Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  “Judging…by all the new knowledge which came to me both from my reading and from my studies, I found that the foundations not only of Roman Catholicism but of the whole Christian faith, as presented to me in nineteenth century theology, were so weak that my mind could not build upon them,” he wrote. “It is to be remembered that these were the years when Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were our chief philosophers, and that even the man in the street felt the strong sweeping current of their thought, while to the young student, eager and impressionable, it was overwhelming.” This loss of faith meant a corresponding loss of support from the well-heeled, observant branches of his family, both in his student days and afterward, when he was struggling to establish a medical practice. But he held firm to his newfound convictions.

  At the university, Conan Doyle came under the sway of an eminent professor, Dr. Joseph Bell. “Bell was a very remarkable man in body and mind,” he recalled. “He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking….His strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character….To his audience of Watsons it all seemed very miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”

  By the time Conan Doyle was twenty, he later wrote, “my father’s health had utterly broken”—in his memoir, he refers to his father’s decline with gentle diplomacy, never specifying the precise nature of his illness—“and I…found myself practically the head of a large and struggling family.” To earn money, he began writing short stories. His first, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” (a non-Holmes tale set in Africa and regarded by modern critics as a pastiche of Poe and Bret Harte), was published in 1879 in Chambers’s Journal, an Edinburgh literary magazine. The next year, also to ease family finances, he interrupted his studies to sign on as the medical officer of the whaling ship Hope. The seven-month voyage would be the first of his many dashing adventures.

  Joining the ship, with its crew of fifty, Conan Doyle embarked from the port of Peterhead, the Scottish town where Slater would one day be incarcerated, bound for the Arctic. “The life is dangerously fascinating,” he later wrote with characteristic Victorian understatement, and he soon found that its dangers applied to the doctor as well as the crew. More than once he was thrown overboard by a sudden swell, landing amid blocks of floating ice before regaining the ship. On another occasion he joined a party of harpooners in their little boat as they set upon a whale. “Its instinct urges it to get its tail to work on the boats, and yours urges you to keep poling and boat-hooking along its side, so as to retain your safe position near its shoulder,” he wrote. “Even there, however, we found…that we were not quite out of danger’s way, for the creature in its flurry raised its huge side-flapper and poised it over the boat. One flap would have sent us to the bottom of the sea.” He added, with equally characteristic sentiment: “Who would swap that moment for any other triumph that sport can give?”

  In 1881, Conan Doyle graduated from Edinburgh as a bachelor of medicine and master of surgery. That autumn, he took a post as a ship’s surgeon on the steamer Mayumba, bound from Liverpool for the west coast of Africa. His account of that voyage betrays the best of Victorian valor and the worst of Victorian imperialism. On one occasion, he helped subdue an out-of-control fire aboard the ship, laden with a cargo of palm oil. On another, in Lagos, he fell seriously ill. “The germ or the mosquito or whatever it was reached me and I was down with a very sharp fever,” he wrote. “As I was myself doctor there was no one to look after me and I lay for several days fighting it out with Death in a very small ring and without a second….It must have been a close call, and I had scarcely sat up before I heard that another victim who got it at the same time was dead.”

  In his appraisal of the ship’s African passengers, Conan Doyle does himself little credit. “There were…some unpleasant negro traders whose manners and bearing were objectionable, but who were patrons of the line and must, therefore, be tolerated. Some of these palm oil chiefs and traders have incomes of many thousands a year, but as they have no cultivated tastes they can only spend their money on drink, debauchery and senseless extravagance. One of them, I remember, had a choice selection of the demi-monde of Liverpool to see him off.”

  In 1882, Conan Doyle established a medical practice in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth in the south of England. Three years later, he married Louise Hawkins, familiarly known as Touie, the sister of one of his patients.*3 A daughter, Mary, was born in 1889; a son, Kingsley, in 1892. The marriage, which would last until Louise’s death in 1906, was amicable, though it seemed based, as one scholar has noted, “more on affection and respect than on passion.”

  Conan Doyle was by all accounts a capable doctor, but he found solo practice a struggle. “I made £154 the first year, and £250 the second, rising slowly to £300, which in eight years I never passed,” he later wrote. “In the first year the Income Tax paper arrived and I filled it up to show that I was not liable. They returned the paper with ‘Most unsatisfactory’ scrawled across it. I wrote ‘I entirely agree’ under the words, and returned it once more.”

  Between patients, he continued to write, selling the occasional story to magazines and completing a historical novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, which would not see publication until 1890. He began to dream of producing a set of stories that, unlike the popular serials of the day, would each be self-contained in a single issue yet leave readers clamoring for sequels.

  “Poe’s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes,” Conan Doyle wrote. “But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science.” For his hero, he considered various names—among them Sherrinford Holmes—before hitting on one whose steel-trap snap befit a detective whose acumen, logical rigor, and sense of honor would outstrip those of many real-life counterparts.*4

  For a time Conan Doyle plied his two trades in parallel: In 1891, after training briefly in Vienna as an ophthalmologist, he moved with his family to London, where he set up a practice. Before long, Holmes’s success would let him relinquish medicine entirely, though his first vocation would stand him in good stead to the end. “Often, physicians who become serious writers abandon the clinic wholly or visit it only intermittently,” Edmund D. Pellegrino, a doctor and bioethicist, has observed. “But they retain the clinician’s way of looking.”

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  ONCE HOLMES MADE HIM FAMOUS, Conan Doyle had to spend a great deal of time denying that he was Holmesian himself. After a reviewer castigated him for letting Holmes disparage Poe’s great detective, the chevalier Dupin, in A Study in Scarlet, he replied, charmingly: “Please grip this fact with your cérebral tentacle, / The doll and his maker are never identical.” In fact, with his big bluff build, round face, and walrus mustache, Conan Doyle seemed far more the embodiment of Watson than of Holmes.

  Yet the doll Holmes sprang from somewhere. Between his natural questing temperament and his supreme diagnostic training under Bell, Conan Doyle possessed a far more Holmesian cast of mind than he usually let on. “I have often been asked whether I had myself the qualities which I depicted, or whether I was merely the Watson that I look,” he wrote. “Of course I am well aware that it is one thing to grapple with a practical problem and quite another thing when you are allowed to solve it under your own conditions. I have no delusions about that. At the same time a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has
some possibilities of that character within him.”

  He continued: “I…have several times solved problems by Holmes’ methods after the police have been baffled. Yet I must admit that in ordinary life I am by no means observant and that I have to throw myself into an artificial frame of mind before I can weigh evidence and anticipate the sequence of events.”

  But according to Adrian Conan Doyle, a son from the author’s second marriage, his father could perform feats of diagnostic logic with ease:

  In travelling through the capital cities of the world, it was one of my keenest enjoyments to accompany my father to any principal restaurant, and there to listen to his quiet speculations as to the characteristics, professions and other idiosyncrasies, all quite hidden from my eyes, of our fellow diners. Sometimes we could not prove the correctness…of his findings as the particular subject might be unknown to the head-waiter; but whenever those concerned were known to the maître d’hotel, the accuracy of my father’s deduction was positively startling. As a footnote, here is a point that will intrigue Holmes enthusiasts. In the mind’s eye, we surely visualize the Master complete with dust-red dressing-gown and curving pipe. But these were the accoutrements of Conan Doyle, and the originals are still in the family possession!

  Conan Doyle’s skill was evident not only in his powers of reasoning but also in his eagerness to amass the welter of empirical data—the clues—on which his rational mind could work. He had started down this empirical path in his university days. “I always regarded him as one of the best students I ever had,” Bell said of him years later. “He was exceedingly interested always upon anything connected with diagnosis, and was never tired of trying to discover those little details which one looks for.”

  As a young doctor, Conan Doyle stood ready to challenge scientific opinion when he thought the facts did not bear it out. In November 1890, while practicing in Southsea, he traveled to Berlin to hear a lecture by the German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch. Koch, who would receive the Nobel Prize in 1905, was already a titan, renowned for having isolated the bacilli that cause anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis. By the late nineteenth century, he authentically believed that he had uncovered not only the cause of tuberculosis but also a cure, one of the most urgently sought grails in world health. This was the subject of his Berlin lecture.

  Arriving the day before, Conan Doyle found the lecture so oversubscribed that he could not get a seat. “Undaunted,” his biographer Russell Miller wrote, “he tried calling at Koch’s home, but got no further than the front hall, where he watched a postman empty a sack of letters onto a desk. He realised, with a sense of shock, that they were mostly from desperately ill people who had heard about Koch’s cure and believed he was their last hope….Since Koch’s findings remained to be verified it seemed to the sceptical Conan Doyle that ‘a wave of madness had seized the world.’ ”

  Returning to the lecture hall the next day, Conan Doyle befriended an American doctor who had gained admission, and who afterward shared his notes. Reviewing them—and spirited in by his American friend to tour Koch’s clinical wards—Conan Doyle realized that the vaunted remedy was not all it appeared. “Observing the patients treated with Koch’s tuberculosis ‘cure,’ ” Laura Otis has written, “Doyle comprehended immediately that the treatment—which proved to be a tremendous disappointment—functioned not by killing the bacillus directly but by killing and expelling the damaged tissue in which the bacillus grew.”

  Conan Doyle outlined his conclusions in a letter in the Daily Telegraph. Koch’s remedy, he wrote, “does not touch the real seat of the evil. To use a homely illustration, it is as if a man whose house was infested with rats were to remove the marks of the creatures every morning and expect in that way to get rid of them.” His was a minority viewpoint, but over time it proved correct.

  By the late 1890s, when Conan Doyle had forsaken medicine and Holmes was a vibrant worldwide presence, he was asked increasingly to turn his diagnostic skills to problems of another sort: real-life criminal mysteries. He would bring his “clinician’s way of looking” to bear on each of them, including, in the most formidable case of his career, the conviction of Oscar Slater.

  *1 To honor a childless great-uncle, Michael Conan, Arthur and his elder sister, Annette, bore the dual surname Conan Doyle.

  *2 The interpolated quotation is from Conan Doyle’s 1895 autobiographical novel, The Stark Munro Letters, about a young doctor.

  *3 Though her legal name was Louisa, she expressed the strong preference throughout her life for Louise.

  *4 Conan Doyle’s original name for the faithful Dr. John H. Watson was Ormond Sacker.

  Chapter 4

  THE MAN IN THE DONEGAL CAP

  On December 21, 1908, the day Miss Gilchrist died, Oscar Slater received two letters from abroad. One was from a London friend, a man named Rogers, who wrote to warn Slater that his estranged wife, seeking money, was on his trail. Slater had already been planning to move to San Francisco at the behest of John Devoto, a friend from his American sojourn. Providentially, the second letter offered an answer to the problem described in the first. It was from Devoto himself, again urging Slater to come over and join him in business.

  Slater promptly gave Schmalz, the maid, a week’s notice. (To deflect inquiries on his wife’s behalf, he instructed her to tell callers that he had gone to Monte Carlo.) It was during his last days in Glasgow that Slater, preparing for his move, did the two things that would put the police on his trail. First, he telegraphed Dent’s in London to ask that his watch be repaired and returned at once. Second, to raise money for his passage, he began canvassing his cronies in Glasgow’s gambling clubs, trying to sell the pawn ticket for his diamond crescent brooch. By 7:00 p.m. on December 21, he had returned to St. George’s Road and was, Antoine and Schmalz later testified, eating supper at home.

  The next four days saw his continued preparations. At about 8:30 on Christmas night, he and Antoine left their flat, with hired porters carrying their ten pieces of luggage. At Glasgow’s Central Station, they boarded the night train to Liverpool. Arriving at 3:40 a.m., they checked into the North-Western Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Slater of Glasgow. At the hotel, Liverpool’s chief detective would later confirm, “the chambermaid had a conversation with the woman, who told her that they were about to sail by the Lusitania for America.”*1

  On December 26, Slater bought two second-class tickets aboard the Lusitania, leaving for New York that day. In an apparent effort to put his wife off the scent, he booked them in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Sando. By now the Glasgow police, alerted by the Liverpool authorities, considered him a fugitive from justice, brooch clue or no brooch clue.

  “The pawned brooch,” Conan Doyle would write long afterward, “was one which belonged to Slater, and the police became aware of this fact…before Slater sailed for America.” He added: “Slater, moreover, had been extremely open about his movements, he had made his preparations for going to America with the greatest deliberation, and carried them out in the same leisurely and open manner after the date when the crime was committed as he had done previously….Such being the case, how is it that a cable was sent to New York to have him arrested on arrival?”

  But just such a cable was sent by the Glasgow authorities:

  ARREST OTTO SANDO SECOND CABIN LUSITANIA WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH THE MURDER OF MARION GILCHRIST AT GLASGOW. HE HAS A TWISTED NOSE. SEARCH HIM AND THE WOMAN WHO IS HIS TRAVELLING COMPANION FOR PAWN-TICKETS.

  On January 2, 1909, when the Lusitania steamed into the Port of New York, local police detectives boarded the ship and arrested Slater. That was the first, he said, that he heard the name Marion Gilchrist. Searching him, they found the pawn ticket for the diamond brooch: he had never been able to sell it. Antoine was dispatched to Ellis Island; Slater was confined in the Tombs, the gritty house of detention in lower Manhattan that still stands, to await
extradition. From there, in February, he would write to his Glasgow friend Hugh Cameron—a shady underworld character known as “the Moudie.”*2 Though Slater did not know it, it was Cameron who had pointed Glasgow detectives toward the pawnshop where he had left his diamond brooch.

  “Dear Friend Cameron!” his letter begins:

  Today it is nearly five weeks I am kept here in prison for the Glasgow murder.

  I am very downhearted my dear Cameron to know that my friends in Glasgow…can tell such liars about me to the Glasgow police….

  I hope my dear Cameron that you will still be my friend in my troubel and tell the truth and stand on my side. You know the best reason I have left Glasgow because I have shown to you the letter from St. Francisco from my friend, also I have left you my address from St. Francisco….

  The police is trying hard to make a frame-up for me. I must have a good trial, because I will prove with five people where I have been when the murder was committed.

  Thanking you at present, and I hope to have a true friend on you, because every man is able to get put in such an affair and being innocent.

  My best regards to you and all my friends—I am, your friend,

  Oscar Slater,

  Tombs, New York

  “It is a measure of Cameron’s friendship,” one modern British writer noted drily, “that he immediately showed this letter to the Police.”

  From this point on, the duplicity of the British authorities becomes truly naked. Between its social paranoia and its scientific advances, the Victorian era was preoccupied with identifying and vanquishing invaders of all sorts: microbes, criminals, foreigners. The Slater case, which sprang in large part from late Victorian ways of casting the convenient Other, would hinge crucially on questions of identification—identification that, as Glasgow officials would soon demonstrate, could be manufactured willy-nilly as the need arose.