The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  On his first morning back in London, Beck received a heartfelt letter from a supporter that described the ‘misery which your friends have suffered from your long imprisonment’, and added that ‘to none has this been more acute than me’. The letter rejoiced in Beck’s liberty:

  Your release has gladdened those who have waited, as you endured all the privations of a convict. The authorities have gone from excess to excess in this matter … That the rest of your days may be triumphantly happy can be the only wish of those who deplore the injustice of your treatment.

  The writer went on to conclude that the ‘whole squalid affair’ stood as an example of Britain’s judicial and political Establishment having closed ranks following the ‘shameful delinquency’ of those who had persecuted Beck in the first place. The letter was signed by Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Doyle, in fact, had taken a supporting role in the case to that of his fellow Crimes Club member, George Sims. Sims, who knew Beck socially, had published a series of articles in the Daily Mail that pointed to serious flaws in the original trial. It’s still difficult to know with complete clarity if this was primarily a matter of corruption or of mere ineptitude, but in either event the proceedings mark a low point in the annals of late Victorian British criminal justice.

  Beck had first been arrested in December 1895, after a woman confronted him in a London street and accused him of having recently swindled her out of some jewellery by the expedient of representing himself to her as ‘Lord Willoughby’, a fabulously wealthy man with ‘a great estate in Lincolnshire and a private yacht’. Suitably impressed, the woman had given him a watch and several rings, which he promised to replace with more valuable pieces. That was the last she had seen of Lord Willoughby until her chance encounter with Beck some three weeks later.

  Following his arrest, no fewer than twenty-two other women came forward to claim that they, too, had been defrauded by the mysterious Willoughby. Beck was not only summarily found guilty; he was sentenced as a repeat offender. Eighteen years earlier, a man named John Smith had been convicted of swindling unattached women by using the alias ‘Willoughby’, and went to prison for five years. He had disappeared after his release, and it was assumed that Beck and Smith were one and the same. In time, Doyle and Sims were able to convincingly discredit the Crown case by the Holmesian technique of stripping away any accompanying emotion and conjecture and instead presenting two objective, material facts which established it as about as clear a case of mistaken identity as can ever have been brought before a British court: first, Beck had been travelling in Argentina, not living in London, at the time of the original crime of 1877; second, the man then incarcerated as John Smith was Jewish and thus had been circumcised, while Beck was not. As Holmes remarks in A Study in Scarlet, ‘before turning to those mortal and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems’.

  Incredibly, in 1904 Beck was arrested a second time for swindling another young woman out of her jewellery. He was again sent for trial and swiftly found guilty, although on this occasion the judge himself expressed doubts about the verdict, and decided to defer sentencing. During the interval, yet more women came forward to complain that they in turn were victims of a confidence trickster posing as ‘Lord Willoughby’ who in a fresh predatory campaign had just relieved them of their watches and rings. It sometimes seems surprising to learn that any female could have walked the streets of London at this time and emerge with her valuables intact.

  Since Beck himself was already in custody, awaiting sentencing, the police were forced to conclude that he might thus be innocent of these latest offences. Instead, they arrested a man giving his name as William Thomas, who proved to be the elusive ‘John Smith’ of the original 1877 trial. Charged under his real name of Wilhelm Meyer, he was sent to prison for both the 1895 and 1904 crimes. He bore a passing physical resemblance to Adolf Beck. Beck himself received a royal pardon and £2,000 in compensation, but a public outcry – again orchestrated by Doyle and Sims – raised this to a total of £5,000, or roughly £375,000 ($550,000) today. He died just five years later, aged 68.

  It’s worth dwelling on the tragedy of Adolf Beck a moment longer, if only because it serves as a direct forerunner to two separate criminal cases that came to occupy, and often to obsess, Doyle for the rest of his life. In all three instances, he distilled the specifics of the case down to one central issue: could the British Establishment (which largely meant the Home Office) be trusted to act vigorously and impartially when made aware of an apparently grave breach of justice?

  More particularly, Doyle would take up matters such as the correct technical procedure for a police line-up; the fallibility of much, if not most, eyewitness testimony; and the vagaries of specialist scientific analysis. These were early days for criminal forensics as a whole, meaning that some of the same small group of professionals would recur in all three cases. Just because a particular handwriting expert had erred in the Beck trial, for example, was no reason to prevent him from testifying a few years later against George Edalji. To Doyle, as to Holmes, it was the rare case that failed to reward a new investigative approach or a fresh mindset. Everything was incremental, and each small discovery was an opportunity to learn something more. If one expert was wrong, conceivably another one was also wrong.

  Perhaps I am too demanding and exacting; perhaps I lack what is essential: the careless attitude of officialdom, which teaches you to tie a thick ribbon around a file you consider to be closed, and then to forget it; I cannot.

  Although Doyle spoke these words, they could just as easily have been Holmes ruminating on his continual struggle to assert ‘the mind’ of intelligence and reason over ‘the heart’ of emotion and prejudice.

  In December 1900, Conan Doyle went into print to admit that, while Sherlock Holmes might still be regarded as dead, there was ‘no limit to the number of papers he left behind or the reminiscences in the brain of his biographer’. The following August, The Strand began serialising The Hound of the Baskervilles, after which it appeared in book form and immediately sold out its first print run of 30,000 copies. It would be hard to overstate the reaction of the reading public at large to Holmes’s return, an event greeted as something akin to the discovery of an eleventh commandment, or a later full-scale comeback tour by the Beatles.

  As we’ve seen, Doyle had been stoical when first disposing of his ‘poor hero of the anemic printed page’, jotting only the words ‘Killed Holmes’ in his notebook. He took a similarly relaxed approach to the subsequent offer from Collier’s to revive the detective for a fee of $25,000, or roughly $1.7 million in modern money. Just for purposes of comparison, in 1911 (before which they were unpaid) a senior British Cabinet minister received an annual salary of £400 (the equivalent today of £28,000, or $40,000) for his services to the nation.

  As well as its phenomenal sales success, The Hound of the Baskervilles also has the distinction of involving Doyle as a leading character, rather than mere author, in a compelling murder mystery. The tale of the infernal dog haunting the Devon moors had initially been brought to him by his friend and occasional golf partner Fletcher Robinson, the Daily Express correspondent who was on the same boat returning from the war in South Africa. Doyle soon negotiated an unheard of advance of £100 per 1,000 words for first-publication rights of his long story in The Strand. Since the magazine sold 33,000 more copies than usual that August, its proprietors can’t have been too unhappy with the arrangement. Doyle appears to have paid roughly a third of his initial fee to Fletcher Robinson, though there’s some doubt about their future relationship; like Dr Watson’s first name, it’s one of those insoluble Holmes riddles to have excited a lively exchange of views over the years.

  More than a century later, a team led by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele applied unsuccessfully to exhume Robinson, who died in 1907 at the age of 36. Their initiative followed years of speculation that Doyle had somehow ‘
arranged to have his unacknowledged collaborator poisoned in order to avoid exposure as a fraud’, a charge that seems fanciful even by the most acute Sherlockian standards. Robinson (who was credited in full under the first column of text of the story’s appearance in The Strand) almost certainly succumbed to typhoid fever, like an estimated 56,000 other Britons that year. While it conjures up a vivid image of Conan Doyle furtively introducing arsenic to his colleague’s drinks back in the clubhouse after a round of golf, set against this are Doyle’s continuing, if sporadic, payments to Robinson throughout the period 1901–1907, as well as his frequent cheerful admission of his moral debt in the matter. Writing to ‘the Mam’ in April 1901, for instance, Doyle proudly announced that The Hound was ‘a real Creeper’ and, further casting modesty to the wind, added, ‘Holmes is at his very best, and it is a highly dramatic idea – which I owe to Robinson’.

  In July 1907, Conan Doyle found himself involved in a Holmesian case about stolen jewels, miscarriages of justice and murderous revenge, although it’s possible the morally austere detective might have shied from some of the crime’s more dissolute subplot. The basic story was that one hot summer’s night someone made off with a collection of 394 gems, worth some £12 million today, from a safe inside Dublin Castle. Known popularly as the ‘Irish Crown Jewels’, they had been under the care of Conan Doyle’s maternal cousin, the Ulster King-at-Arms, 44-year-old Sir Arthur Vicars.

  His custodial regimen seems to have been a relaxed one, and it was reported that the dipsomaniac Vicars had sometimes awoken from a stupor on the floor of his office wearing one of the most valuable pieces round his neck, among other lapses of protocol, although in his defence he explained that these had merely been instances of his ‘personally checking security arrangements’ for the collection. One can imagine Holmes’s pursed lips as he listened to accounts of the ‘unsavoury types, some of them members of Vicars’s own staff, indulging in depraved late-night entertainments in the Castle’s state rooms’, where the parties tended to be of the all-male variety.

  Among the principal cast of characters was a Captain Richard Gorges, lately a Boer War hero, of ‘sexually equivocal’ reputation; the 9th Duke of Argyll, King Edward VII’s brother-in-law and a former Governor-General of Canada, who had a known fondness for guardsmen; Lord George Haddo, the king’s official representative in Dublin, who travelled with his own satin-clad pageboy; and Vicars’s nephew and secretary, Pierce Gun Mahony, who, in addition to sounding like a 1930s Chicago gangster, was reputed to have ‘eyes that could make a girl do anything’. Looming above them all as a suspect in the theft that came briefly to be known as the ‘crime of the century’ was 30-year-old Francis Shackleton, the disreputable younger brother of the polar explorer, who shortly afterwards left Ireland, possibly with official encouragement, and never returned.

  Immediately he read of the matter, Doyle wrote to his cousin Vicars offering to consult on the case. Vicars replied that he would be very glad of the help, adding that whatever the eventual outcome he was already ’quite ruined’, his job and pension in jeopardy, thanks to the ‘well-connected debauchers and sodomites’ who lay at the heart of the scandal. Doyle was quickly able to establish that there had been no fewer than seven keys to the door of the room where the valuables were kept, and access to the vault itself ‘casual, [to] the point of criminally negligent’. No one had bothered to check the contents of the safe at any time between 11 June, when Vicars had briefly inspected the jewels, and the morning of 6 July, when he discovered their theft.

  A further cause for concern was that the king and queen were expected in Dublin on an official visit just four days later, and His Majesty was reportedly not amused by this ‘brazen relocation’ of pieces that had originally been a gift of his grandfather, William IV. The crime also came during one of those cyclical crises in Anglo-Irish affairs, when the barricades ‘will surely soon be manned against the thunder of hooves and mutinous terror on the streets of England,’ as the London Globe chillingly put it. Could the robbery, Vicars mused, have somehow been part of a larger plot intended to ‘incite our Union to the brink of civil war?’

  Conan Doyle took the pragmatic approach to the case. First, he acquired an architect’s blueprint of Vicars’s office in Dublin Castle, as well as a detailed sketch map showing the adjacent doors and staircases. Having satisfied himself on the basic layout of the crime scene, he turned to the ‘immemorial questions of motive and opportunity – who might have desired the jewels’ removal, and had the means to carry them off?’ Doyle’s suspicions quickly fell on ‘that feckless man’ Frank Shackleton as the culprit, if for no other reason than that he was known to be chronically short of funds, ‘and not discriminating in how he obtained them’. Vicars seems to have supported this theory, and in January 1908 publicly accused Shackleton of the crime.

  Playing Lestrade to Doyle’s Holmes, meanwhile, was the stolid figure of Detective Chief Inspector John Kane of Scotland Yard, who eventually submitted a lengthy report, never publicly released, blaming ‘two persons, neither of them previously familiar with Dublin Castle’, and adding that these individuals had ‘almost certainly since broken up the pieces for individual sale’. Kane explicitly denied to a Viceregal Commission that Shackleton was involved in the theft. That same body reached the less controversial verdict that Vicars had ‘not exercise[d] due vigilance or proper care in his role as custodian of the regalia’, and relieved both him and his staff of their duties.

  Doyle continued to see his cousin as a scapegoat. Modestly remarking that he would prefer not to be quoted on the subject, lest the British public come to see him as an ‘infernal busybody’, he wrote to Vicars in May 1920 to say that the original case had been relatively simple to solve, and that the only complication had been ‘the obtuseness [and] misreporting’ of the official inquiry. In November 1912, the Daily Mail had alleged that Vicars had allowed a woman reported to be his mistress to obtain a copy of his key to the safe, and that she had since fled to Paris with the gems in her possession. A year later, the paper was forced to issue an apology and to admit that the story was a complete fabrication – ‘there was never any such female,’ the Mail admitted. Vicars went on to accuse Shackleton by name in his will, which also referred to certain ‘wicked and blackguardly acts of the Irish government’, who were ‘backed to the hilt by the late King Edward VII whom I had loyally and faithfully served’.

  Many of the principal characters in the case fared poorly, if not considerably worse than that, in the years ahead. Captain Gorges went on to be convicted of manslaughter, and emerged from prison to die in poverty. At the time of his original investigation, Doyle had been able to establish what the official force had somehow overlooked: Gorges and Shackleton had served together in the same army unit in South Africa, where their money troubles had been the stuff of regimental legend, and thus might conceivably have gone on to become accomplices in the Irish affair. Shackleton himself was imprisoned in 1914 for passing a cheque stolen from a widow. On his release he took the alias ‘Mellors’ and lived under that name until his early death in 1940. Vicars’s nephew Pierce Gun Mahony was later found floating dead in a lake in County Wicklow. It was said that he had tripped while out walking, accidentally shot himself twice through the heart, and then stumbled backwards into the water. In April 1921, masked men broke into Arthur Vicars’s home in County Kerry and set it on fire. They then marched Vicars out to the lawn, tied him to a tree, and shot him through the head. A sign found attached to his body read, ‘Spy Informers beware – IRA never forgets’.

  The Irish jewels were never recovered, but they returned in spirit, at least, eighteen months later, when The Strand published Conan Doyle’s story of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’. Although there are several differences between the Holmes adventure and its real-life precursor, the central idea of stolen goods in high places, and the subsequent disgrace of their custodian, is common to both versions. It seems safe to assume that Colonel Frank Shackleton might be the m
odel for Colonel Valentine Walter, the reprobate brother of an eminent Englishman ‘whose decorations and sub-titles fill two lines of a book of reference’ in the fictional tale. There is also a shared connection to royal patronage. While Edward VII had privately offered a reward for the return of the Dublin jewels, in the Bruce-Partington case, set in the year 1895, we learn that Holmes goes on to ‘spend a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin’, the gift of ‘a certain gracious lady in whose interests he had carried out a small commission’.1

  Shortly after he published ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, Doyle heard from a young woman named Joan Paynter, who worked as a nurse at the North Western Hospital in Hampstead, London. ‘I am appealing to you as I can think of no one else who could help me,’ she wrote, in terms that might have come direct from the prologue to another Holmes mystery, which Dr Watson would surely have given the title ‘The Disappearing Dane’:

  About five weeks ago, I met a man, originally a native of Copenhagen. We became engaged and although I did not wish to say anything about it for a little while he insisted on going down to Torquay to meet my people.

  Following this introduction, the Dane had simply vanished from the scene. There had been no attempted fraud or extortion on his part, and his fiancée was understandably distressed at his abrupt departure. ‘Please don’t think it awful cheek on my part, I feel so awfully miserable and it was only this morning that I thought of you, please do all you can for me, and I shall be eternally grateful,’ she wrote. To Doyle it must have seemed an irresistible opportunity to put chivalry in the service of detection.