The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  In June 1894, as the torrent of offensive letters continued to rain down at Great Wyrley, Conan Doyle packed a weekend bag and accompanied two fellow members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) on a field trip to the remote coastal village of Charmouth, in Dorset. They were there to investigate an allegedly haunted house occupied by an Irish family and their mute, elderly maid – ‘a gothic ménage,’ Doyle noted.

  On their first night in residence, the three men sat up with a specially modified camera and other equipment with which to capture any spirits that might appear. None did. On the second night, Conan Doyle reported that he had been startled to hear a series of loud bangs coming from the kitchen, but that nothing looked out of place when he and his colleagues ran downstairs to investigate. He seems to have suspected at the time that they were the victims of a hoax, possibly perpetrated by the family’s 19-year-old son in league with the maid. As Doyle’s own beliefs changed, so did his interpretation of what he came to call the ‘Charmouth possession’. When he wrote about the incident some thirty-five years later in his book The Edge of the Unknown, Doyle added that the house in question had burned down a short time later, and that the skeleton of a young boy was discovered buried in the garden. The inference was that the child’s spirit had somehow been responsible for all the commotion.

  Conan Doyle the materialist and sceptic also recognised a strain of mysticism in himself which often imbued his prose. What gave the early Holmes stories the ring of truth was their combination of human warmth and scientific spirit. Doyle’s own occult experiences at this time were still restricted to a few sittings with seaside mediums, a continuing belief in the practicalities of mesmerism, telepathy and levitation, and an ‘unbreakable’ faith in the materialising power – or apport – of solid objects at a séance.

  A more traditional psychic incident came one night at home, where Doyle suddenly awoke ‘with the clear consciousness that there was someone in the room, and that the presence was not of this world’. After lying seemingly paralysed for some moments, he had heard steps slowly approach his bed, and then a voice murmur, ‘Doyle, I came to tell you that I am sorry’ – a case, he believed, of a formerly sceptical friend who had, in the afterlife, recanted his views on spiritualism.

  Pursuing his more conventional career, Doyle let off several furious broadsides at members of his own trade whom he deemed guilty of excessive ambition. A prime target was Hall Caine, bestselling author of the prototype feminist novel The Christian, whose talent for self-advertisement Doyle addressed in a letter to the Daily Chronicle:

  I think it unworthy of the dignity of our common profession that one should pick up paper after paper and read Mr Caine’s own comments on the gigantic task and the colossal work which he has just brought to a conclusion … It is for others to say these things.

  As we’ve seen, there were subsequent feuds with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, among others. Doyle told his editor friend W.T. Stead that he made a distinction between the writing of ‘real work’ and that of a mere yarn in a newspaper or magazine. The latter ‘must be uneven, disjointed and superficial,’ he insisted, in another implied reproach of the Holmes stories by their author.

  Fortunately, Conan Doyle had bills to pay, resulting in a steady flow of work which still gives pleasure today. In December 1894 he published the first batch of his well-received Brigadier Gerard tales, which happily married his love of early nineteenth-century historical romance with some of the narrative fizz of Holmes. Another, less successful Napoleonic saga, Uncle Bernac, followed in 1897. Never one to rest on his laurels, Doyle then began work on a Regency prizefighting novel he called Rodney Stone, followed in turn by The Tragedy of the Korosko – ‘a book of sensation,’ he admitted, if still visionary in dealing with the theme of Islamic terrorism. Were that not enough, the ‘cheerfully gamut-running’ author produced both a series of paranormal tales that became known as the Round the Fire Stories and a volume of poems, Songs of Action, in the same two-year period.

  When the journalist Harry How went to interview Conan Doyle, he was struck by the author’s voluminous postbag. The ‘lunatic letters’ were a problem, Doyle admitted, although others were more suggestive. ‘On the morning of my visit the particulars of a poisoning mystery had been sent to him from the Antipodes,’ How recorded. This was the sensational case of the Yorkshire-born Thomas Hall, who had emigrated to New Zealand as a teenager and in 1885 went on to marry the former Kate Espie in Timaru, a whaling port roughly 100 miles south-west of Christchurch. Two months after the wedding, Hall presented his wife with her will, and requested that she sign it. It left him all her property. The following month, he took out two life insurance policies in her name; between them, these would benefit him by £6,000 (some £480,000 today) in the event of Kate’s death within seven years.

  In an echo of the Chantrelle case, Kate fell ill shortly after the birth of her only child, Nigel, in June 1886. For weeks, this ‘gentle, affectionate girl’, as a judge later called her, lay bedridden with crippling stomach pains. She ‘vomited until [she] was exhausted, and then vomited again, unable to think or sleep’. In time her hair and teeth fell out. She was ‘pitiful thin, spent and ghastly’, a ‘desperate old crone’ while still in her early twenties. Kate’s doctor, Patrick McIntyre, who was said to be good on minor ailments but weak on serious diseases, eventually arranged for a sample of her stomach contents to be sent to Dunedin for analysis. When the police came for Thomas Hall a few weeks later and said that his wife’s system contained enough antimony sulfide (produced by filing off the heads of safety matches) to poison ten women, he looked amazed and distressed. ‘How could such a thing happen?’ he asked.

  Hall was arrested for attempted murder. Joining him in the dock was the family’s live-in companion, Margaret Houston, with whom he was said to have had an affair. It did not help Hall’s case that he had bought a book called Taylor on Poisons while on his honeymoon, and highlighted the section on antimony in red pen. At the trial in Christchurch, Houston was acquitted; Hall was sentenced to life imprisonment. The presiding judge called him ‘the vilest criminal ever seen in New Zealand’. In a dramatic postscript, the body of Hall’s wealthy father-in-law was then exhumed, and it too was found to be riddled with poison. This seemed to confirm what many of the local papers had already told their readers – that the case was about a sociopathic man ‘employing one of the cruellest of all forms of assault for monetary gain’. Hall was duly tried a second time and condemned to hang, although his sentence was commuted on appeal. After serving twenty-one years in prison, he returned to England to die.

  When Hall wrote to Conan Doyle from his jail cell in January 1892 appealing for his help, Doyle seems to have declined to actively investigate the case. Hall recorded in his diary, ‘No interest beyond mercy’. Doyle was, however, to refer to the precedent of the New Zealand Appeal Court when he came to campaign for a similar institution to provide relief for George Edalji and other victims of miscarriage of justice at home in England.

  It’s perhaps not accidental that in a story called ‘The Naval Treaty’, published in 1893, Sherlock Holmes takes a keen interest in poisons. As we first see him, Holmes is at his table in Baker Street, clad in a dressing gown, and in the midst of an intense chemical investigation. In a moment he introduces a slip of litmus paper to a test tube containing a solution. ‘You come at a crisis, Watson,’ the detective announces. ‘If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life.’ Doyle, as Watson, remarks, ‘He then dipped it into the test-tube, and it flushed at once into a dull, dirty crimson. “Hum! I thought as much!” he cried … “A very commonplace little murder,” said he.’

  In time, Doyle intervened more directly in the case of Moat Farm, near Clavering in Essex. A middle-aged woman named Camille Holland had disappeared, and suspicion fell on her common-law husband Samuel Dougal, a short, shaven-headed retired army officer of unusual domestic habits. Dougal’s case wasn’t helped when it was lear
nt that he had quickly installed another woman in the house as his mistress, and that in the summer months he was in the practice of going bicycling in the nude accompanied by his similarly free-spirited teenaged servant girl.

  Again, it seemed raw greed was the primary factor involved. Dougal was found to be systematically moving funds from the missing Camille’s accounts into his own, sufficient for the police to take possession of the farm in the hunt for clues to her whereabouts. As the Essex County Chronicle reported, the phrase ‘take possession’ was literally true, as ‘the police actually move[d] into the home … The officers engaged in the search now occupy the farmhouse, preparing their meals and making their beds for themselves. Detective-Sergeant Scott acts as chef.’ It was also one of the first criminal investigations in Britain to attract the decadent voyeurism of later major cases. ‘Throughout the week, people have flocked to the Moat Farm in crowds, the majority being ladies,’ the Chronicle reported. ‘Oranges and nuts were sold as at a village fair, and the raucous voices of the vendors were heard on every side. Souvenir postcards commanded an enormous sale.’

  Despite this intense scrutiny, the police drew a blank until Conan Doyle, sitting at his desk 100 miles away in Hindhead, was asked by an inquisitive reporter if there was any point in the affair to which he might wish to draw the investigators’ attention. ‘To the curious fact of the property’s name,’ he remarked, in so many words.

  ‘The property is called Moat Farm.’

  ‘That is the curious fact,’ Doyle replied.

  The following day, police pulled the body of Camille Holland from a trench that had been dug into the moat surrounding the estate. She had evidently been shot through the head at close range and then buried in the muddy soil. In July 1903, Samuel Dougal went to the gallows at Chelmsford Jail, aged 57. In the split-second before the trapdoor opened beneath him, he uttered the word ‘guilty’.

  In November 1899, at the age of 40, Conan Doyle felt duty-bound to volunteer to serve with the British forces fighting the Boers in South Africa. Doyle’s mother – the Mam – was not pleased, rather tactlessly noting that her son’s ‘very breadth’ would make him an easy target for the enemy. Although the army declined his services, Doyle was eventually to spend four months working as a surgeon in a field hospital in Bloemfontein, a town only recently taken by British troops, where he arrived in March 1900.

  Initially, this seems not to have been too arduous. The hospital was set up in the grounds of the Ramblers Cricket Club, and Doyle continued to enjoy ample meals served to him in the pavilion dining room by his butler Cleeve, who he paid to accompany him on the journey. But conditions worsened appreciably when, in mid April, the Boers managed to sever the town’s supplies.

  Conan Doyle’s first intimation that life would rapidly deteriorate from there came when he tried to run his pre-dinner bath one evening and found that there was no hot water, ‘nor water of any kind, but a trickle of viscous slime dripping from the tap’. In short order, Doyle and his fellow doctors were confronted by the ‘hellish vista’ of a full-scale typhoid epidemic. The artist Mortimer Menpes, covering the war for the Illustrated London News, later wrote of Doyle:

  Throw[ing] open the door of one of the wards … The only thing I can liken it to is a slaughter-house. The place was saturated with enteric fever, and patients were swarming in at such a rate that it was impossible to attend them all.

  Even in the midst of this horror, Conan Doyle remained characteristically cheerful, organising a series of football matches where players ‘slithered around on a field of blood and waste’.

  He returned safely to England in July 1900. The chief result of his time at the front was his publishing of a book-length sixpenny pamphlet The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, which combined his usual stout defence of the British fighting man with trenchant criticism of the backwardness of some of the military establishment – ‘essentially unchanged in tactics since Waterloo’, and which ‘urgently needed to be dragged into the new century’. Doyle’s paper quickly went through eighteen editions, and was thought to have weighed heavily in the new king’s decision to give him a knighthood.

  The other upshot of Doyle’s South African adventure was a revival of Sherlock Holmes from his apparent watery grave: first in the discrete, satanic canine melodrama The Hound of the Baskervilles, and then in a burst of Holmes-redux stories beginning with ‘The Empty House’. At their best these were dazzling, vividly recreating the fading, gaslit era of the 1890s, while providing some modest twentieth-century allusions both to new scientific methods and sexual mores, if, at the same time, betraying Doyle’s only fragile command of technical detail involving plot devices such as thumbprints or bicycle tyres.

  From all indications, Doyle had been highly indignant to learn that the enemy troops in South Africa, while for the most part not lacking physical courage, adopted guerrilla tactics in the field. A particular Boer ruse was to hoist a dummy convincingly dressed as a soldier somewhere on the horizon. Only when the British fired on it did they come to appreciate (‘with some bitterness,’ Doyle noted) that it was a trap intended to give away their position. As often as not, there were heavy casualties in the subsequent counter-assault by well-entrenched Boer snipers. Doyle himself later insisted that the plot twist of Holmes’s return in ‘The Empty House’, in which the detective foils a would-be assassin by tricking the man into firing at a wax effigy of him, was chiefly the brainchild of his friend Jean Leckie. It’s tempting to wonder if he was also thinking of his experience of the front lines in South Africa less than three years earlier.

  Although Holmes remained anchored solidly in the material world, Doyle himself now saw spiritualism as an increasingly valuable aid to traditional detective skills. There was the case, for instance, of James Robert Hay, who was born in Australia to Scottish migrant parents, worked for a time as a primary schoolteacher, and then joined the Mormon Church and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. There, in 1896, Hay married Aggie Sharp, the daughter of a prominent businessman and community leader. Their wedding was a ‘swagger’ affair, the Salt Lake Herald reported, complete with printed guest list and embossed invitations, servants dressed up in powdered wigs, a full orchestra, and ‘no late-night outbreak of the hoochy-koochy, or other such abdominal embellishments that now pass for dancing’.

  All went well for the next few years, during which the couple had three children. Then, in December 1901, James Hay disappeared one snowy night after visiting his friend and neighbour, 36-year-old Peter Mortensen. Mortensen insisted that they had parted amicably, and the local sheriff initially seemed inclined to believe him. Thinking otherwise, Hay’s father-in-law, James Sharp, a practising spiritualist, took his suspicions to the Herald. The paper was not slow to discover that Mortensen had been a customer of Hay’s timber company, to which he ‘owed big’, a story it ran under a banner headline on the morning of 18 December. That night, James Sharp had a vision in which he saw his son-in-law’s frozen corpse buried in a familiar location; not a hunch or a premonition, he was later at pains to point out, ‘but an actual picture inside my head’ of Hay’s hastily dug grave.

  The following morning, the police found Hay’s body, a bullet through his head, in the very spot James Sharp had described for them. Sharp then corresponded with Conan Doyle, sharing some of the particulars of the crime and in time asking him if he felt he could help the prosecution case by ‘now reading the mind of the suspect’. Doyle thought it ‘a rude and elementary affair’ as a murder mystery, but ‘highly instructive on the psychic level’. His reply to Sharp was measured. ‘Brain waves’ might be hard to interpret at that distance, he allowed, but:

  A friend here has passed on a vision to me. I know by many means the power of this person’s mediumship. In the vision, a message came through which spelled out the letters ‘PLC’ in some financial connexion. There is also a more hazy impression of a line of guns being fired. ‘I am not able to get more detail than that,’ the medium has assured me, ‘bu
t there is a definite atmosphere of deceit and fraud to be investigated.’ I give this for what it is worth.

  Nowhere in the correspondence does Doyle specify the name or even the sex of his mysterious clairvoyant, although it’s possible to speculate that it may have been his companion Jean Leckie, who went on to show a talent for ‘ghost writing’, among other psychic abilities, a few years later. By the time of this particular exchange, the Salt Lake Herald had already revealed that Peter Mortensen had owed some $4,000 to Hay’s business, and that this traded as the Pacific Lumber Company, although it’s by no means certain, given the communications technology of the era, that Doyle himself would have known of this. There are various non-psychic techniques, collectively called ‘chaining’, that enable a skilled performer to make a series of ambiguous but broadly accurate observations about an individual or object, but it seems unlikely that such a person could have stumbled on the initials ‘PLC’ purely by chance. In due course, Peter Mortensen was found guilty of first-degree murder, and was put to death in the early hours of 20 November 1903. At his own request, he was executed by a firing squad.

  At about the same time as James Hay’s disappearance in Utah, 60-year-old Adolf Beck emerged from Portland Jail off the coast of Dorset in southern England, where he had served five years’ hard labour for fraud. Portland was among the most notorious outposts of the nineteenth-century British penal system; among other afflictions, the place featured both the ‘stairs of death’, a vertiginous rock quarry up whose ninety-eight steps prisoners struggled carrying hefty concrete slabs, and a system of physical punishments, including flogging, that might not have disappointed Captain Bligh at his most pitiless on the deck of the Bounty. Beck, an educated, if somewhat shiftless Norwegian-born mining engineer with a seafaring background, emerged from confinement ‘wasted and careworn’, the Daily Mail reported, ‘with an unsteady gait and the mark of his ordeal impressed upon his stooped shoulders and downcast eyes’.