Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  The most famous of these pseudoscientists was Cesare Lombroso. An Italian doctor and criminologist, he devised an early-warning system (known as “criminal anthropology” or “scientific criminology”) that sought to cloak racial, ethnic, and class bigotries in Victorian scientific garb. Criminals, he argued, were born, not made: they were compelled to commit crimes because they carried within them the legacy of primordial human ancestors. As a result, the criminal class could be spotted by atavistic features associated with primitive man: heavy brow ridges, small or oddly shaped skulls, asymmetrical faces, and the like. Lombroso’s index of criminal physiognomy, long since discredited, now seems a flesh-and-blood forerunner of the aircraft silhouettes that civilians were urged to memorize in wartime. Both served the same function: to identify an alien invader before he got too close.*4

  Even Conan Doyle, humanist though he was, subscribed to scientific criminology, at least in part. Touring the United States in 1914, he visited Sing Sing, the venerable state penitentiary north of New York City. There, as he recalled in his 1924 autobiography, Memories and Adventures, he watched a group of prisoners being entertained by a visiting musical-hall troupe. “Poor devils, all the forced, vulgar gaiety of the songs and the antics of half-clad women must have provoked a terrible reaction in their minds,” Conan Doyle wrote. “Many of them had, I observed, abnormalities of cranium or of features which made it clear that they were not wholly responsible for their actions….Here and there I noticed an intelligent and even a good face. One wondered how they got there.”

  As Lombroso well knew, in turbulent times it is a comfort to put a face on nebulous fear. That face, it went without saying, must be sufficiently different from one’s own—a face ideally belonging to a bogeyman specially constructed for that purpose. Once identified, he could be routed from the community, taking its worst fears with him. The historian Peter Gay calls this scapegoat the “convenient Other.” In Glasgow in the winter of 1908–9, the face of that Other was coming increasingly to resemble Oscar Slater’s.

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  ON DECEMBER 26, 1908, Superintendent Ord issued the first notice in which Slater’s name appears. Based on descriptions by McLean and Cameron, and with a nod to the “Donegal cap” of which Mary Barrowman had spoken, it read:

  Wanted for identification for the murder at Queen’s Terrace on 21st instant, “Oscar Slater,” sometimes takes the name of Anderson, a German, 30 years of age, 5 feet 8, stout, square-shouldered, dark hair, clean shaven, may have few days’ growth of moustache. Nose has been broken and is marked. Dressed when last seen in dark jacket suit, cap with flaps fastening with button at top; sometimes wears a soft “Donegal” hat; has a light and a dark-coloured overcoat, either of which he may be wearing.

  May be accompanied by a woman about 30, tall, stout, good-looking, dark hair, dressed usually in dark or blue costume, heavy set of furs, sable colour, and large blue or black hat with green feathers, residing till yesterday at 69 St. George’s Road.

  By this time Slater, who had gone not to Monte Carlo but on his long-planned trip to America, was far out to sea, blithely unaware of the dragnet that was starting to encircle him.

  *1 A Scottish legal term denoting the receipt or resale of stolen goods, or the illegal harboring of a criminal.

  *2 Exploitative, low-paying employers—i.e., sweatshop operators.

  *3 Though he was an observant Jew, Phillips was called “Reverend” and held the title “minister.” Those designations, applied to spiritual leaders who were not ordained rabbis, were in common use among British Jews in the late nineteenth century and afterward.

  *4 Such taxonomies persisted well into the twentieth century. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, flyers purporting to instruct citizens in the art of telling Chinese Americans from Japanese Americans were ubiquitous in the United States. On December 22, Life magazine published an article headlined “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.” It began: “In the first discharge of emotions touched off by the Japanese assaults on their nation, U.S. citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the county are many of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese, whose homeland is our staunch ally….To dispel some of this confusion, Life here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.” These were, the article went on to illustrate, (for the Chinese) “parchment yellow complexion,” “higher bridge [of the nose],” “never has rosy checks,” “lighter facial bones,” “scant beard,” “longer, narrower face” and (for the Japanese) “earthy yellow complexion,” “flatter nose,” “sometimes rosy cheeks,” “massive cheek and jawbone,” “heavy beard,” “broader, shorter face.” The article’s strong implication was that while readers should refrain from beating up Chinese Americans, they need have no such scruples around Americans of Japanese descent.

  Chapter 3

  THE KNIGHT-ERRANT

  Victorian fears were on abundant display in the detective novel, a genre that had its first great flowering in the late nineteenth century. Earlier crime fiction had concerned itself approvingly with the exploits of dashing brigands: heroes, heavily romanticized, were modeled on populist historical figures like Dick Turpin, the eighteenth-century highwayman who energetically robbed, plundered, and murdered his way across England. Villains were typically noblemen who had denied the masses their economic due or malevolent law officers seeking to snare the hero.

  But by the Victorian era, with its metropolitan terrors, new middle class, and zeal for safeguarding possessions, the concerns of crime fiction had shifted markedly. Now property trumped populism in the foremost crime stories of the day, and the heroic rogue was replaced by the upright detective. This new fictional detective had a twofold role. His first task was to reassure. Lombroso had tried to convince upright citizens that criminals could be diagnosed at a glance and thus avoided. The detective novel, with somewhat more finesse, attempted to do the same: it sought to persuade the public that, as one scholar has described it, “the individual’s traces were readable and could not be concealed in the crowd.”

  The detective’s second function was scientific—even medical: to act, where prevention was impossible, as an agent of cure. If the Victorian age was about little else, it was about the coming of modern science: the world-shaking evolutionary theory of Darwin; signal advances in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology; the increased understanding of the structure and function of living cells and of the germ theory of disease; and, hand in hand with those discoveries, the professionalization of modern medicine.

  These developments informed the era’s preoccupation with crime and criminals. Crime was increasingly seen as a form of contagion—a kind of “social pathology”—and the new scientific method as a tool with which to track it down and wipe it out. By late Victorian times, criminals (especially foreign ones) were viewed as invading the populace in much the same way that germs invade the body. In the literature of the period, metaphors of invasion are everywhere: consider the blood-sucking antihero of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, or the insidious Jewish hypnotist Svengali in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, who co-opts the soul of his lovely young protégée.

  The Holmes stories, too, bear witness to these fears, for their author, like many progressives of his era, was not immune to prevailing ideas about criminal physiognomy, about the glories of empire, and even—as some Holmes stories betray—about foreigners. (For his simultaneous embrace of ecumenical humanism and ardent fealty to Crown and country, the scholar Laura Otis has aptly described Conan Doyle as a “Liberal Imperialist.”) While many of Conan Doyle’s villains are Englishmen gone bad, the canon also contains its share of nefarious outsiders, like the vengeful American Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet, or Tonga, the murderous Andaman islander fro
m The Sign of Four. Conan Doyle, Otis writes, “depicts British society as permeated by foreign criminals, ‘passing’ as respectable citizens….Sherlock Holmes, his hero, acts as an immune system…to identify them and render them innocuous.”

  The Slater case embodied the most potent concerns of its time. It is every inch about paranoia—highly personal on Miss Gilchrist’s part, more general on the public’s. It sprang from an act of invasion of the most terrifying kind: intrusion into a heavily fortified home. It involved a shadowy outsider who was not only a foreigner but also a Jew, a people long taxed, as Nazi ideology would soon trumpet, as being agents of the transmission of disease. Above all, it would require the use of sharp scientific reason to combat the willful unreason of police and prosecutors. How fitting, then, that Slater’s greatest champion was both a medical doctor and the father of the literary figure who remains the supreme incarnation of the Victorian detective.

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  THE FIRST CITIZEN OF Baker Street, as Sherlock Holmes would be known, sprang fully and impeccably to life in Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet. First published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, it was reprinted in book form the next year. Though Conan Doyle would continue publishing Holmes stories until 1927, even the late works embody the Victorian sensibility to their core.

  Holmes quickly became a global sensation, not only for his investigative prowess, unimpeachable morals, and ultra-rational mind but also for his embodiment of an age of Victorian gentility, and Victorian certainties, that was already slipping away. From the beginning, the tales conjured a comforting world of gaslight and empire, where problems could still be remedied through the combined palliatives of reason and honor.

  “Marshall McLuhan…once observed that serious cultural change always comes masked in the familiar trappings of the preceding cultural norm,” the critic Frank D. McConnell has written. “In this context, we can see that Doyle’s invention of Holmes and Watson is a crucial survival myth for the modern era, the technologized and urban age. If Doyle had not invented Holmes, someone else would have had to.”

  The sea change to which Holmes bore witness was manifest in the scientific revolution then sweeping the West, of which Conan Doyle was an ardent adherent. Just as Thomas Henry Huxley (the distinguished nineteenth-century English biologist, Darwin acolyte, and grandfather of Aldous) had used his popular writings and lectures to bring the new scientific advances to the masses, Conan Doyle used Holmes to showcase their application to the investigation of crime. Holmes’s rationalist approach differed from that of most earlier literary detectives, something his creator set out to ensure from the first.

  “It often annoyed me how in the old-fashioned detective stories, the detective always seemed to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or fluke or else it was unexplained how he got there,” Conan Doyle said in a 1927 interview. “I began to think about…turning scientific methods…onto the work of detection.”

  Holmes resonated so deeply with the late Victorian public that people could scarcely countenance him as fictional. Readers requested his autograph and sent him pipe tobacco and violin strings. Women wrote to Conan Doyle, applying to be Holmes’s housekeeper. An American tobacconist requested a copy of his putative monograph classifying 140 different varieties of ash. “Occasionally,” a biographer has written, “when a certain ‘pawky strain of humor’ came over him, Conan Doyle would send a brief postcard in reply, expressing regret that the detective was not available. The signature, however, was calculated to raise eyebrows. It was: ‘Dr. John Watson.’ ”

  In 1893, Conan Doyle (who soon wearied of his hero and would rather have been known for the ponderous historical novels he also wrote) killed Holmes off in “The Final Problem.” But so great was the public clamor for Holmes—and so correspondingly lucrative the prospect of renewed publication—that Conan Doyle found he could not leave him dead. He first revived his hero in flashback in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–2 but set in the years before Holmes’s demise. In 1903, he brought Holmes fully back to life in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” an act of resuscitation that prefigured his real-life rehabilitations of George Edalji and Oscar Slater. All three cases confirmed an essential truth that Conan Doyle had noted in childhood, after devouring boys’ adventure stories: “It was easy to get people into scrapes,” he observed, “but not so easy to get them out again.”

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  IF OSCAR SLATER WAS the incarnation of late Victorian fears, then Arthur Conan Doyle embodied most of the era’s sterling qualities: valor, thirst for adventure, love of manly competition in the boxing ring and on the cricket pitch, a passion for scientific knowledge, and a deep sense of fair play. To the systemic prejudices of Victorian Britain—his own included—he brought the unshakable counterweight of populist progressivism, for, like Slater, he had grown up poor, marginalized for his religion, and very much not an Englishman.

  Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, the second child, and eldest son, of the seven surviving children of Charles Altamont Doyle and the former Mary Josephine Foley.*1 Theirs was an impoverished branch of an illustrious family: Arthur’s paternal grandfather, John Doyle, an artist who drew under the name H.B., was a political caricaturist of renown in early nineteenth-century London; among his luminous acquaintances were William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Benjamin Disraeli. Arthur’s paternal uncles included James Doyle, author and illustrator of The Chronicle of England; Henry Doyle, manager of the National Gallery in Dublin; and Richard Doyle, an illustrator for Punch.

  Arthur’s father, a painter and illustrator, appeared to have been as gifted as his brothers. But he suffered from epilepsy, alcoholism, and, by the time Arthur was a youth, severe mental illness. When he was able to work, he earned a meager wage as a clerk in an Edinburgh municipal office. “We lived,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty.”

  “Charles possessed the Doyle family charm in full measure, yet was frequently described as ‘dreamy and remote,’ ‘apathetic,’ ‘naturally philosophic’ or ‘unworldly,’ ” the biographer Russell Miller has written. “When he was only 30 years old he suffered such a severe attack of delirium tremens that he was incapacitated and put on half pay for almost a year. Mary would later tell doctors that for months at a time her husband could only crawl, ‘was perfectly idiotic [and] could not tell his own name.’…He became increasingly unstable, once stripping off his clothes and trying to sell them in the street.” In 1881, Charles was committed to the first of the series of Scottish institutions that would be his home to the end of his life. He died in 1893, at sixty-one, at the Crichton Royal Lunatic Asylum in Dumfries.

  Holding the family together in these years was Mary Doyle, the well-read daughter of an Irish doctor, who had married Charles in 1855, at seventeen. She was descended on her mother’s side, or so she had been told, from English nobility. “Diminutive Mary Doyle…fiercely proud of her heritage, drummed into her son her fervent belief that they had aristocratic ancestors and schooled him in the traditions and lore of a bygone age, of chivalry and heraldry and knights in shining armour,” Miller wrote, adding:

  She would frequently challenge him to emblazon heraldic shields and he could soon provide every detail. It was a welcome escape from the spartan conditions, anxiety and genteel poverty in which they lived….Arthur never forgot sitting on the kitchen table while his mother busied herself cleaning the hearth and expounding on the past glories of her family and its connections with the Plantagenets, the Dukes of Brittany and the Percys of Northumberland: “I would sit swinging my knickerbockered legs, swelling with pride until my waistcoat was as tight as a sausage skin, as I contemplated the gulf which separated me from all other little boys who swang their legs upon tables.”*2

  Arthur grew up curious, sturdy, literar
y—he began writing little stories as a child—and, when need be, bellicose. “I will say for myself, however,” he wrote, “that though I was pugnacious I was never so to those weaker than myself and that some of my escapades were in the defence of such.” It was a trait that would define him to the end of his life.

  The Doyles were Roman Catholics; as a youth Arthur, helped by well-to-do members of his extended family, was educated at Stonyhurst, a centuries-old Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire. He would remember it for its austerity, discipline, and frequent corporal punishment. “I can speak with feeling as I think few, if any boys of my time endured more of it,” he later wrote. “I went out of my way to do really mischievous and outrageous things simply to show that my spirit was unbroken….One master, when I told him that I thought of being a civil engineer, remarked, ‘Well, Doyle, you may be an engineer, but I don’t think you will ever be a civil one.’ ”

  After leaving Stonyhurst in 1875, he studied for a year at a Jesuit school in Austria before returning to Edinburgh to start his university education. “I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application, so that one was bound to try to meet it,” he wrote. “My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her. It had been determined that I should be a doctor, chiefly, I think, because Edinburgh was so famous a centre for medical learning.”

  Medical education in Scotland was then part of the undergraduate curriculum, and in 1876, at seventeen, Conan Doyle entered the University of Edinburgh to work toward a bachelor of medicine. He had already begun to part company with his religious beliefs, and the breach was widened by the scientific ideas to which he was exposed at university.