Conan Doyle, Detective: True Crimes Investigated by the Creator of Sherlock Holmes

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Conan Doyle, Detective: True Crimes Investigated by the Creator of Sherlock Holmes", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 728-730. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818063

In the detective genre the stories of Sherlock Holmes are generally considered as archetypal. There were other writers, like Poe and Wilkie Collins and Fergus Hume, in what became the genre at the time – the second half of the 19th century – but it is the consulting detective, able to infer the solution to the crime from the most tantalizingly fragmentary and enigmatic evidence, and his everyman companion Dr Watson, that readers remember. We might easily imagine that Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, modestly projected himself into the Dr Watson character, able to ask the simply questions readers wanted asked. It follows that Doyle might have drawn on Dr Joseph Bell, the teacher on his course in medicine at the University of Edinburgh and a man of meticulous and mercurial deductive habits. We all know that Doyle started with A Study in Scarlet, that his stories appeared in The Strand magazine, that later books included The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that he resurrected Sherlock Holmes by popular demand after falling, it seemed, to his death, grappling with his enemy Professor Moriarty beside the Reichenbach Falls.

This is probably what everybody knows. To go deeper you need to be an enthusiast, the kind of person to join the Conan Doyle Society and its like, and someone prepared to immerse him/herself in the literature of the period and all the debate ever since. Anyone doing this will soon find plenty of evidence to suggest that Conan Doyle was no mean detective in his own right, and that in many ways both Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson represented two sides to the author. Peter Costello (who has also written on Jules Verne and James Joyce), in Conan Doyle, Detective, argues that Doyle was “the writer as detective and criminologist”. In fact, some of Doyle's contemporaries in the police and forensics (yes, the discipline came into being at the time) thought that Doyle would have become a detective if he had not become an author. He meticulously followed contemporary criminal cases, including some of the most notorious ones, like Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen and Roger Casement, and actively intervened in more than a few of them.

There is a lot of evidence, then, for saying that Conan Doyle was a detective in his own right. The Edalji case is a case in point: a doctor of Parsee descent living in England was accused of slashing horses and other animals, and Doyle took up his case when the authorities appeared to show prejudice and procrastination. Using ingenuity of the kind associated with Sherlock Holmes himself, Doyle identified the real culprit. People wrote to him asking him to help them solve crimes and he helped many of them to do so. He often did it in a spirit of justice, and some of his interventions made him unpopular with the establishment. Costello takes the reader through the numerous crimes which Doyle read about and where he intervened, What emerges is not only the predictable re‐evaluation of a well‐known author but two other things likely to be of interest to any librarian who is also a bibliographer and historian.

The first thing is the way in which the study of any author – and we could say this of authors from Poe to Jonathan Kellerman – opens up an astonishing array of material and research, discussion and argumentation about issues current at the time. While we know the stories now and think of them capturing the hansom‐cabs and smogs of a London long gone, a formal study is likely to be as much a study of the social and cultural by‐ways of the period as of the author him/herself. Costello draws on and points the reader to many works published at and about the time that merit serious consulting and collecting, typically accounts of the trials and the lawyers in them, references to pathologists like Spilsbury and secret societies that discussed the inner workings of justice, medical and toxicological works that Doyle used as a doctor and held in his own library, letters to the press and public comment on both the crimes and on the stories, and much else.

The second thing is the way in which even events – and certainly crimes long ago – still resonate today. Only a couple of years ago, for instance, did Patricia Cornwell publish what she claimed was the definitive interpretation of Jack the Ripper. Costello rightly suggests that, even today, not all is known about cases like the Crowborough Chicken Farm Murder and Agatha Christie's famous walkabout. For these, and for the details about Doyle and his writing, there are still debates going on, often between enthusiasts and addicts. Costello wrote this book first in the late 1980s and it was published as The Real World of Sherlock Holmes in 1991. He has revised and enlarged it for the current 2006 edition. In both, he points out how, at times, he has evidence never seen before, and at other times other commentators on Doyle, like Higham and Edwards, Stashower and John Dickson Carr himself ( Doyle's first biographer and an excellent sealed‐room mystery writer in his own right), might have got things wrong.

Up to a point these are “academic” and unlikely to interest the average user of the lending library. Yet for the specialist cultural and literary historian, and for the specialist collector, these are matters of real importance, likely to shape collecting habits as well as opinion. As a paperback, this work is rather brittle for long‐life but its contents are of substantial interest to anyone keen on Sherlock Holmes and, at least as much, in the “true crime” of his era. True crime is a growing force in bookshops and in the media. Even when, towards the end, Doyle interested himself more in the paranormal, he applied his psychic methods to the detection of crime, in the way that we find in Algernon Blackwood too. Carroll and Graf are not merely fashionable in publishing a work that seems to appeal to detection and the paranormal, and, for all the criticism Doyle himself attracted for his interest in fairies at the time, his work, above all his detective novels and his involvement with real detection, remains an intriguing monument to his memory.

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