Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  I call that period the eye-squinting period, because the treatment then given puts the eyes out of view. Through numerous experiments I was able to hold my own. I saw these men round about me in a horrible plight….Attacks were made upon the organs of these men and also upon their nervous system, and we know from the conscientious objectors that the Government have taken their percentage of these men—some have died, some have committed suicide, others have been knocked off their heads, and in this way got into asylums….I experienced part of the process, and I wish to emphasize the fact that this callous and cold system of destroying people is going on inside the prisons now.

  It is as hard to evaluate MacLean’s claims as it is to evaluate Slater’s. But “what is not in question,” one Scottish historian has written, “is that MacLean’s experience in prison, both in 1916–17, and after the 1918 trial, enormously damaged his health.” MacLean died in 1923, at forty-four.

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  PETERHEAD OFFICIALS WERE WELL aware of Slater’s state of mind. “With respect to prisoner’s mental condition,” a June 1911 report from the prison medical officer reads, “Slater is obsessed with the idea that liberation is imminent, the obsession being the direct outcome of certain letters & communications*3 of which he has been the recipient. These have thrown his mind into such a chaotic condition that he has lost his entire sense of proportion.” The report concluded, ominously: “I do not meanwhile regard him as insane, but there is no doubt that unless his correspondents observe more care he will become so.”

  By chance Conan Doyle joined the case soon afterward. His mandate, as he was well aware, was not to figure out whodunit, but to prove who had not. “Since I was generally given credit for having got Edalji out of his troubles, it was hoped by those who believed that Slater’s condemnation was a miscarriage of justice that I might be able to do the same for him,” he later wrote. “I went into the matter most reluctantly, but when I glanced at the facts, I saw that it was an even worse case than the Edalji one, and that this unhappy man had in all probability no more to do with the murder for which he had been condemned than I had.”

  As he began sifting the data, what he found only strengthened this resolve. “It is impossible to read and weigh the facts in connection with the conviction of Oscar Slater…without feeling deeply dissatisfied with the proceedings, and morally certain that justice was not done,” he wrote in 1912. “It will, in my opinion, be a serious scandal if the man be allowed upon such evidence to spend his life in a convict prison….How far the verdict was a just one, the reader may judge for himself when he has perused a connected story of the case.” It was just this kind of story—a narrative chain forged from diagnostic traces—that Conan Doyle now began to construct.

  *1 Slater’s brother, a prosperous landowner.

  *2 Prison nomenclature for the “separate cells”—i.e., solitary confinement.

  *3 The report does not specify from whom, or the precise nature of their contents.

  BOOK FOUR

  PAPER

  Chapter 15

  “YOU KNOW MY METHOD”

  The more Conan Doyle studied the Slater case, the more disturbed he became. “It is an atrocious story,” he wrote, “and as I read it and realized the wickedness of it all, I was moved to do all I could for the man.” Though he could scarcely have imagined that he would be involved with the case until the late 1920s (his work for Edalji had spanned less than a year), his decision to commit himself to Slater’s cause was not made lightly. “I have been in touch with several of his fellow convicts who have come out,” Conan Doyle would later write, “and…they are agreed that his innocence is recognised by his criminal companions, and there could be no more knowing jury than that.”

  Though the Edalji case formed a template for Conan Doyle’s work on Slater’s behalf, there were crucial differences. Where Edalji had involved Conan Doyle the man of action, Slater was about Conan Doyle the cogitator. In his work for Edalji, Conan Doyle literally trod the same ground the assailant had covered, picking his way across muddy fields and tangled railway lines. He met his subject, and his subject’s family, and was in contact with them throughout. For Slater, by contrast, he chose to work chiefly from documents. Conan Doyle met Slater only once, after his release; Peterhead’s correspondence log, which records every letter Slater sent and received over eighteen and a half years, lists not a single communication between them.

  There were several reasons for these differences. Conan Doyle had entered the Edalji affair shortly after the death of his first wife, Louise, and it offered a welcome distraction. By the time he took up Slater’s case, he was happily remarried to Jean and, it is fair to assume, disinclined to range from home. Still more significant, although Conan Doyle’s personal feelings toward Slater did not affect his commitment to the case (“Some of us still retain an old-fashioned prejudice in favour of a man being punished for the crime that he is tried for, and not for the morals of his private life,” he wrote), good Victorian that he was, he clearly deplored him. Throughout the years he would spend on the case, Conan Doyle made a point of holding Slater at arm’s length.

  But if his work on Slater’s behalf seemed closer to armchair ratiocination, it was no less vital a method of detection. Poe’s great detective, Dupin, once solved a murder without leaving his rooms. Holmes himself resolved many a case from the untidy confines of 221B Baker Street. “Insurance companies are reluctant to reimburse anyone but the psychiatrist for talking with the patient,” the physician Pasquale Accardo has written. “Yet the Holmesian ideal involves just that—to solve the case without ever leaving his sitting room—à la Nero Wolfe.” In the Edalji case, Conan Doyle’s work as a tracker was literal. In Slater’s it was metaphorical, but no less powerful.

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  “DATA! DATA! DATA!” HOLMES famously cries in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” an 1892 story. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” And so in the Slater case, Conan Doyle began to amass his clay. The Gilchrist crime scene was long gone, of course; the crude forensics of the day had yielded nothing useful anyway. So he turned to the medium he knew best: the printed word. He began with a rigorous study of the trial transcript, first published and annotated by William Roughead in 1910.

  A distinguished Scottish lawyer and criminologist, Roughead had attended every day of Slater’s trial and had come away utterly persuaded of his innocence. “That his opinion was manifest in the magnificent introduction to his book on the trial,” Peter Hunt has written, “is suggested by the fact that when Slater received his copy [in prison] the Introduction had been removed.”

  Delighted to have gained so formidable an ally, Roughead became his leg man, playing energetic Archie Goodwin to Conan Doyle’s Wolfe, sending him additional documents, along with accounts of his interviews with various principals in the case. Conan Doyle also trained his diagnostic eye on the blizzard of news coverage of the crime and its aftermath, and on the stenographer’s transcript of the New York extradition hearing. He was, in essence, taking a rigorously detailed case history. The data he amassed were the symptoms, or effects, of the case laid before him. His job was to rule out Slater as having been their cause.

  The method by which Conan Doyle did this was admirably set out in his account of the Langham Hotel mystery: to separate the relevant details from the welter of narrative chaff, and to finger, among what remains, the telling clues. In so doing, aided by his deep understanding of human behavior, he would make the first truly seminal public discovery about Slater’s case. It supplied a plausible motive for the seemingly motiveless murder of Marion Gilchrist.

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  WHILE CONAN DOYLE EMBARKED on fact-finding, Slater’s arduous life continued, with time marked by the cherished correspondence with his parents. “The Iserbach has been filled up for years so that there is no more frog-concert, but instead of t
his the electric cars pass every ten minutes,” Pauline wrote.

  “On working with my granite-stones, I knock very often with my hammer my left hand, and I wish you for every stroke I have already and will still receive a very happy new year,” Slater wrote one December. The next April, he wrote: “No doubt you would realise in Beuthen that the [Passover] holidays began yesterday, the Jews here are sending me food, oftentimes also fish, and when I get these extra dishes I always feel that I am eating real Jewish food.”

  As before, Slater’s somber lines could show flashes of puckish humor. “Your letter has been handed over to me during my supper and I was very happy to know you [are] well and cheerful,” he wrote. “When I saw your photo and contemplated father’s growth of hair, I put unconsciously my hand on my head (there is no mirror here) and I felt very discouraged, however got consoled again, thinking that I was born already quite bald.”

  Pauline’s letters remain unswerving in their faith and support. “My most beloved good son: A letter from you, my dear child, is for us a recreation, if even it comes from there, where, God knows, you do not belong to. It seems like a tale when I tell you, not a moment I have given up hope, that over short or long you will get your freedom again, which you well deserve. Do not lose courage, beloved child. The Almighty will hear the daily ardent prayers of your old good parents….Surely the day will come when all will be discovered and we see us again and you will after think, my mother has prophesied correctly.”

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  IN 1912, CONAN DOYLE published the fruits of his investigation as The Case of Oscar Slater. Spanning eighty pages, the book is a model of economy. But in it, with Holmesian acumen and Watsonian lucidity, he dismantles the case against Slater plank by plank. The volume is an object lesson in abductive reasoning, drawing on observed facts—and only the facts—to construct a logical, reverse-engineered narrative.

  “You know my method,” Holmes often remarks to Watson, and in The Case of Oscar Slater, Conan Doyle’s approach followed precisely that of Holmes. Confronting the case, he sought to answer a set of questions: What is fact and what conjecture? Which data are so trifling as to have escaped earlier investigators’ notice? When all the data are amassed, sifted, and codified, what patterns emerge? As Holmes, admonishing Watson, described the process, “Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.”

  A pervasive theme in Conan Doyle’s book is the utter illogic of the pursuit and prosecution. He pulls apart the tangle of narrative inconsistencies, punctures hyperbolic claims, and unravels the web of circular reasoning that pervaded the case from start to finish. Underlying his exposition of the crime and its aftermath is a central, urgent concern: By what can the seemingly anomalous aspects of the case be explained?

  Conan Doyle sets the stage, describing Miss Gilchrist, her jewels, and her fortified flat; reprising the night of the murder; and placing a worried Arthur Adams—and a curiously unruffled Helen Lambie—on the doormat. Then the diagnostic demolition begins.

  One of the book’s first, and most damning, indictments concerns Lambie’s actions as she watched the intruder leave Miss Gilchrist’s flat. The scene contains a clue of a very particular kind: negative evidence. In all of English letters, the single most famous example of the diagnostic use of negative evidence comes from Conan Doyle. It takes place in “Silver Blaze,” a Holmes story from 1892. Investigating the disappearance of a prize racehorse, Holmes talks to a local police inspector about the behavior of other actors at the farm where it was stabled.

  “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” the inspector asks.

  “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Holmes replies.

  “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” the inspector protests.

  “That,” Holmes says, “was the curious incident.”

  For Holmes, the solution to the mystery lay precisely in that non-incident. Something similar might well be divined, Conan Doyle knew, from Lambie’s odd behavior at the door. Consider the following scenario: If, on arriving home, you find a stranger sallying past you from inside your house, you are certain to say something—“Hey!” “Stop!” “Who are you?” But Lambie said nothing. Her curious silence was noted in passing by Roughead in 1910. Now, in The Case of Oscar Slater, Conan Doyle brought her behavior into stark relief. After describing the scene on Miss Gilchrist’s doormat, he continued:

  The actions of Helen Lambie…can only be explained by supposing that from the time she saw Adams waiting outside her door, her whole reasoning faculty had deserted her. First, she explained the great noise heard below: “The ceiling was like to crack,” said Adams, by the fall of a clothes-line and its pulleys of attachment, which could not possibly, one would imagine, have produced any such effect….On the appearance of the stranger she did not gasp out: “Who are you?” or any other sign of amazement, but allowed Adams to suppose by her silence that the man might be someone who had a right to be there. Finally, instead of rushing at once to see if her mistress was safe, she went into the kitchen, still apparently under the obsession of the pulleys. She informed Adams that they were all right, as if it mattered to any human being; thence she went into the spare bedroom, where she must have seen that robbery had been committed, since an open box lay in the middle of the floor. She gave no alarm however, and it was only when Adams called out: “Where is your mistress?” that she finally went into the room of the murder. It must be admitted that this seems strange conduct, and only* explicable, if it can be said to be explicable, by great want of intelligence and grasp of the situation.

  The Case of Oscar Slater went on to chronicle the police investigation, the breakdown of the brooch clue, the transatlantic pursuit of Slater, the extradition hearing, the preposterous identity parade in Glasgow, and the trial in Edinburgh. With polite acidity, Conan Doyle pointed out the unlikelihood of Lambie’s account and Barrowman’s having coalesced on their own into a unified description of the killer—something they began to do in New York, and did further at trial. “In Edinburgh Barrowman, like Lambie, was very much more certain than in New York,” he wrote. “The further they got from the event, the easier apparently did recognition become….It is remarkable that both these females, Lambie and Barrowman, swore that though they were thrown together in this journey out to New York, and actually shared the same cabin, they never once talked of the object of their mission or compared notes as to the man they were about to identify. For girls of the respective ages of fifteen and twenty-one this certainly furnishes a unique example of self-restraint.”

  Conan Doyle also demolished the idea, crucial to the prosecution, that a guilty Slater had fled Glasgow on Christmas night 1908. That theory, as he would later point out in more detail, rested on a fallacious premise:

  The Lord Advocate made a great point in his speech of this flight—how Slater, on leaving Glasgow, had taken all pains to cover up his tracks. Yet all the time the Glasgow police held the following telegram from the Chief Detective of Liverpool: “Only two people came off the Glasgow train….They engaged a bedroom in the North-Western Hotel. The man gave the name of Oscar Slater, Glasgow….The chambermaid had a conversation with the woman, who told her that they were about to sail by the S.S. Lusitania for America.”

  There was, therefore, no concealment of tracks….It is, of course, true that Slater aboard the ship took the name of Otto Sando. He wished to make a fresh start in America under that name….The clear proof that the change of name was for America, and not to throw off any pursuit from Glasgow, lies in the fact that he signed the Liverpool hotel register with his true name and address, at the moment when, according to the police theories, he should have been most carefully concealing his identity. Could you conceive a murderer flying red-handed with the knowledge that there was pursuit behind him and announcing at the first hotel his name and whence he came? />
  The hunting of Slater, Conan Doyle wrote in 1912, had defied logic from its inception: “Consider the monstrous coincidence which is involved in his guilt, the coincidence that the police owing to their mistake over the brooch, by pure chance started out in pursuit of the right man. Which is A Priori the more probable: That such an unheard-of million-to-one coincidence should have occurred, Or, that the police, having committed themselves to the theory that he was the murderer, refused to admit that they were wrong when the bottom fell out of the original case and persevered in the hope that vague identifications of a queer-looking foreigner would justify their original action?”

  Those “vague identifications,” Conan Doyle stressed, were the foundation on which the prosecution had erected its entire case: “What the police never could produce,” he wrote, “was the essential thing, and that was the least connecting link between Slater and Miss Gilchrist, or any explanation of how a foreigner in Glasgow could even know of the existence, to say nothing of the wealth, of a retired old lady, who had few acquaintances and seldom left her flat.” Of the Lord Advocate’s promise to tell jurors how Slater came to know of Miss Gilchrist’s jewels, Conan Doyle reminded his readers, “No further reference appears to have been made to the matter.”

  Then there was the question of how the assailant got into Miss Gilchrist’s flat in the first place. Reasoning abductively, Conan Doyle supplied a likely answer: