The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

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  DUET WITH AN OCCASIONAL CHORUS

  It’s not clear exactly when Conan Doyle became aware that his first brief flirtation with Sherlock Holmes might evolve into a lifelong marriage. Even as crowds lined up in the street to buy each successive issue of The Strand featuring the detective’s latest adventure, his author doggedly forged ahead with his novel The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents, dealing with the oppression of the seventeenth-century Huguenots and their exodus to America. If anything, Doyle continued to look on literature as the lesser part of his dual career, and on Holmes himself as a definite if increasingly lucrative distraction.

  In late 1891, when he was 32, the self-described ‘ink-stained physic’ was still keeping his options open. The character ‘seems to have caught on,’ Doyle would remark calmly as the global Sherlock Holmes publishing phenomenon got under way, before adding, ‘It augurs well for the new book’.

  Whether a doctor with a paying sideline in fiction, or a writer who also happened to keep a medical practice, Conan Doyle consistently came to the defence of the persecuted or oppressed. If the aggrieved party happened to be a lady, so much the better. Doyle may not have been a ‘feminist’ in the later sense of the word, but he was, in his way, a comparatively modern man. In 1897 he published a story called ‘The Confession’, in which a Catholic woman speaks of her feelings of guilt over a youthful love affair.

  Doyle’s novel A Duet with an Occasional Chorus followed two years later, just as he grappled with challenges in his own marriage. It, too, touches on sexual infidelity. Most modern readers would take both these works in their stride, but at the time they rattled the bars that defined the limits of respectable literature. When a friend named Jeannie Bettany was suddenly widowed in 1892, Doyle wrote her a letter with the suggestive hope that she would not squander ‘upon household and maternal duties what is meant for the world’. In broadly similar vein, there’s the description of A Duet’s Frank Crosse that seems to speak just as much of his author:

  There was sometimes just a touch of the savage in Crosse … He left upon women the impression, not altogether unwelcome, that there were unexplored recesses of his nature to which the most intimate of them had never penetrated. In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found him dull.

  A man of the world, then, but also one who worked tirelessly on behalf of divorce law reform and other initiatives intended to liberate ‘the fairer – and higher – sex from mindless convention’. Doyle ‘undoubtedly thought that women were superior,’ his daughter Jean would later remark, reflecting on his belief that ‘a wife would, in a happy home, influence her husband’. To Doyle, women were sometimes shallow and vain, more often able and resolute, and, whatever their character, invariably the target of his finely honed sense of chivalry and compassion if wronged.

  On 30 September 1896, a wealthy San Francisco tea importer named Walter Castle, his wife Ella and their 9-year-old son Frederick checked in to the Cecil Hotel on the Thames Embankment in London. The venue, which sported a Moorish façade, carved marble columns, velvet pile and an Indian smoking room, was then the last word in opulence, and not normally associated with episodes of petty crime. The Castles were on the final leg of a grand European tour, and planned to return across the Atlantic a week later. Both adult members of the family were confirmed Anglophiles, and had often spoken of their plans to bring various souvenirs of the old country back home to America. ‘My own special interest in silverware developed during this period,’ Ella later explained, ‘and I knew how a beautiful tablepiece from Garrard or Asprey would captivate our friends when next we sat down to dine together in California.’

  But if Mrs Castle thought that her visit to London would be merely an enjoyable extended shopping trip, she was to be cruelly disappointed. On 5 October, the police arrived in the family’s hotel suite and began a thorough search of the premises. They had been alerted by a suspicious nearby shopkeeper, who reported – in the words of the official complaint – ‘that the pieces left on display [there] had been reduced in number by at least one Great Exhibition cream jug, fancy tea-cup, [and] Imperial Russian Pillbox Clock (blue)’, following Mrs Castle’s visit. There were other allegations, too, that someone had recently removed items of cutlery from the hotel’s dining room. ‘We know nothing about it,’ Walter Castle told the police. ‘We are just here for some peace and quiet.’ There had been absolutely nothing untoward about their stay in London to date, he added, except that a dog had bitten his wife on the ankle, and she had become ‘incensed’ as a result.

  Once in the suite, the police quickly took possession of several diamond brooches, some rings and ‘a fancy necklace of Egyptian design’ found in the bottom of a steamer trunk. Mr Castle still remained calm, inviting his guests to sit down and politely asking the lead investigator, a Detective Arrow, ‘What’s this all about, friend?’ A moment later, one of the officers opened a large oak wardrobe and discovered not only the missing shop chinaware, but also:

  Seventeen ornate fans, a score of tortoiseshell combs, sixteen brooches, diverse mufflers, scarves [and] gloves, three sables, four engraved toast racks, two hallmarked egg-cups, assorted utensils and a tall cream-pot.

  While Mr Castle remained silent, his wife began to rapidly pace up and down the room, sobbing quietly. The couple were arrested on charges of theft, and spent the next several nights in prison.

  Eventually, a court decided that Walter Castle, if seeming ‘oddly removed’ from events, had no case to answer. His wife, who appeared in the dock half-swooning, and supported by two uniformed nurses, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of shoplifting. Her QC, Sir Edward Clarke, introduced evidence to suggest that his client was a mentally unstable, physically ill woman, who from the onset of puberty had exhibited ‘various troubles incidental to female life’. In a future, less reticent age these same ailments would be referred to as premenstrual syndrome, later joined by post-natal depression.

  Testimonials from Mrs Castle’s American friends revealed that her disordered state of mind had been a ‘pathetic secret … for many years’. The judge agreed with the defence counsel that, while technically guilty – indeed, ‘an incorrigible kleptomaniac’ – the accused should be spared the full penalty of the law, which allowed for up to four years of hard labour. Instead, she was sentenced to three months’ confinement at Holloway Jail. The prisoner left the court in Clerkenwell amidst a barrage of reporters and photographers, providing an early glimpse of a celebrity media frenzy that Conan Doyle, for one, thought unedifying. ‘It was prurience,’ he later noted, ‘masquerading as journalism.’

  Much of the press, in fact, seemed to be gripped by an advanced form of schizophrenia when it came to reporting the Castle case. On the one hand, there were constant articles and editorials (fourteen in the San Francisco Chronicle alone) deploring that accounts of a woman’s ‘most delicate physiology’ had been publicly aired in a ‘grotesque breach’, to quote the Chronicle, of her ‘rights and privacy’. On the other hand, those same guardians of Mrs Castle’s dignity felt able to engage in an almost psychotic discussion, by the standards of the day, of the more clinical details of the case, including, but not limited to, the exact state of the accused’s menstrual cycle and the possible condition of her uterus. These were not terms readily bandied about during the latter days of the reign of Queen Victoria, and Doyle’s prompt letter on the subject in the press combined a becoming delicacy with a rigorous degree of logic that approached Holmes’s own methods:

  Dear Sir,

  Might I implore your powerful intercession on behalf of the unfortunate American lady, Mrs Castle, who was condemned yesterday to three months’ imprisonment upon a charge of theft? Apart from the evidence of the medical experts, it is inconceivable that any woman in her position in her sane senses would steal duplicates and triplicates – four toast racks, if I rememb
er right. Small articles of silver with the hotel mark upon them, so they could not be sold or used, were among the objects which she had packed away in her trunk. It can surely not be denied that there is at least a doubt as to her moral responsibility, and if there is a doubt, then the benefit of it should be given to one whose sex and position as a visitor amongst us give her a double claim upon our consideration. It is to a consulting room and not a cell that she should be sent.

  The following day, the Home Secretary announced that Mrs Castle was indeed ‘mentally [and] morally irresponsible for her actions’, and would be released from custody forthwith ‘on her husband’s promise to take charge of her’. The family immediately sailed home to America. At Christmas the following year, Ella Castle sent Conan Doyle a book of Walt Whitman poems. In it was a note, ‘To Sir Arthur, who serves as the world’s conscience.’

  In the summer of 1891, Conan Doyle, his wife Louisa and their 2-year-old daughter Mary (a son, Kingsley, would follow in 1892) moved into a large, red-bricked house at 12 Tennison Road, South Norwood, a London suburb roughly an hour’s hansom cab ride south of Baker Street. The fourteen-room villa reflected the family’s growing prosperity. Thanks largely to Sherlock Holmes, Doyle earned £1,616 that year, the bulk of it from his pen, which was roughly five times his annual income as a young practitioner in Southsea. In regular notes to his mother, or ‘the Mam’, as he called her, he extolled the pleasures of being ‘in my own lovely little home, with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives’ – and talked about how he was never happier than when taking Louisa on a 30-mile spin on their tandem bicycle.

  The following year, Conan Doyle packed the family off for an extended stay in Davos, Switzerland, where, a stout, ruddy-faced 34-year-old Briton dressed in tweed knickerbockers, he became a somewhat unlikely pioneer of alpine skiing. Affairs in general were ‘most satisfactory’, Doyle assured his mother – ‘I have saved enough now to make Touie’s position & that of the children quite secure in case I should die.’

  Although a collaboration with James Barrie on a comic opera called Jane Annie proved a flop (‘the most unblushing outburst of tomfoolery that two responsible citizens could conceivably indulge in publicly,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote, in one of its better reviews), Doyle followed this with his one-act play A Story of Waterloo, which opened successfully in the West End to warm notices, and went on to become a staple of late Victorian theatre. In 1892, he earned the significant sum of £2,279, or roughly £200,000 ($300,000) in today’s terms.

  ‘It appear[ed] almost too good to last,’ Doyle later wrote, and in fact it was. The pleasant routine of life was soon interrupted by a series of frustrations and private sorrows that eclipsed any possible professional disappointment. Following Doyle’s sister Annette’s loss to pneumonia at just 33, and his father’s lonely death in a Scottish asylum, came the news that Louisa herself was dangerously ill. It proved to be a case of tuberculosis. In those pre-antibiotic days there was little hope of recovery from the disease, which generally proved fatal within only a few months, or at best a year or two. It was a chain of events that even the constitutionally optimistic Arthur admitted was ‘a little overwhelming’. Seeking a more rarefied climate than the London suburbs, Conan Doyle and his family settled in a house in the elevated village of Hindhead, Surrey, which he perhaps charitably called the ‘English Switzerland’. After a winter of monsoon-like rain he was soon forced to revise his estimate of its benefits to Louisa’s health. Despite this, Doyle was to make Hindhead his home for the next eleven years, and finally disposed of his property there, Undershaw, only in 1921.

  On 15 March 1897, meanwhile, in circumstances he chose to omit in his autobiography, Doyle met a 23-year-old Anglo-Scots woman named Jean Leckie. He would celebrate the anniversary for the rest of his life by presenting her with a spring flower, suggesting that he associated her with an act of renewal, or rebirth. Ironically, Doyle had also met Louisa on or around the same date – the Ides of March – twelve years earlier. The lively and attractive Jean, said to have possessed a ‘chatty’ manner and ‘dazzling’ green eyes, was both an expert horsewoman and a trained opera singer. She was also descended from an ancient Highland clan that had shown various signs of artistic and literary ability over the years.

  The exact nature of Doyle’s relationship with Jean while he struggled with his responsibilities to Louisa and the children can only ever be a matter of guesswork and hearsay. It may well be that he was flagrantly unfashionable in terms of today’s morality, and remained faithful to his wife during her long physical decline. Strikingly, however, just weeks after meeting Jean, Doyle began work on his short story ‘The Confession’, before turning to his novel A Duet, among various other tales dealing broadly with domestic or married life. All these works are tastefully done, and can be innocently enjoyed on any number of levels. If one were to summarise their common theme, it would be a surprisingly bold exploration of social taboos, and, more specifically, of sexual infidelity.

  In January 1889, just as, in Southsea, Conan Doyle prepared to deliver his first child, the police came to arrest 17-year-old Elizabeth Foster, who worked as a servant girl at the Church of England vicarage in Great Wyrley, near Walsall. She was accused of sending threatening letters to her employer, the Reverend Sharpurji Edalji, who, as an Anglican vicar of Indian origins, was something of a novelty in the English Midlands of that time. Foster appeared at Cannock Police Court, where she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was bound over to keep the peace. Few of those who read the short local news report of the trial, including Doyle himself, can have guessed that it was to be the starting point of one of the most sensational and protracted criminal cases of early twentieth-century Britain.

  Some years later, there was a second outbreak of anonymous letters to Reverend Edalji’s home. They came in a variety of handwriting styles and under a number of pseudonyms. If the correspondence could be said to have a mutual theme, it was that Edalji and his family were Satan-worshipping infidels of highly unusual personal habits who would roast eternally in hell. ‘Do you think, you Pharisee, that because you are a parson God will absolve you from your iniquities?’ enquired one note. Another characterised Edalji as a ‘confirmed lunatic’ – surely a case of projection – and promised the Edaljis’ three children and their Scots-born mother Charlotte an afterlife distinguished by perpetual fire and brimstone. Much of the language employed was intemperate, quite often embellished by crude graffiti, and some of it positively demented in its tenor and allusion. The blameless Mrs Edalji, for example, was ‘a kunt, liar, divil, confounded hypocrite, silly blasted bloody fool’, in the words of a complainant who could apparently not spell the words ‘cunt’ and ‘devil’, but who had no difficulty with ‘confounded hypocrite.’

  The local police were no closer than they had been at the time of the first threatening letters to identifying the culprit or culprits, although there seems to have been a growing belief that the teenaged George Edalji, the eldest child, was in some way implicated in harassing his own family. This began the truly bizarre chain of events that led to George’s eventual arrest and imprisonment on a charge of cattle mutilation. Conan Doyle investigated the case, and quickly concluded that at the heart of it there lay not so much a diabolical ripper as the technical shortcomings of the turn-of-the-century rural English police, added to George Edalji’s provocative combination of brown skin and precocious intelligence as one of the first Anglo-Asians to successfully embark on a career as a lawyer.

  We’ll return in the next chapter to the Edalji affair, which took several further dark turns before reaching its climax in 1907. In time, Doyle imposed at least partial order on the mounting chaos of the case, insisting that the persecution of George Edalji owed more to racial prejudice and to rank blundering on the part of the authorities than to a rational investigation of the facts. ‘The sad truth is that officialdom in England stands solid together,’ he wrote:

  … and that when you are forced to attack it,
you need not expect justice, but rather that you are up against an avowed Trade Union, the members of which are not going to act the blackleg to each other, and which subordinates the public interest to a false idea of loyalty.

  More than a century later, it’s still striking how this apparently conventional, Imperialist figure would lay his hard-won reputation on the line to defend a half-caste young Birmingham solicitor against the full force of the Edwardian Establishment.

  As his campaign attracted more and more attention, however, Doyle began to be criticised for some of his underlying methodology – was he really all that ‘Holmesian’ in his core investigative technique, or more of a social crusader who saw elaborate criminal conspiracies everywhere, instead of mere incompetence or bigotry? Doyle felt these criticisms keenly. He had a depressive side anyway, and as we’ve seen was something of an eccentric, a believer both in fairies and in the supernatural powers of ectoplasm, as secreted from under a medium’s skirts.

  Through it all, he never once wavered in his support of George Edalji, and as a result can be said to have become a founding father of England’s Court of Criminal Appeal, for which he should be a national hero. Edalji himself lived until 1953, and once told a reporter, ‘Sir Arthur may be chiefly remembered for Sherlock Holmes, but he was also the bravest man in Britain. I owe him everything.’