by Margalit Fox
On January 13, 1909, Detective Inspector Pyper and William Warnock, the chief criminal officer of the Glasgow sheriff court,*3 set sail for New York, accompanied by their three star witnesses: Helen Lambie, Arthur Adams, and Mary Barrowman. They arrived on the twenty-fifth. At Slater’s extradition proceedings, which began the next day, the British Crown would bring all needed mendacity to bear on its efforts to see him returned to Scotland.
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THE HEARING FOR THE EXTRADITION of Oscar Slater, alias Otto Sando, opened in the Federal Building in lower Manhattan before John A. Shields, a United States commissioner for the Southern District of New York. Arguing for the Crown was an attorney named Charles Fox. Slater was represented by two American lawyers, Hugh Gordon Miller and William A. Goodhart. Because the Crown’s case was slender, Slater’s lawyers were confident he would prevail. As Goodhart wrote, “At the time of the arrest of Slater it was decided to resist extradition because…the pawn ticket constituted the Government’s chief evidence and knowing that there was nothing to that, I advised a fight.”
But the Crown was more than ready. Its strategy from this point forward would center not on the pawn ticket, which it knew to be worthless, but on witness identification of Slater as the man seen fleeing Miss Gilchrist’s home. To hedge their bet, Glasgow officials showed Slater’s photograph to Adams and Barrowman before the extradition proceedings started. They did not bother to show it to Lambie, who said she had not seen the suspect’s face, though that story would soon change.
The first identification of Slater in New York took place before the extradition proceedings even began. As the hearing was about to start, Slater, flanked by two U.S. deputy marshals, was led down the hallway to Commissioner Shields’s chambers. One marshal, John W. M. Pinckley, to whom he was visibly handcuffed, was six foot four. (Slater was about five foot eight.) The other wore a large badge marked “U.S.,” adorned with red, white, and blue stars.
Standing in the hall as the three men passed were Mr. Fox, the Crown counsel; Inspector Pyper; and the three witnesses. As Marshal Pinckley would testify long afterward, when he passed the group with his prisoner, he saw Fox indicate Slater with his thumb and say to the witnesses something like “Is that the man?” or “That’s the man.”
Under questioning by Fox in chambers, Lambie offered suggestive testimony:
Q. Do you see the man here you saw that night?
A. One is very suspicious if anything.
Though she said she had not seen the intruder’s face on the night of the murder, Lambie testified that she had noticed something peculiar about his walk—“he was sort of shaking himself a little”—a detail she had never mentioned before.
Q. Is that man in this room?
A. Yes he is, Sir.
After further questioning, she indicated Slater.
Another striking feature of Lambie’s testimony was her account of what the intruder had worn. Just after the murder, her description of the man’s clothing had differed markedly from Barrowman’s—so much so that the police thought two men were involved. (Lambie had described the intruder as wearing a gray overcoat and round cloth hat; Barrowman spoke of a fawn-colored waterproof coat and a Donegal cap.) Now, at the extradition hearing, Lambie’s description had dovetailed remarkably with Barrowman’s: both young women testified that the man exiting Miss Gilchrist’s flat had worn a fawn-colored waterproof and Donegal cap.
Next to testify was Barrowman, who reiterated her description of hat and coat. Asked whether Slater resembled the man she had seen in West Princes Street that night, she replied, “That man here is very like him,” an assertion that would be considerably strengthened by the time the case came to trial. She repeated her claim that the man she had seen “had a slight twist in his nose.” (Slater’s nose, though somewhat convex, had no discernible twist.) She also admitted having been shown a photograph of Slater in Fox’s office earlier that day.
Adams, to all appearances the only mature, reflective adult among the three witnesses, took the stand. He would say only that Slater was “not at all unlike” the man he had seen on Miss Gilchrist’s landing. In glimpsing the intruder, he had noticed neither the peculiarity of walk described by Lambie nor the peculiarity of nose described by Barrowman.
The hearing continued for several days, with others testifying for the Crown and still others, including friends from his past American sojourn, for Slater. Slater himself, doubtless on the advice of counsel, who were concerned about his awkward, heavily accented English, did not testify on his own behalf. But his testimony may well have seemed unnecessary, for as the hearing unfolded, the Crown’s case for extradition proved increasingly weak.
“I never doubted his innocence,” Slater’s lawyer William Goodhart wrote to Conan Doyle some years later. “It has always seemed to me, from my knowledge of the class of identification presented before our Commissioner at the extradition proceedings, that a grave doubt existed as to the identity of Slater as the man seen leaving the home of the victim on the night of the murder.” Yet on February 6, 1909, as proceedings were about to reconvene for the day, Slater’s lawyers announced that their client had chosen to waive the balance of the hearing. He would return to Scotland of his own volition and stand trial.
Slater’s decision, amid proceedings that seemed almost certain to end in his favor, betrays several facets of his character. One is his mercurial temperament, a trait that would manifest itself repeatedly during his prison years and again after his release. Another was almost certainly a concern with finances: his modest reserves had already been exhausted in legal fees.
There appeared also to have been a third reason, one that more than any other attests to Slater’s complex personality. Despite his decadent lifestyle, he was as concerned with reputation as any bourgeois of his era and wanted badly to clear his name. But beneath his foppish sophistication, Slater was in some ways breathtakingly naive. He knew full well he was innocent and so chose to put his faith in the Scottish justice system. A trial, he felt certain, would vindicate him once and for all.
*1 In May 1915, amid World War I, the RMS Lusitania would be torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, an event that generated worldwide headlines and sparked anti-German riots throughout Britain.
*2 A Scottish dialect term meaning “the mole.”
*3 “Sheriff” in this sense denotes a member of the Scottish judiciary who presides over a local court.
BOOK TWO
BLOOD
Chapter 5
TRACES
If you want to solve a crime, call a doctor—better still, a doctor who is a crime writer. Detection, at bottom, is a diagnostic enterprise: like many Victorian intellectual endeavors, medicine and crime-solving seek to reconstruct the past through the minute examination of clues. For if the nineteenth century was about the coming of modern science, it was also about the coming of science of a very particular type: reconstructive fields, like geology, archaeology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, that let investigators assemble a record of past events through evidentiary traces, often barely discernible, that lingered in the present.
From a single bone, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier could induce the whole of an extinct animal. From ruins unearthed at Troy and at Knossos, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the English archaeologist Arthur Evans conjured long-dead civilizations. “The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated observer will witness certain events,” Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in 1880; “the clairvoyant declares that, at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as ‘backteller!’) affirms that so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen. In all these cases, it is only the relation to time which alters—the process of divination beyond the limits of possible direct knowledge remains
the same.”
A goal of these new sciences was the creation of narrative—a narrative of things past, often long past, that could be assembled only through the close reading, painstaking analysis, and rigorous chronological ordering of what could be discerned in the present. Huxley evocatively called this process “retrospective prophecy.”
“From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other,” one of the most famous nineteenth-century passages on retrospective prophecy runs. It continues:
So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all the other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study….Let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.
The author of that passage, which is taken, we learn, from his celebrated essay “The Book of Life,” is none other than Sherlock Holmes, as his very first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, reveals. For in creating Holmes, his fictional “scientific detective,” Conan Doyle was evangelizing as vigorously for late Victorian rationalism as Huxley was doing in his essays and public lectures.*1
Retrospective prophecy underpins both detection and doctoring, for in their modus operandi, the two have much in common. Both often start with a body. Both reason backward, from discernible effect (a clue, a symptom) to covert cause (a culprit, a disease). Both are deeply concerned with questions of identity, and both seek an elusive quarry: a criminal for the detective, a germ or other agent of illness for the doctor. Both bring about solutions through great learning, minute observation, and reasoned, carefully controlled leaps of imagination. Both are inherently moral enterprises, seeking to restore a state of order (safety, health) that has been disrupted. In the detective fiction of the late Victorian period, all these elements are exquisitely combined.
Ultimately, both disciplines seek to answer the most fundamental question there is: What happened? To do so, the investigator must gather evidence, but therein lies a basic challenge: neither detective nor doctor—nor any retrospective prophet—is apt to encounter the evidence in the chronological order in which it was laid down. It was not until the nineteenth century that medicine became fully cognizant of this problem, only then considering the patient’s symptoms to be the last link in a narrative chain. With that conceptual shift, the diagnostic examination began to assume the form we recognize today.
“Throughout the 18th century, doctors based their diagnoses mainly on their patients’ spontaneous verbal communications,” the physician Claudio Rapezzi and his colleagues have written. “As diseases were categorised by symptoms, patients could communicate their symptoms verbally, or even by letter. Thus, doctors could effectively ‘visit’ a patient…by post.” But by the nineteenth century, doctors who wished to discern, identify, and correctly order medical clues had to learn not merely to look directly but to “look feelingly,” as Edmund Pellegrino has written. Precisely this skill was imparted to Conan Doyle by Joseph Bell.
By the end of the century, advances in microscopy had enabled doctors to look more precisely than ever. Likewise for detectives of the period, for whom seeing retrospectively was best accomplished by seeing minutely. “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important,” Holmes says confidently in “A Case of Identity,” a story from 1891. A year later, Bell obliged Conan Doyle by furnishing the introduction to the 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet. “The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable,” Bell wrote. “Trained as he has been to notice and appreciate minute detail, Dr. Doyle saw how he could interest his intelligent readers by taking them into his confidence, and showing his mode of working. He created a shrewd, quick-sighted, inquisitive man, half doctor, half virtuoso.”
It is noteworthy, too, to recall that Conan Doyle trained as an eye doctor, for the Slater case is crucially about late Victorian ways of seeing—for good and, on balance, for ill. With its focus on identification, and its prejudices rooted in class and ethnicity, the case is at its core about visual diagnosis or, more accurately, misdiagnosis of a prolonged and pernicious kind.
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RETROSPECTIVE PROPHECY DID NOT start with the Victorians, of course: the art has its roots deep in antiquity, born of the hunter’s skill at tracking his prey by reading its traces. Before Holmes, one of the finest fictional exponents of this skill was Zadig, the ancient Eastern prince who is the title character of Voltaire’s philosophical novella of 1747. In a passage that was an acknowledged influence on Conan Doyle, Zadig offers a masterly demonstration:
One day, when he was walking near a little wood, he saw one of the queen’s eunuchs running to meet him, followed by several officers, who appeared to be in the greatest uneasiness….
“Young man,” said the chief eunuch to Zadig, “have you seen the queen’s dog?”
Zadig modestly replied: “It is a bitch, not a dog.”
“You are right,” said the eunuch.
“It is a very small spaniel,” added Zadig; “it is not long since she has had a litter of puppies; she is lame in the left forefoot; and her ears are very long.”
“You have seen her, then?” said the chief eunuch, quite out of breath.
“No,” answered Zadig. “I have never seen her, and never knew the queen had a bitch.”…
The chief eunuch had no doubt that Zadig had stolen…the queen’s bitch, so they caused him to be brought before the Assembly of the Grand Desterham, which condemned him to the knout*2 and to pass the rest of his life in Siberia. Scarcely had the sentence been pronounced, when…the bitch [was] found. The judges were now under the disagreeable necessity of amending their judgment; but they condemned Zadig to pay four hundred ounces of gold for having said that he had not seen what he had seen….Afterwards he was allowed to plead his cause….He expressed himself in the following terms:
“…I saw on the sand the footprints of an animal, and easily decided that they were those of a little dog. Long and faintly marked furrows, imprinted where the sand was slightly raised between the footprints, told me that it was a bitch whose dugs were drooping, and that consequently she must have given birth to young ones only a few days before. Other marks of a different character, showing that the surface of the sand had been constantly grazed on either side of the front paws, informed me that she had very long ears; and, as I observed that the sand was always less deeply indented by one paw than by the other three, I gathered that the bitch belonging to our august queen was a little lame….”
All the judges marvelled at Zadig’s deep and subtle discernment….Though several magi were of opinion that he ought to be burned as a wizard, the king ordered that he should be released from the fine of four hundred ounces of gold to which he had been condemned. The registrar, the bailiffs, and the attorneys came to his house with great solemnity to restore him his four hundred ounces; they kept back only three hundred and ninety-eight of them for legal expenses.
It is clearly no accident that when the name “Zadig” is given a Germanic reading—with “z” pronounced “tz” and “g” pronounced “k,” as it might be uttered by Yiddish-speaking Jews—it becomes “Tzaddik,” the term, rooted in the Hebrew word for “justice,” that denotes a spiritual master who possesses profound wisdom.
The first modern fictional detective, and every inch an heir to Zadig, was Edgar Allan Po
e’s cogitating protagonist, the chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin, who made his debut in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and returned in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter,” anticipates Holmes in several respects. He is a gentleman—brilliant, aloof, gothic, nocturnal, dissolute. He has a faithful companion who renders the tales of his exploits for the public. He is possessed of observational powers so minute, and a mind so rational, that he can induce a connected chain of contingencies from a single residual clue.
Dupin’s skill at retrospective prophecy—“ratiocination,” Poe calls it—can seem almost clairvoyant, as in a famous scene from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In it, Dupin correctly divines that his friend has been thinking about Chantilly, a petite, stagestruck local cobbler, from the way the friend stumbles in the street after a fruit seller bumps into him. “You were remarking to yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy,” Dupin concludes. “The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer….So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. At this point I interrupted your meditations to remark that as, in fact, he was a very little fellow—that Chantilly—he would do better at the Théâtre des Variétés.”
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BY 1887, WHEN SHERLOCK HOLMES made his debut, late nineteenth-century scientific method and the late nineteenth-century literary detective were poised for sublime convergence. In Conan Doyle’s hero, the ratiocinative skills exhibited by Dupin would reach their apogee.*3 “The scientific method made the fictional detective possible and it made him popular,” J. K. Van Dover, an authority on detective literature, has observed. “The detective offered himself as a special model of the new scientific thinker….He promised to combine the most powerful method of thought with a fundamental commitment to traditional ethics (and, as a further attraction, to exercise his method…on the sensational matter of violent crime), and the public embraced him.”
