Sherlock Unlocked

by Daniel Smith

  LOSING THE PLOT

  As well as serving as a model for Sherlock Holmes, it is known that Joseph Bell also offered some story ideas to Conan Doyle. Indeed, in the early days of Holmes, the author is said to have asked his mentor to set aside ten minutes or so a day to think up story ideas since he was ‘insatiable for material’. A letter from Conan Doyle to Bell in 1892 thanked him ‘very heartily’ for the ‘tips’ and alluded to a Bell-inspired plot (apparently never actually used): ‘The deserter-cobbler is admirable. I wish I had a dozen more such cases.’ It was around this time that Bell also suggested that Holmes go up against a killer who used a bacterial agent as his weapon. Bell suggested he had knowledge of just such a case. Conan Doyle, though, was not sure, fearing that such a plot might be too much for his readership. In the 1920s, Conan Doyle would write that he had generally found Bell’s plot suggestions to be impractical for his needs. Yet, there is something strangely familiar about that germ-murderer idea. In 1913, Holmes appeared in ‘The Dying Detective’ – a tale that pivots around a dastardly killer’s attempts to take his victims by infecting them with a little-known disease originating in Asia. Whether or not Conan Doyle had forgotten Bell’s suggestion of a bio-murderer all those years ago, we will never know. But surely the old doctor had sown a seed that blossomed into one of the great canonical tales, which was published shortly after his own death.

  School of Scandal

  Opium regularly crops up in the canonical stories, most often in the context of willing experimentation. There are also a couple of instances of opium poisoning, notably in ‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘Wisteria Lodge’. Intriguingly, Conan Doyle had an early-life run-in of his own with one of the most notorious opium poisoners in Scottish history. In the autumn of 1866, the future author began studies at Edinburgh’s Newington Academy, located just a few streets from his home. Shortly before his arrival, a Frenchman by the name of Eugene Chantrelle had been employed to teach modern languages. It was not long, though, before Chantrelle was forced out, having begun an affair with a fifth-former, Elizabeth Cullen Dyer, who fell pregnant. The teacher and the girl subsequently married but on 2 January 1878, Elizabeth died at her home, seemingly the victim of accidental gas poisoning. However, further investigations (most notably by Holmes’s mentor, Joseph Bell, and his colleague, Henry Littlejohn) revealed that her death was in fact the result of deliberate opium poisoning. Chantrelle was duly found guilty of murdering his wife, and sentenced to hang.

  A NICE COMPLIMENT

  As Chantrelle stood on the gallows, he turned to Henry Littlejohn (who was attending in an official capacity), doffed his hat and said: ‘Bye-bye, Littlejohn. Don’t forget to give my compliments to Joe Bell. You both did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold.’ The murder and trial caused a sensation that Conan Doyle no doubt followed in the newspapers. As Conan Doyle created his own characters who wielded opium with malicious intent, the spectre of Chantrelle, his old teacher, must surely have been hanging over him.

  Defending the Family Honour

  Although Conan Doyle was himself generous in his recognition of Joseph Bell, others of his family would prove more reluctant to acknowledge his mentor’s contribution – in particular, his son Adrian Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle Snr had five children altogether, two with his first wife, Touie, and three with his second wife, Jean. Adrian was his youngest son, born in 1910 to Jean. He proved to be a robust defender of his father’s legacy and took notable exception to a biography of Arthur written by Hesketh Pearson in 1943. He responded by publishing his own take on his father, firstly in extended essay form (‘Conan Doyle: His Life and Art’, 1943) and then, two years later, in the full-length The True Conan Doyle. One of the thrusts of Adrian’s text was that his father had been the ‘real’ Sherlock Holmes, not Bell or any other pretenders to the throne. Referring specifically to Bell, he spoke of ‘the ridiculous position that could arise if the plaudits due to a brilliant virtuoso were reserved only for the teacher who gave him his original music lessons’.

  I, HOLMES

  ‘Mr Hayden Coffin, the American journalist,’ Adrian once wrote, ‘has offered us interesting confirmation . . . that my father told him in a private interview in 1918 that – “If anyone is Holmes, then I must confess that it is I.”’ He also cited Arthur’s own words in evidence: ‘. . . a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really lifelike unless he has some possibilities of that character within him.’

  According to Adrian: ‘In power of deductive observation I have never known his equal.’ He even described how his father had owned a ‘dust-red dressing gown’ and a curved pipe – items, he rather tenuously suggested, with which in ‘the mind’s eye, we surely visualize the Master’. His opinion echoed the sentiments of his mother, who in 1934 had written: ‘The public does not realize that my husband had the Sherlock Holmes brain, and that sometimes he privately solved mysteries that had non-plussed the police.’ It is possible to understand Adrian’s frustration that, as he saw it, his father was being stripped of some of the credit for the character of Sherlock Holmes when, of course, he was the product first and foremost of Conan Doyle’s mind. However, it is possible that there were other factors at play in Adrian’s vehement downplaying of Bell’s role in the detective’s genesis. Bell had, after all, been asked by Conan Doyle to assist with possible plotlines and certainly contributed several ideas. Did Adrian – a man who kept an eye on the bottom line – fear that if Bell was too widely acknowledged, one or more of his descendants might come looking for some financial recompense? It would perhaps explain why Adrian seemed so much more bothered than his own father that Bell had been bathed in Holmes’s reflected glory.

  The Islander Who Wasn’t

  The Sign of the Four features a native of the Andaman Islands by the name of Tonga. However, there is little chance that Tonga hailed from the Andamans, which lie in the Bay of Bengal. Instead, he is a reflection of the popular perception of ‘exotic savages’ that prevailed in Victorian Britain – an idea rooted in imperialist aspirations rather than anthropological fact. Holmes sought background on the poisoned dart-blowing Tonga from a recently published gazetteer. The aborigines of the Andaman Islands, it said,

  . . .may perhaps claim the distinction of being the smallest race upon this earth, though some anthropologists prefer the Bushmen of Africa, the Digger Indians of America, and the Terra del Fuegians. The average height is rather below four feet, although many full-grown adults may be found who are very much smaller than this. They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained. They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small.

  It just so happens that even to this day, the native groups of the Andamans have had remarkably little interaction with the outside world. At the time Conan Doyle was writing, very little was understood about the islands except that attempts to establish a British colony in the late eighteenth century were quickly abandoned. Fresh in the memory, too, was the murder in 1872 of the British Viceroy by a convict of the penal colony established by the British there in the 1850s. The anthropological information that Holmes read, however, does not correspond to the known characteristics of any of its indigenous groups. In other words, Tonga was almost certainly not the Andamans native that Holmes believed him to be.

  When Doctors Go Wrong

  Watson is the very essence of the reliable, adept and good-hearted medical man, but not all of the doctors who appear in the canonical stories come across quite so well. It was in ‘The Speckled Band’ that Holmes made the observation: ‘When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession.’ Here, Conan Doyle once again wove details from real life into Holmes’s fictional world. The doctors cited, William Palmer and Edward Pritchard, were revi
led murderers of relatively recent vintage. Both were, in truth, ostensibly reliable local GPs rather than the ‘heads of their profession’ as Holmes suggested, unless the profession he was referring to was the killing one. Certainly, neither paid much heed to the demands of their Hippocratic Oath. Palmer was convicted of murdering a friend, John Cook, in 1855 by means of strychnine, apparently so that he could claim the victim’s substantial gambling winnings for himself. Palmer was also suspected of murdering, among others, his own brother, mother-in-law and even four of his children (each of whom succumbed to ‘convulsions’ before their first birthdays). In each case, the alleged motive was financial. No lesser figure than Charles Dickens called Palmer ‘the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey’. He was hanged in 1856. Pritchard, meanwhile, was also accused of being a poisoner, with his wife and mother-in-law among his victims. It is likely he also killed a servant girl, with the existence of an uncomfortable ménage-à-trois in the Glasgow family home put forward as motive. He was convicted and hanged in 1856. Pritchard had a couple of intriguing links to Conan Doyle, too. The first was that he hailed from Southsea, in Hampshire, where Conan Doyle for a time practised as a doctor. Secondly, Henry Littlejohn (see here) helped gather together the forensic evidence for the Crown’s case against the miscreant doctor.

  Something to Steady the Nerves

  A prolific smoker and not insignificant drug-taker, Holmes at least took his alcohol in moderation. He was a red-wine drinker, favouring claret (imbibed in at least two stories) and also Beaune (a burgundy), which he drank at lunch with Watson in The Sign of the Four. As for spirits, he was most likely to go for whisky. As would be expected given Conan Doyle’s roots, it is most certainly Scotch whisky that he would have drunk. He is seen drinking it twice in the canonical stories, each time mixed with soda, and offering it to others a further three times (once in combination with soda and twice with water). However, when Holmes and Watson wanted to fortify others with a drop of alcohol, they most commonly turned to brandy, which they wielded on no less than five occasions in the original stories.

  Déjà Vu

  At the beginning of ‘The Cardboard Box’, Holmes puts on a bravura performance in which he seems to have been able to read the mind of Watson. (He hasn’t, of course, but has merely picked up on a series of subtle clues.) Yet there is something else remarkable about this episode – it appears, word for word, in ‘The Resident Patient’, too. The explanation involves a strange quirk of publishing history. ‘The Cardboard Box’ has some of the most gruesome imagery in all the canon – that of severed ears. Possibly because of its shocking nature, the story was not published in the original British edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, although it did appear briefly in the American version before being removed. With the story effectively out of circulation, Conan Doyle lifted the relevant passage (of which he was clearly proud) and inserted it into a new story. However, with the passage of time ‘The Cardboard Box’ found its way into British versions of The Memoirs (and in America, the volume entitled His Last Bow). So today, eagle-eyed readers can enjoy the extract not once but twice in any volume of the complete canonical works – although those ears still have the power to shock!

  Bar Flies

  The Criterion Bar and Restaurant in London’s Piccadilly Circus, is so proud of its Holmesian associations that in 1953 a commemorative blue plaque was unveiled to celebrate a meeting that never really happened within its walls. For it is here, so we are told in A Study in Scarlet, that Watson is standing at the bar when he receives a tap on the shoulder. Watson turns to see Stamford, his old dresser (in other words, his medical assistant) from his days studying at St Bart’s. It is, of course, Stamford who alerts Watson to the possibility of sharing rooms with an acquaintance who was ‘bemoaning himself this morning because he could not get someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms which he had found, and which were too much for his purse’. Although Stamford warns that Watson might ‘not care for him as a constant companion’, Watson is not to be deterred and so begins one of the most enduring literary relationships of all time. The Criterion itself had only opened in 1873, a spectacular meeting-spot done out in the Neo-Byzantine style. It soon garnered a devoted clientele, which included such literary luminaries as H. G. Wells.

  The Game is Afoot!

  ‘Come, Watson, come!’ Holmes once famously cried. ‘The game is afoot.’ He borrowed the latter expression from Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part 1) and ‘the Game’ has come to be a vital part of the Holmesian experience. Among Holmesians, ‘the Game’ refers to efforts to resolve queries and inconsistencies and to fill in gaps that spring from Conan Doyle’s original body of stories by picking up on small details and expounding new theories. Practitioners tend to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the pastime even as they recognize its essential frivolity. But, just as the player of the Game might seek to establish the origins of Holmes and Watson, we might ask what the origins of the Game are itself. Its inventor is generally acknowledged to be Ronald Knox, an English priest and sometime-crime-novelist. In 1911, he authored an article entitled ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, which he delivered to the Gryphon Club at Trinity College, Oxford. ‘If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do,’ he began.

  . . . It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental. There is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is, in a sense, Holmes’s own method. ‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ he says, ‘that the little things are infinitely the most important.’ It might be the motto of his life’s work. And it is, is it not, as we clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge of a man’s character.

  So began a new school of Holmesian study based around the Game.

  THE REAL EXPERT

  Conan Doyle himself was once moved to comment to Knox: ‘I cannot help writing to you to tell you of the amusement – and also the amazement – with which I read your article on Sherlock Holmes. That anyone should spend such pains on such material was what surprised me. Certainly you know a great deal more about it than I do . . .’

  The Right Tools

  Watson once declared that he had become an institution in the life of Holmes, much like his violin. But what a violin! On the face of it, Sherlock Holmes was in possession of an instrument manufactured by the most famous name in the business – Stradivarius. He had bought it on London’s Tottenham Court Road for a mere 55 shillings, though it was said to be valued at something more than 500 guineas. Given how rarely the wool was pulled over Holmes’s eyes, we must assume his purchase of the violin really was one of the greatest deals of his life. It was, after all, a source of great solace for the detective, helping him work through complicated cases and serving as a means of winding down once an investigation was completed. In his darker moments, he seemed to gain some comfort from just simply clutching it. He was a talented, if slightly erratic, player, Watson calling his skills ‘remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments’. Sometimes, he would indulge Watson by playing a whole series of the doctor’s favourite airs. Holmes was also known to be a fan of the work of Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner and Jacques Offenbach. Of the celebrated player Niccolò Paganini, meanwhile, he would regale Watson with ‘anecdote after anecdote of this extraordinary man’. In rather more weary terms, Watson also described him ‘prattling’ about the differences between Stradivarii and Cremona violins.

  MINDS IN CONCERT

  Holmes’s love of the violin was such that it underpinned a large part of his relatively limited social life. In A Study in Scarlet, for example, he made a special effort to see a performance by Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda. Born into a family with rich musical heritage in Brno (at the time part of the Austrian Empire), Norman-Neruda confounded critics who did not be
lieve the violin was a suitable instrument for a woman. Performing in public from the age of seven, she went on to marry the Swedish musician Ludvig Norman and then the Anglo-German Charles Hallé (founder of the Hallé Orchestra). She was appointed Violinist to the Queen in 1901 and Holmes commended her ‘attack and her bowing’ as ‘splendid’. In ‘The Red-Headed League’, Holmes also took time to attend a concert by the violinist and composer, Martín Melitón Pablo de Sarasate y Navascués, at St James’s Hall. Holmes was in good company in his appreciation of Sarasate. George Bernard Shaw was another fan, describing his music as leaving ‘criticism gasping miles behind him’.

  Barts Alumni?

  The chemical laboratory at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (commonly known as Barts) in the City of London has gone down in legend as the location at which Holmes and Watson first met – with, as we have seen, Stamford (Watson’s old dresser) as the agent of their coming together. However, while Watson’s association with the institution is straightforward, Holmes’s is less so. Watson graduated from its medical school in 1878 but Holmes appeared to be using its facilities under a far looser arrangement. According to Stamford, ‘he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors.’ Who were his professors, and what was their role in his development if he did not attend regular classes? Had he reached some sort of agreement to share the details of any discoveries (such as his haemoglobin test; see here) with them in return for a free hand in the laboratory? Certainly, his activities raised eyebrows. Stamford for one was not comfortable when it came to his beating the subjects in the dissecting rooms with a stick. Or had he perhaps used his powers of disguise to persuade the hospital authorities that he was a bona fide student? These are questions we will probably never be able to answer. But Holmes could not have picked a more prestigious medical establishment. The hospital itself was established back in 1123, with the medical school formerly founded in 1843 (although it had been effectively operating since the early part of the century under the guidance of the esteemed surgeon, John Abernethy). A grand Medical School Building was opened in the year that Watson left, and a year earlier, in 1877, a pioneering School of Nursing was opened. No doubt Watson would have enjoyed the opportunity to mingle with the women who studied there but it was his meeting with Holmes that proved most enduringly significant.