The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Was he really a Holmes, or a Watson? Or a bit of both? Doyle’s son Adrian – who went off the rails in later life, moving around Switzerland and various hotels on the French Riviera and often leaving no forwarding address, negotiating the sale of his father’s papers as he went, and thus who may not be an entirely credible witness – later wrote of a childhood with a distinct flavour of Baker Street to it:

  My memories are mottled with sudden, silent periods when following upon some agitated stranger or missive, my father would disappear into his study for two or three days on end … The hushed footfalls of the whole household, the tray of untasted food standing on the threshold, the subconscious feeling of tension that would settle on family and staff alike, were not less than the reflected essence of the brain, the lamp and the letter that wrought their unpublicised drama on the inner side of the curtained door.

  In short, Doyle was that comparative rarity, a contented author, sharply focused when circumstances demanded, and at all other times a genial companion to his family and friends. One American reporter thought him:

  A prime slab of Merry England … He laughed easily, and loudly, with great gusto, usually slapping his knee in exclamation at the same time … The emotions were always healthily near the surface. He was blessed with a marvelous expressive face that turned beet-red when he was angry, which was seldom, and lit up when he was pleased.

  And yet Conan Doyle’s equilibrium was often tested by the most irregular circumstances and the most curious events. ‘Those who knew him best will testify, I think, to the darkness of Doyle’s mind in its contemplation of human nature,’ said Bernard Ernst, an author and lawyer who became a friend. ‘He was a smoothly polished vessel filled with the most toxic content.’

  In March 1885, Conan Doyle’s near neighbour and colleague Dr William Pike, a fellow Scot, sought his opinion on a patient who appeared to be suffering from recurrent headaches and nausea, which Pike thought might be symptoms of something more serious. The victim was a 25-year-old man named Jack Hawkins. He had been living for the previous six months in a Southsea boarding house with his widowed mother and elder sister, but as Jack’s condition worsened they had moved into a private home at 2 Queen’s Gate, Osborne Road, a few minutes’ walk to the south of Elm Grove.

  Doyle’s examination confirmed what Dr Pike had feared: Hawkins was suffering from ‘dropsy’, or cerebral meningitis, an inflammation of the brain lining for which there was then no known cure. Under the circumstances, the doctors could do little more than prescribe a course of bedrest, fluids and analgesics. It’s possible that Dr Pike may have subsequently tried to ‘ventilate’ his patient by pumping air into his lungs with a household bellows. In any event, the treatment was unsuccessful. Jack Hawkins continued to deteriorate rapidly, and neither his mother nor sister could provide the constant care he required. In time, Doyle, who had a spare room, made a suggestion that was undoubtedly humanitarian as well as narrowly commercial. Hawkins could come to live with him as a paying guest at Elm Grove, where he would at least be kept as comfortable as the circumstances allowed.

  Although there are obvious dangers in taking the Holmes stories too literally, the detective’s 1893 adventure of ‘The Resident Patient’ gives a workable account of what followed. In the fictional treatment, the ‘Hawkins’ character is a renegade member of a criminal gang who chooses a doctor’s house in which to hide out from his vengeful former associates. There are one or two other significant embellishments, such as the arrival at the surgery of a mysterious Russian nobleman prone to cataleptic fits, unique to the published tale. But the essence of the plot, the taking of sanctuary by a distressed individual in a medical practice, is common to both versions. It was an example of how Doyle would often confront and dramatise the events of his own life in order to make a suitably intricate case for Holmes.

  Within only a day or two of Jack Hawkins being brought to Elm Grove, his condition worsened significantly. The headaches gave way to seizures, and by his third night in residence Doyle was administering his patient the powerful sedative chloral, which if taken in excess can itself produce convulsions, heart irregularities and even death. On the evening of the fourth day, Doyle called in Dr Pike for another consultation. They agreed that there was nothing further to be done. Early the following morning, 25 March, Doyle was awakened by the sound of his housekeeper screaming from the next room. She had gone in to take Hawkins his daily medication, and found him dead in his bed.

  Conan Doyle’s immediate reaction to the tragedy seemed to dwell less on the narrowly medical and instead to favour a more spiritual interpretation of events. ‘There is great promise, I think, in the faces of the dead,’ he wrote, impressed by the way in which Hawkins now appeared to be so ‘thoroughly serene’. ‘They say it is but the post-mortem relaxation of the muscles, but it is one of the points on which I would like to see science wrong.’

  Two days later, on the morning of Friday, 27 March, Doyle helped to carry Hawkins’s coffin out of the front door of his house (uncongenial to a doctor still trying to win the confidence of his local community) and rode at the head of the small funeral cortège to the nearby cemetery. By this stage, he had come to take notice of the dead man’s sister Louisa, or ‘Touie’, a handsome and soft-spoken 27-year-old spinster who, like Doyle himself, had a family secret: her older brother Jeremiah had spent the last fifteen years confined in a mental ward, where he tirelessly filled sketchbooks with drawings that ranged from the classically religious to the obsessively anatomical, ‘displaying the human form at its most stark’, in one contemporary account. With her round face and brown-red hair, which she often wore in a bun, it’s perhaps also worth adding that Louisa bore a passing resemblance to a younger version of Doyle’s mother, Mary.

  Later on the night of the funeral, Conan Doyle returned home to find a police inspector waiting for him on his doorstep. There had been an allegation of murder against him, the caller announced. Recalling the incident many years later, Doyle justifiably remarked that the visit had come ‘like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky’. Once inside, the inspector explained that he had received an anonymous letter questioning the speed with which Jack Hawkins had succumbed to his final illness while in Doyle’s care. He was there now, he added, as an ‘objective explorer’ trying to illuminate the facts in the case. What medications had Dr Doyle prescribed for his patient? Who had signed the death certificate? Why had it been thought fit to bury Jack Hawkins with such haste? For the imaginative and sensitive Doyle, the inquisitive official sitting before him writing in his notebook must have seemed a sinister, threatening figure, if not one quite on the order of Professor Moriarty. Under the circumstances, it was perhaps fortunate that Dr Pike was able to confirm that he had seen the patient the night before he died, and that his colleague Doyle had done everything possible for the poor man.

  Although the police soon concluded their enquiries into Jack Hawkins’s death, the anonymous correspondent might conceivably have felt justified in renewing his efforts in the light of what followed. In the course of the next few weeks, an affection formed between Hawkins’s doctor and bereaved sister, who now enjoyed a sole legacy of £100 a year from her late father’s estate, circumstances broadly similar to those contained in the 1890 Holmes tale The Sign of the Four. The sweet-natured Louisa was duly presented to Doyle’s mother, who approved. In all, it was to be a year of wildly fluctuating fortunes for the young literary doctor. A strange mixture of emotional fragility and moral poise, he reported feeling ‘rapturous again’ soon after he began courting Louisa, whom he married on 5 August 1885.

  Even so, Doyle retained ‘potent memories’ of the Hawkins affair, and the uneasy sensation of how even an innocent man might feel while under official suspicion, for the remaining forty-five years of his life. Speaking of his broader sense of the precariousness of the human condition, he later coined the phrase ‘The abyss under every soul’. It’s perhaps not coincidental that Doyle first began to write A Study in Scarlet s
itting in that same downstairs interview room, on the first anniversary of the inspector’s visit. He would often return to the theme of a man unjustly accused in the course of the fifty-nine Holmes tales that followed.

  A Study in Scarlet did not prove easy to place, and even its eventual appearance in the Christmas Beeton’s anthology was little cause for celebration. It brought its author neither fame nor fortune. The publishers paid Doyle the unpromising sum of £25 for the copyright, and ‘I never at any time received another penny for it,’ he recorded in his memoirs. The story resurfaced in a modest book edition the following year, but even then it avoided any significant sales. At that stage Doyle had few plans to revive the eccentric inhabitants of 221b Baker Street, and, in common with the reading public, clearly had no idea that they were bound for immortality.

  Reviewing his prospects in 1889, shortly before the pivotal commission for The Sign of the Four, the struggling young author could note only that his life at the time consisted of his medical practice, his paranormal interests and his writing, in that order, ‘with a little cricket as a corrective’. As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Conan Doyle was still obliged to take whatever literary hack work he could, of which his translation of a technical German submission to the Gas and Water Gazette was but one milestone down a long road of ‘serial indignities [and] burdens’. In 1888, one publisher declined Doyle’s historical novel Micah Clarke, set at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, with the scathing verdict that it lacked ‘the one great necessary point for fiction, i.e. interest’.

  For Doyle, however, returning to crime writing almost seemed to be a case of predestination. It was as if the material was searching him out. Sometimes this took the form of a curious, true-life encounter with the criminal fraternity, while at others the inspiration was of a more occult nature. Both sets of circumstances clearly appealed to Doyle’s adventurous imagination and met his requirement for a suitably dramatic denouement. As he understood it, he was being led by unseen but insistent hands ‘down an indefeasible path, towards a career sometimes expressly, often dimly, stated’.

  In early 1887, Conan Doyle had such an experience while sitting in a séance room in Portsmouth that would affect him for the rest of his life. Alfred Drayson was present, along with a mutual friend, a young architect named Henry Ball, as well as four or five others. The sitters prayed together around a small table, with the proceedings led by Ball, who also practised as a clairvoyant. All of those gathered had previously affirmed their belief in the distinct prospect of communion with the dead. During the prayers, Ball, small and bespectacled, and seemingly the most conventional of figures, was seized by what he took to be a visitation of the Holy Spirit. The tone and message of his prayer changed, and he prophesied that Doyle – still unknown in literary circles – would become a world-famous author. Another participant in the session who was clasping Doyle’s hand felt ‘a bolt of current’ run through it. Ball’s own hand was shaking uncontrollably at the time. When the lights came up again a few moments later they revealed only the spectacle of half a dozen formally dressed Victorian men sitting around a suburban Portsmouth dining table, but Ball regarded it as an authentic paranormal message. Doyle also accepted the prophecy as valid.

  In time, there were to be more material sources of inspiration for Doyle’s subsequent series of detective fiction. A letter written by a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society touches on the curious case of the swarthy young man who presented himself one morning at Doyle’s surgery in Elm Grove. The caller’s hand was heavily bandaged, supposedly as a result of a late-night industrial accident. Doyle deduced from the precise serrations of the man’s wound, and the telltale evidence of ink blotches, that his patient had in fact been involved in a counterfeiting operation gone wrong. This particular diagnosis effectively combined the routinely medical with some of Holmes’s own powers of logical observation. It was ‘quite a turn-up,’ the correspondent would go on to note.

  The hurried departure of the injured man out of the back door of the surgery, and the swift subsequent arrival of the police to interview Doyle – their second appearance on his doorstep in successive years – provide another real-life Victorian puzzle plot, one which countless readers have gone on to enjoy as the classic 1892 Holmes tale (one of only two such cases Dr Watson ever brought to his friend’s attention) ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’.

  In particular, the criminal ambience of late Victorian Portsmouth, with its bustling docks where women in tight skirts loitered in doorways or ‘disported themselves with drunken sailors until daybreak’, must have commended itself to the aspiring detective writer, always vicariously thrilled by the court pages in the Evening News and ready to appropriate them for his fiction. The contemporary press reveals an underworld of thieves and imposters, and a published account of Christmas week, 1886, records the various judicial proceedings taken against ‘bawdy-house keepers, night crawlers, pick-pockets, robbers, coshers … and fraudulent merchants who take advantage of the annual merriment’, even in that season of supposed peace and goodwill.

  Conan Doyle was clearly in his element as an ambitious young author whose most famous character relied for his existence on a continually replenished supply of varied and dramatic criminal activity. It was as if the more roguish members of the community actively sought Doyle out. There was the lady patient, for example, who called on him one morning in 1887 with a request for a ‘highly specialised and unusual reconstructive procedure’ (a disguise not intended for her face), a commission he declined; and others whom he remembered for their ‘boisterous, individualistic and sometimes violent’ natures. As a young medical student, Doyle had made the acquaintance of Sir Robert Christison, a distinguished former president of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians, and a man of ‘obscure [and] faintly shady’ personal habits, widely thought to have combined with the German-born criminal Adam Worth to serve as models for the notorious Professor Moriarty, although others have conferred the honour on Christison’s successor Thomas Fraser, a classically austere Scot chiefly remembered today as a tireless advocate of vivisection, briefly one of Doyle’s own enthusiasms.

  At some stage early in 1891, in the first flush of his success with Holmes, Doyle went to London’s Portman Square, immediately off Baker Street, to be photographed by the society portraitist Herbert Barraud. It was another case of art mirroring life, as Barraud, a blackmailer, served at least in part as inspiration for the character of Charles Augustus Milverton, perhaps the greatest single ogre to be found anywhere among the 100-odd criminals in the Holmes canon. A dictionary of 1897 (the year after Barraud’s death) lists him as ‘a base and impudent man [about whom] there was an atmosphere of sulfur and reeking fish’.

  Doyle was also familiar with the details of the suggestively named Charles Augustus Howell (1840–90), an art dealer and alleged swindler who notoriously organised the exhumation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal and the retrieval of the poems Rossetti had left buried in her coffin seven years earlier. Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Howell was found lying in the street outside a Chelsea pub with his throat slit, and a coin jammed in his mouth, possibly an allusion to a life given over to extortion and slander. The poet Algernon Swinburne wrote of Howell that he hoped he was ‘in that particular circle of Malebolge where the coating of external excrement makes it impossible to see whether the damned dog’s head is or is not tonsured’. It’s both a sign of the times and a curious fact of his own life that even as a provincial family doctor Conan Doyle should have consistently encountered such a rich and varied cast of ruffians.

  All of these were of course dwarfed by the activities of Jack the Ripper between August and November 1888, a period when Conan Doyle was still at work in Portsmouth and frequently travelling to London to arrange the publication of his book Micah Clarke. The ‘theory’ that Doyle himself was the Ripper belongs in fairyland, although, as briefed by his old tutor Joseph Bell, he certainl
y knew of both the more graphic details of the Whitechapel killings and the widespread panic they caused.

  One way or another, the eminently respectable general practitioner seemed to be personally acquainted with many of the more memorable murders in Britain. According to Adrian Conan Doyle, his father ‘thought it likely that [the Ripper] had a rough knowledge of surgery. He also thought it probable he clothed himself as a woman to approach his victims without arousing suspicion on their part.’

  As his own beliefs changed, Doyle came to feel that the police should make more use of clairvoyance in gaining what he called ‘divine insight’ into cases like the Ripper’s. Joseph Bell later remarked that he and ‘a medical man who liked puzzles’ had separately investigated the series of five murders. Bell recalled:

  There were two of us in the hunt and when two men set out to find a golf ball in the rough, they expect to find it where the straight lines marked in their mind’s eye to it, from their original positions, crossed. In the same way, when two men set out to study a crime mystery, it is where their researches intersect that we have a result.

  In November 1888, Bell and Doyle each wrote down the name of his prime suspect in the Ripper case and placed it in a sealed envelope. When they opened the envelopes they found that they had written down the same name: James Kenneth Stephen, an Old Etonian poet and author, known equally for his brooding good looks and prodigious physical strength, who until recently had been employed as tutor to Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. Stephen had suffered a serious head injury in the winter of 1887, and this had seemingly exacerbated his natural tendency to bouts of psychosis and violence, which he believed ‘could only be explained by the most pronounced insanity’. He spent much of the next four years alternating between a post at Kings College, Cambridge, and a mental asylum in Northampton. In January 1892, Stephen heard that his erstwhile pupil and friend, 28-year-old Prince Albert, had died of pneumonia. From that moment onwards, he refused to eat, and died just twenty days later. He was 32. The official cause of death was given as ‘mania’.