper, and a champion of those persecuted for their political or spiritual beliefs.