Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell

by Howard Engel

  Alan Lambert is now completely reconciled with his father. In this I suspect the agency of his brother, Graeme, and his sister. The poor man is cursed with two bohemian sons. But now that Alan has sidestepped the gallows trap, the unfortunate man protests that he is happy to have two living sons be they as prodigal as can be. Perhaps it will become easier for him to bear in the tropics so far from the chilly wind that wraps itself around Edinburgh Castle. I cannot help but sympathize with him.

  Stevenson writes from America, from Monterey in California:

  …I have been tramping the hills above Carmel, but without the companionship of my dear Modestine… Here in the West, I am quite as brown as a crofter and happy as Larry. When I descend from the hills I am swept up into the generous bosom of the Osborne family, where I am trying to make a permanent place for myself beside my darling Fanny. At the moment, it’s weddings (not mine) and cancelled weddings (again not mine) all too complicated to spout about… The Pacific is a rather peculiar sort of ocean and will require further study…

  When I bought a printed copy of his book, I found that Modestine was a donkey. His writing career is assured, or so my literary friends say.

  The terrible George Budd has written to me from Plymouth, urging me to join him there. He thinks I already know enough medicine to support a shingle. I was tempted to go, if only for the adventure of it, but Joe Bell has suggested that I postpone it until I have completed my studies here. If it is adventure I crave, he suggests that I try to pass myself off as a ship’s doctor. He will write to the master of a whaler that plies between here and Greenland. (I said earlier that I was fated to be lost looking for Franklin’s bones.) It is a better, more practical idea, and, of course, I must give it thought. Budd will wait, and, perhaps by the time I am fully qualified, he will have discovered the cures for all known diseases. If cocaine hasn’t destroyed him first.

  I wish I could say that Detective-Lieutenant Bryce was received back into the bosom of the Edinburgh police force, but some institutions, even when shaken to their roots, cannot change overnight. Bryce was on the brink of rejoining the navy, when a cable arrived from Chicago in the United States. It was an offer from Alan Pinkerton, who had established a private detecting agency, apart from his work with the American government. Bryce was quick to accept this offer from a fellow Scot and left this shore with few regrets. From what I hear, he has made a great success of himself doing the work he knows so well. He told me, in a recent letter, that he now has an eighty-foot yacht which he keeps at Alexandria on the Potomac River. For what it is worth, he sounded content with his lot.

  Marwood sent Bell a note offering to return his hospitality should he ever find himself in Horncastle.

  I am still torn between the practice of medicine and a literary career. Bell says that he has been similarly tempted: the new chief constable has been after him to consult upon thorny problems of a curious nature, but so far he has only commented upon them through the post. He tells me that he is half-tempted to become—what does he call it?—a consulting detective. He taunts the principal of the university with this thought from time to time, now that he has become one of the living institutions of the faculty. I can well understand that lecturing to wave after wave of ignorant, opinionated young men can become tedious, but he takes some pleasure in turning young heads into wiser ones. Perhaps I too will resist the temptations that lie before me. I will neither rush off to Plymouth nor trade my scalpel for a pen just yet. Oh, I shall continue to write things and send them off to the journals, but I will not rush myself. Bell says that I have not yet found my subject. He is right there. But at least we both know that I am looking for it. The trick is to be able to recognize it when it comes along and to be ready.

  The following items of recent information might serve to end this narrative. The first came in the afternoon post yesterday. It was an offer from Chamber’s Journal to publish a story of mine, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” in a coming edition of that magazine. Naturally, I agreed. The second item of interest appeared in this afternoon’s newspaper. Last night many people were killed when a railway bridge collapsed in a raging December storm, sending the engine, coaches, track and central span into the frigid waters below. It was the new Firth of Tay Bridge.

  AFTERWORD

  Thirty years after the story told in the foregoing pages, a man named Oscar Slater, a real eastern European immigrant to Glasgow, found himself in almost the same predicament as the fictional Alan Lambert. My story has used many aspects of the Slater case, as recorded in a number of versions by William Roughead. It is one of the most intriguing of British criminal proceedings and Roughead’s telling of it has preserved for several generations of readers all of the inequities and ironies in this case of perverted justice. For this I owe him my thanks. Slater spent nearly twenty years in prison before the errors that put him there were officially, if grudgingly, acknowledged. Every step of the way, a stubborn legal establishment refused to admit its role in this wrongful or “wrongous,” as they say in Scotland, conviction. In righting this wrong, no one was more vigorous than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then—1909-1929—an internationally famous writer. His sense of fair play and a belief in making the system work for all and not just for an isolated and privileged oligarchy turned Doyle into a real-life crime fighter. Conan Doyle was a fitting father of the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street. Although of a conservative disposition and very much a man of his time, Doyle’s sense of justice often broke through convention in order to redress a wrong, such as in Slater’s case.

  Dr Joseph Bell is no fictional figment of my imagination. As a professor of surgery at Edinburgh University, he served as Doyle’s mentor at the time of this novel. It was upon his amazing powers of observation and deduction that Doyle drew, in 1886, when he first wrote the name “Sherrinford Holmes” near the top of a page and then, later, adjusted the given name to “Sherlock.” It was from the character of Doyle’s friend George Budd that Doyle found clues to some of the more extravagant of Holmes’s idiosyncrasies, which he discovered when he at last followed Budd and his bride to Plymouth.

  Detective-Lieutenant Bryce is modelled on John Thomson Trench of the Glasgow police, who was detroyed by the established powers that ruled north of the Tweed. Having lost his career and his pension, as well as his reputation, he found useful work in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. But even here he was not safe; he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of receiving stolen goods, of which he was totally cleared after being held in custody for some months. Trench, clearly, was hounded to his grave by a vindictive, unforgiving oligarchy.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my friends at University College, University of Toronto, for their help in bringing this work into being. I would especially like to mention Lynd Forguson, Jack McLeod and A.P. Thornton. While in the vein, I should also thank my agent Beverley Slopen, my publisher Cynthia Good, my copy editor Mary Adachi, and my wife, Janet Hamilton, all of whom had something to do with the final shape of this novel.

  The germ of this book began in a conversation with my friend the late Julian Symons. We were dining at Bofingers not far from La Place de la Bastille in Paris, when I mentioned the rough idea to him. He thought it interesting enough to pursue, although he doubted whether the Doyle family would thank me for trespassing upon the greatly esteemed name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I assure them, and all, that this labour was undertaken in the same spirit with which Brigadier Girard swoops down on foxes and the celebrated consulting detective of 221B Baker Street entertains a fresh three-pipe problem.

 

 

 
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