Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  Pauline was partly blind: Ibid.

  “I could not wish a better son”: Quoted in ibid., 131.

  first visited England in about 1895: Whittington-Egan (2001), 30.

  “underworld, peopled by strange denizens”: Ibid., 57.

  two prior arrests: HMPP intake form, May 28, 1909, NRS.

  “the marginal world”: Hunt (1951), 123.

  “men who, without being criminals”: Ibid.

  a world in which many Jewish immigrants: See, e.g., Ben Braber, Jews in Glasgow 1879–1939: Immigration and Integration (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 29.

  the act was widely understood: Ibid., 25.

  In 1190, in the deadliest: Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 118ff.

  “the first ejection”: Robert S. Wistrich, “Antisemitism Embedded in British Culture,” online interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (2008), http://jcpa.org/​article/​antisemitism-embedded-in-british-culture.

  Only in the mid-seventeenth century: Ibid.

  “The lay Englishman”: Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 1:407.

  “and I make this Declaration”: Jews Relief Act (1858). Text at www.legislation.gov.uk/​ukpga/​Vict/​21–22/49/contents/enacted.

  the only person of Jewish birth: Born to a Jewish family in 1804, Disraeli was baptized in 1817, at his father’s insistence, in the interest of assimilation and social advancement. As an adult, he considered himself religiously intermediate, “the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” as he famously said. Quoted in Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Schocken Books, 2008), 32. As Kirsch points out, the imagery was not original to Disraeli, coming from the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

  between the early 1880s: Braber (2007), 4.

  In 1914, London had: Ibid., 184.

  Glasgow’s the same year: Ibid., 4.

  “Following the discovery”: Knepper (2007), 63.

  first taken up formally in 1887: Ibid.

  “Crime had become”: Ibid., 63–65; italics added.

  “Scottish Protestants put great emphasis”: Braber (2007), 18.

  The first Jews settled: Ibid., 8.

  about four dozen strong: Ibid.

  an optician, a quill merchant: Ibid.

  “A small group of Jews”: Ibid., 21.

  the supposed involvement: Ibid., 23.

  “was of a Jewish type”: Ibid., 25.

  one of his few early champions: Ibid., 29.

  one of the first in Britain: Grant, (1973), 15.

  “Poor devils”: Conan Doyle (1924), 296.

  the “convenient Other”: Gay (1993), 35 and passim.

  “Wanted for identification”: Quoted in Hunt (1951), 39.

  CHAPTER 3: THE KNIGHT-ERRANT

  “the individual’s traces”: Rosemary Jann, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 67.

  “social pathology”: See, e.g., Robert Peckham, ed., Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge, 2014).

  “Liberal Imperialist”: Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 98.

  “depicts British society”: Ibid., 6.

  The First Citizen of Baker Street: See, e.g., Jack M. Siegel, “The First Citizen of Baker Street,” Chicago Review 2, no. 2 (1947): 49–55.

  Beeton’s Christmas Annual: The annual’s founder, Samuel Orchart Beeton, was the husband of the tastemaker and author Isabella Beeton, whose instructional book on cooking and homemaking, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, was a lodestar for generations of bourgeois Victorian women.

  “Marshall McLuhan…once observed”: Frank D. McConnell, “Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Order amid Disorder,” Wilson Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1987): 181–82.

  “It often annoyed me”: Quoted in J. K. Van Dover, You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective (Bowling Green, Ky.: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 90.

  Readers requested his autograph: For all these things, see, e.g., Miller (2008), 158, 465; Jann (1995), 12; Michael Hardwick and Mollie Hardwick, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1964), 9.

  “Occasionally,” a biographer has written: Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Owl/Henry Holt, 1999), 132.

  “It was easy to get people into scrapes”: Conan Doyle (1924), 13.

  suffered from epilepsy, alcoholism: E.g., ibid.

  “We lived,” Conan Doyle later wrote: Conan Doyle (1924), 11.

  “Charles possessed”: Miller (2008), 16–17.

  the series of Scottish institutions: Ibid., 18–21.

  To honor a childless great-uncle: Jann (1995), xv.

  who had married Charles in 1855: Ibid., 15.

  “Diminutive Mary Doyle”: Ibid., 24, and A. Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters: Being a Series of Twelve Letters Written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to His Friend and Former Fellow-Student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, During the Years 1881–1884 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1895), 60.

  “I will say for myself”: Conan Doyle (1924), 12.

  “I can speak with feeling”: Ibid., 16–17.

  “I was wild, full-blooded”: Ibid., 22.

  He had already begun to part company: Ibid., 20.

  “Judging…by all the new knowledge”: Ibid., 31.

  “Bell was a very remarkable man”: Ibid., 25–26.

  “my father’s health”: Ibid., 30.

  a pastiche of Poe and Bret Harte: Miller (2008), 58.

  with its crew of fifty: Conan Doyle (1924), 36.

  he was thrown overboard: Ibid., 40.

  “Its instinct urges it”: Ibid., 43.

  “Who would swap that moment”: Ibid.

  In 1881 , Conan Doyle: Ibid., 47.

  helped subdue an out-of-control fire: Ibid., 56–57.

  “The germ or the mosquito”: Ibid., 52.

  “There were…some unpleasant”: Ibid., 49.

  “more on affection and respect”: Jann (1995), xvi.

  “I made £154”: Conan Doyle (1924), 70.

  Though her legal name: Georgina Doyle, Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family (Ashcroft, B.C.: Calabash Press, 2004), 55.

  “Poe’s masterful detective”: Ibid., 74–75.

  Sherrinford Holmes: Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005–6), 3:847. (Some sources erroneously give the name as Sherringford.)

  “Often, physicians who become”: Edmund D. Pellegrino, “To Look Feelingly: The Affinities of Medicine and Literature,” Literature and Medicine 1 (1982), 20; italics added.

  Ormond Sacker: Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Free Press, 2007), 121.

  “Please grip this fact”: Quoted in Jann (1995), 15; accent mark added for scansion.

  “I have often been asked”: Conan Doyle (1924), 100.

  “I…have several times solved”: Ibid., 101.

  “In travelling through”: Adrian Conan Doyle (1946), 19.

  “I always regarded him”: Quoted in Ely Liebow, Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes (Madison, Wis.: Popular Press, 2007), 175.

  “Undaunted,” his biographer Russell Miller wrote: Miller (2008),
125.

  “Observing the patients”: Otis (1999), 109.

  Koch’s remedy, he wrote: ACD to Daily Telegraph, Nov. 20, 1890. Quoted in Gibson and Lancelyn Green (1986), 36.

  CHAPTER 4: THE MAN IN THE DONEGAL CAP

  On December 21, 1908: Hunt (1951), 85.

  Slater had already been planning: Ibid., 84ff.

  Slater promptly gave Schmalz: Ibid., 85–86.

  It was during his last days in Glasgow: Ibid., 86.

  By 7:00 p.m. on December 21: Ibid.

  their ten pieces of luggage: Ibid., 95.

  Arriving at 3:40 a.m.: Roughead (1950), 294.

  “the chambermaid had a conversation”: Quoted in ACD letter to the Spectator, July 25, 1914. In Gibson and Lancelyn Green (1986), 205.

  two second-class tickets: Park (1927), 83.

  Mr. and Mrs. Otto Sando: Ibid.

  “The pawned brooch”: Conan Doyle, introduction to Park (1927), 7–8.

  ARREST OTTO SANDO: Quoted in Park (1927), 83.

  On January 2, 1909: Hunt (1951), 44ff.

  “Dear Friend Cameron!”: OS to Hugh Cameron, Feb. 2, 1909, NRS. Also quoted in Toughill (2006), 53–54.

  “It is a measure of Cameron’s friendship”: Toughill (2006), 54.

  On January 13, 1909: Hunt (1951), 45.

  “At the time of the arrest of Slater”: William A. Goodhart to Ewing Speirs, Slater’s Glasgow attorney, April 17, 1909, NRS.

  Glasgow officials showed Slater’s photograph: Hunt (1951), 46.

  One marshal: Ibid., 215 n. 1.

  As Marshal Pinckley would testify: John W. M. Pinckley, testimony in the appeal of Oscar Slater, 1928. Quoted in ibid., 215.

  “Do you see the man here”: HL testimony, Slater extradition hearing transcript, Jan. 26, 1909, 17, NRS.

  she had not seen the intruder’s face: Hunt (1951), 26.

  “he was sort of shaking himself”: Ibid., 19.

  “Is that man in this room?”: Ibid., 19–20.

  “That man here”: Barrowman testimony, ibid., 37.

  “had a slight twist”: Barrowman testimony, ibid.

  admitted having been shown: Barrowman testimony, ibid., 38.

  “not at all unlike”: Arthur Adams testimony, ibid., 51.

  “I never doubted his innocence”: William A. Goodhart to ACD, May 28, 1914, ML.

  on February 6, 1909: Hunt (1951), 56.

  Another was almost certainly a concern: Ibid., 55–56.

  A trial, he felt certain: This position is confirmed by his lawyer Goodhart, who in 1909 wrote, “Slater’s willingness to go back is certainly indicative of innocence.” William A. Goodhart to Ewing Speirs, April 17, 1909, NRS.

  CHAPTER 5: TRACES

  “The foreteller asserts”: Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science,” in Thomas Henry Huxley, Science and Culture: And Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton, 1882), 139–40.

  “retrospective prophecy”: Ibid., 135.

  “From a drop of water”: Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” in Conan Doyle (1981), 23.

  his fictional “scientific detective”: Conan Doyle (1924), 26.

  therein lies a basic challenge: The literary critic Lawrence Frank, in Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19, also makes this point.

  “Throughout the 18th century”: Claudio Rapezzi, Roberto Ferrari, and Angelo Branzi, “White Coats and Fingerprints: Diagnostic Reasoning in Medicine and Investigative Methods of Fictional Detectives,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 331, no. 7531 (2005): 1493.

  “look feelingly”: Pellegrino (1982), 19–23.

  “It has long been an axiom”: Conan Doyle (1981), 194.

  “The importance of the infinitely little”: Dr. Joseph Bell, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” introduction to Sir A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock & Company, 1892), 9–10; italics added.

  an acknowledged influence on Conan Doyle: A[lma] E[lizabeth] Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 177.

  “One day, when he was walking”: M. de Voltaire, Zadig (New York: Rimington & Hooper, 1929), 16–19.

  “ratiocination,” Poe calls it: E.g., Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 521.

  “You were remarking to yourself”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in Poe (1984), 402–4.

  “The scientific method”: Van Dover (1994), 10.

  “The detective offered himself”: Ibid., 1.

  “medico-legal practice”: R. Austin Freeman, “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” in The Best Dr. Thorndyke Stories, selected by E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), 15.

  “only a foot square”: Ibid., 16.

  “rows of little re-agent bottles”: Ibid., 17.

  “Dupin was a very inferior fellow”: Conan Doyle (1892), 49.

  “The narrative of the detective story”: Van Dover (1994), 30; italics added.

  CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINAL SHERLOCK HOLMES

  His grandfather Sir Charles Bell: Michael Sims, Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 17.

  “For some reason”: Conan Doyle (1924), 25.

  He said to a civilian patient: Ibid.

  “He greeted her politely”: Stashower (1999), 20.

  “Use your eyes, sir!”: Dr. Harold Emery Jones, The Original of Sherlock Holmes (Windsor, U.K.: Gaby Goldscheider, 1980), iv–v.

  a classmate of Conan Doyle’s: Ibid., i.

  “Gentlemen, a fisherman!”: Ibid., v–vi.

  “Cultivate absolute accuracy”: Quoted in Liebow (2007), 116.

  “Nearly every handicraft”: Quoted in ibid., 177.

  “Is there any system”: Quoted in Jessie M. E. Saxby, Joseph Bell: An Appreciation by an Old Friend (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1913), 23–24.

  “For twenty years or more”: “The Original of ‘Sherlock Holmes’: An Interview with Dr. Joseph Bell,” Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 28, 1893. Quoted in Saxby (1913), 19.

  he married one of his pupils: Alexander Duncan Smith, ed., The Trial of Eugène Marie Chantrelle, Notable Scottish Trials Series (Glasgow: William Hodge & Company, 1906), 2.

  “My dear Mama”: Quoted in Liebow (2007), 120.

  Chantrelle insured his wife’s life: Ibid.

  on the bedside table: Ibid.

  Returning, she saw: Ibid.

  “Bell and Littlejohn found evidence”: Ibid., 120–21.

  An investigation by the gas company: Ibid., 121.

  discovered a pipefitter: Ibid.

  Chantrelle was hanged: Ibid.

  Conan Doyle had long admired: See, e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Akadine Press, 1999), 259ff.

  who suffered from tuberculosis: Sims (2017), 197.

  “blended the praise”: Ibid.

  “Dear Sir,” Stevenson wrote: Ibid.; italics added.

  CHAPTER 7: THE ART OF REASONING BACKWARD

  “To-day criminal investigation”: Sir Sydney Smith, Mostly Murder (New York: Dorset Press, 1988), 30.

  Many of the methods invented: Illustrated London News, Feb. 27, 1932. Quoted in Nordon (1967), 211.

  he left a written legacy: “Charles Sanders Peirce,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001; revised 2014), http://plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​peirce.

  “A given object”: Charles Sanders Peirce, unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “You Know My Method: A Juxtap
osition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes,” in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., The Sign of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 17.

  “Abduction makes its start”: Peirce, unpublished manuscript. Quoted in ibid., 24–25; italics added.

  Fact C is observed: N[ick] C. Boreham, G. E. Mawer, and R. W. Foster, “Medical Diagnosis from Circumstantial Evidence,” Le Travail Humain 59, no. 1 (1996): 73.

  “In solving a problem”: A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle (1981), 83.

  All serious knife wounds: Adapted from Marcello Truzzi, “Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist,” in Eco and Sebeok (1983), 69.

  “We are coming now”: Conan Doyle (1981), 687; italics added.

  “the scientific use of the imagination”: Holmes is quoting the physicist John Tyndall, author of the 1870 essay “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” whom Conan Doyle acknowledged as a deep influence.

  “the whole thing is a chain”: A Study in Scarlet, in Conan Doyle (1981), 85.

  “who had such a hatred”: Ibid., 583.

  “considering,” Holmes points out: Ibid., 584.

  “Holmes pointed”: Ibid., 587.

  “by a connected chain”: Ibid., 594.

  “Holmes…operates like a semiotician”: Jann (1995), 50; italics added.

  CHAPTER 8: A CASE OF IDENTITY

  On February 11, 1909: Hunt (1951), 60ff.

  To avoid the throng: Park (1927), 37.

  As he disembarked: Hunt (1951), 61.

  neatly folded, carefully packed: Ibid., 62.

  Nor did police find: Ibid., 61.

  “In the fierce popular indignation”: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Strange Studies from Life and Other Narratives: The Complete True Crime Writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, selected and ed. Jack Tracy (Bloomington, Ind.: Gaslight Publications, 1988), 33.

  the inherent unreliability of eyewitness testimony: See, e.g., Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).