by Daniel Smith
Cabell may well have been a nasty piece of work but today we should perhaps be thankful to him for having sown the seed of an idea that, long after his death, was turned into one of the most enduringly popular sagas in the English language. But be careful if you dare to visit his tomb today . . . they say that if you put your fingers through the bars, the wicked squire will give them a nibble.
Partners in Crime-Writing?
The mystery surrounding the authorship of The Hound of the Baskervilles might even have stumped Holmes himself. The question is how much of the story came from the pen of Conan Doyle alone, and how much we owe to his friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Fletcher Robinson was a writer of some note on his own account, not to mention a respected magazine editor. Still only in his early thirties when The Hound was published, Fletcher Robinson was responsible for a prodigious output that included some detective stories of his own and collaborations with no lesser figure than P. G. Wodehouse. He had also helmed a number of respected literary journals and would go on to edit Vanity Fair magazine. Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson had become firm friends when they travelled on the same ship from Cape Town to Southampton in 1900. Early the following year, Fletcher Robinson took his famous friend on a tour of the sights of Dartmoor, an area to which he had moved while he was still a child. It was on this trip that he revealed the legend of Squire Cabell. Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson were both blessed with a nose for a good story and the pair agreed to collaborate on a story to be called The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was, Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, to be a ‘small book’ but ‘a real creeper’. However, at some point after this Conan Doyle decided to rework the story to make it a Holmes tale. The clamour for more of his detective stories – not to mention the financial incentives to resurrect Holmes – had reached such a level that he could no longer resist. To begin with, Conan Doyle had suggested to his editors that the work should appear under a joint by-line with Fletcher Robinson, but his paymasters were unwilling to dilute the power of the Conan Doyle brand. Instead, the author inserted a footnote into the first chapter: ‘This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details.’ Moreover, he paid Fletcher Robinson £500, a considerable sum in 1901 when the book was first serialized. Bertram Fletcher Robinson never publicly declared that he wrote any of the book himself and Conan Doyle would later declare that ‘the plot and every word of the actual narrative are my own’. Yet rumours have persisted that the collaboration went deeper. If not, why suggest a joint by-line and why such a significant payment? In the 1950s, Fletcher Robinson’s coachman, Harry Baskerville – whose family name was used in the title of the famous book – suggested Fletcher Robinson had been responsible for large chunks of the book. At the extreme end of things, such rumours have spurred some rather incredible conspiracy theories, including the suggestion that Conan Doyle had a part in his friend’s early death. Such talk is generally considered bunkum and most Holmesians remain sceptical that Conan Doyle was anything other than the principal creator of the book – citing, not least, Fletcher Robinson’s own silence on the subject – but the question of authorship nonetheless persists, a mystery layered on top of a mystery.
In the Pinkertons
Detectives from the famous American Pinkerton National Detective Agency appear in two of the canonical stories, ‘ The Red Circle’ (1911) and, most famously, in The Valley of Fear (1915). The agency was established by Allan Pinkerton, a Scot who emigrated to the States in 1842 and seven years later became a police detective in Chicago. He set up the Pinkertons a year later and came to national prominence when he was said to have foiled an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War. In the 1870s, the agency was hired by rich mining interests to disrupt the activities of the so-called Molly Maguires – a secret society with roots in Ireland who riled Pennsylvania mine-owners because of their part in a series of expensive labour disputes. The group was infiltrated by Pinkerton agent James McParland, who arrived in New York from County Armagh in 1867. He became a trusted secretary on one of their branches and fed intelligence back to the authorities, putting himself in considerable personal peril. As a result of the evidence he garnered, some ten members of the organization were hanged. However, their guilt is questioned, amid suspicions that charges were trumped up by a mining industry keen to see the back of them. It was McParland’s story in particular that fascinated Conan Doyle as he wrote The Valley of Fear. It just so happened that, shortly before publication of that story, the author met William Pinkerton, the son of Allan Pinkerton and by then head of his father’s agency. The two seemingly got on well although the friendship was not to last. Pinkerton was unhappy with The Valley of Fear, apparently suspecting that Conan Doyle had incorporated elements from their private conversations. Nonetheless, Conan Doyle had likely finished the text before the pair met and had gained his intelligence not from Pinkerton but from another detective, William J. Burns (see here). It has been alleged that Pinkerton feared certain details in the story risked exposing family members of McParland to danger. If this was indeed the case, it is safe to assume that Conan Doyle had done so quite unwittingly. It was nonetheless a sad end to a fleeting friendship. For readers of Holmes, there is at least the consolation that the Pinkertons were key elements in such a strong pair of stories before relations soured.
America’s Holmes
Being the living embodiment of a fictional legend is burdensome, as Joseph Bell (see here) could have told you. A similar fate befell the Irish-American detective, William J. Burns, who Conan Doyle publicly declared was ‘America’s Sherlock Holmes’. Burns was born in 1861 to parents who had fled Ireland during the potato famine. His interest in the world of criminality was sparked off in his teens when he became friendly with a notorious forger by the name of Charles Ulrich. Opting for the right side of the tracks, Burns got a job with the Columbus Police Department in Ohio, before becoming a private detective, working for Thomas Furlong, whose team offered services similar to those of the Pinkerton Agency. Next, he moved to the Secret Service, and it was there that his reputation burgeoned. He became noted for heading investigations characterized by thorough research, cunning undercover operations and robust interviewing of suspects – all traits that could be seen in Holmes’s own practice. Never one to eschew publicity, it was not long before Burns was in a position to set up his own agency. Over the years, his tales of derring-do and his ability to secure arrests made him a quasi-legendary figure. In 1911, for instance, he infiltrated a colony of anarchists in Washington State as he rooted out the notorious McNamara Brothers – responsible for the previous year’s bombing of the Los Angeles Times building that killed more than twenty and injured a further hundred. On another occasion, Burns exposed the endemic corruption in San Francisco’s city hall by going undercover in the city’s docks.
THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL
Such were Burns’s achievements that in 1921 he was invited to become director of the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the modern FBI), but it was here that his fortunes would take a downturn. His reputation suffered badly when Bureau agents investigating the notorious Teapot Dome Scandal (a bribery scandal in which public officials were allegedly paid off by the oil industry) started to threaten journalists critical of President Warren Harding’s government. Burns was forced to resign, to be succeeded by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. While Conan Doyle ensured Holmes exited the scene while his public was still hungry to hear more of him, ‘the American Sherlock Holmes’ alas left his stage under a cloud.
Hands Across the Ocean
Holmes was not much of a political beast, but one of his more explicit political declarations is to be found in the 1892 story, ‘The Nobel Bachelor’. Holmes is seen yearning for ‘a world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes’. It is, perhaps, a rather jilting passage that does not quite sound like the detective. There is a good
reason for that. Here was an occasion where Holmes was serving as the mouthpiece of Conan Doyle. The Scot was a keen admirer of the American nation, which in turn loved him and Holmes. For evidence, we need look no further than a letter he published in The Times on 7 January 1896. In it he spoke of the great kindness he had personally received on a trip to America, along with his concern over a more general anti-English sentiment he had encountered. ‘I believe,’ he wrote, ‘and have long believed, that the greatest danger which can threaten our Empire is the existence of this spirit of hostility in a nation which is already great and powerful, but which is destined to be far more so in the future. Our statesmen have stood too long with their faces towards the East. To discern our best hopes as well as our gravest dangers they must turn them the other way.’ The ill-feeling between the two countries had, he recognized, long and deep historical routes, going back to the treatment of the American colonies, but he also cited the unwillingness of the British to recognize the achievements of their American cousins. Where Holmes spoke abstractly of ‘a world-wide country’ under a joint flag, Conan Doyle now made his pitch for a practical approach. He said:
Above all, I should like to see an Anglo-American Society started in London, with branches all over the Empire, for the purpose of promoting good feeling, smoothing over friction, laying literature before the public which will show them how strong are the arguments in favour of an Anglo-American alliance, and supplying the English Press with the American side of the question and vice versa. Such an organization would, I am sure, be easily founded, and would do useful work towards that greatest of all ends, the consolidation of the English-speaking races.
In Holmes, Conan Doyle had gone some way to prove that Britain and the US were not two nations divided by a common language after all.
Family Secrets
In The Sign of the Four, it is revealed – albeit obliquely – that Watson suffered a difficult family background that rendered his many achievements and irrepressible enthusiasm all the more remarkable. In that story, we learn that Watson’s father had been dead for ‘many years’, although the cause of his death is never revealed. Moreover, allusion is made to Watson’s tragic older brother. Despite the sibling’s previous ‘good prospects’, Holmes deduced from a watch in Watson’s possession that he ‘threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died’. All of this remained, unsurprisingly, highly sensitive to Watson, who suspected Holmes (erroneously, of course) of making unsolicited enquiries into his background and then passing them off as evidence of his powers of observation. Holmes’s behaviour left Watson limping about the room ‘with considerable bitterness in my heart’, although it is fair to say that his bitterness really sprang from his feelings towards his unhappy family circumstances.
No Casement to Answer
Even though Watson had once deemed Holmes’s knowledge of politics to be ‘feeble’, every now and again the detective emerged as an impassioned patriot. This aspect of his character comes through most starkly in the anti-German tone of the First World War-era in ‘His Last Bow’. But it is also detectable in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1912) and even as far back as ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893). Conan Doyle was never reticent about expressing his own love of country but, in 1916, he became involved in the disquieting case of Roger Casement, who had been sentenced to death for his attempts to rally German support for an anti-British uprising in Ireland. The Irish-born Casement came to public prominence in the 1890s on account of his work for the British Foreign Office in Africa’s Congo Free State. In a shocking report that had international repercussions, he exposed the inhumane treatment of the indigenous people by colonial powers – for example, labourers considered lazy had their hands cut off. It was during his bid to improve the human rights of the local African population that Casement first came into contact with Conan Doyle, and they became firm friends. Casement even accompanied Conan Doyle to a performance of ‘The Speckled Band’ in 1910 and the Irishman was also the inspiration for the character of Lord John Roxton in the non-Holmesian The Lost World. In 1911, Casement joined Conan Doyle as a knight of the realm, so it is easy to imagine the latter’s shock when his friend was arrested and charged with high treason. He was accused of having travelled to Germany in the depths of the World War to petition for German support for Irish independence. After making his plea, he was returned to Ireland aboard a German U-boat shortly before the Easter Uprising, an aborted attempt by Irish nationalists in Dublin to wrestle political power from the governing British. Conan Doyle struggled to reconcile the man of virtue he knew with such blatant treachery of the country for which he worked as a public servant. Conan Doyle could put it down to nothing other than that Casement was out of his mind. As he put it in a letter of 1916:
He was a man of fine character, and that he should in the full possession of his senses act as a traitor to the country which had employed and honoured him is inconceivable to anyone who knew him . . . He was a sick man, however, worn by tropical hardships, and he complained often of pains in his head . . . I have no doubt that he is not in a normal state of mind, and that this unhappy escapade at Berlin is only an evidence of it.
Conan Doyle championed a petition for his release, which counted among its signatories such eminent figures as John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats. It did not have the desired impact, though, and Casement was executed on 3 August 1916.
Swings and Roundabouts
Such is the aura that surrounds Holmes that it is easy to forget that several of his canonical adventures ended either in defeat or otherwise unsatisfactorily. In ‘The Five Orange Pips’, he noted: ‘I have been beaten four times – three times by men, and once by a woman.’ In fact, the argument can be made that over the course of his career – in which his win-rate was undeniably remarkable – there were several more reversals than this quotation indicates. The identity of the woman is most certainly Irene Adler, whose powers of observation, quick-wittedness and spirit so captivated the detective in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. But the identities of the male rivals who bested him is less clear. The antagonists in ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ managed to evade justice, so their leader might be considered to have won a victory over Holmes. Similarly, the villains in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ were never officially caught, although arguably the natural elements had a part to play in their ‘escape’. Then there is the criminal at work in ‘The Red-Headed League’ – I am being deliberately vague as to character names to avoid spoilers as much as possible – who Holmes considers ‘the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third’. The detective admits to having previously had ‘one or two little turns’ with this fellow who ‘is at the head of his profession’. That he was still working his nefarious schemes in ‘The Red-Headed League’ suggests Holmes had not been especially successful against him in these earlier encounters. And then there is Professor Moriarty, that Napoleon of Crime, who Holmes desired so much to deliver into the hands of the courts, but who for so long dodged detection. Surely he must have been one of the four to whom Holmes referred? As for other ‘failures’ in the Holmes record, he did manage to lose a client in ‘The Dancing Men’, although whether it was really in his gift to have saved the poor unfortunate is debatable. ‘The Yellow Face’, meanwhile, is a curiosity in that Holmes spends most of the story barking entirely up the wrong tree.
NORBURY
‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ was set in the area of London called Norbury and Holmes so recognized his shortcomings in the investigation that he told Watson to whisper ‘Norbury’ in his ear should he ever be getting too big for his boots. Muhammad Ali is widely considered the greatest boxer of all time for his brilliance that shone through despite the odd defeat, and Holmes is similarly permitted the occasional failure. Indeed, it is in defeat that he is perhaps at his most humane, while the setbacks bring into sharp relief his extra
ordinary record of success.
Life, the Universe and Everything
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson came across a marked-up article, ambitiously entitled ‘The Book of Life’. It ‘attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way’ and was, in Watson’s immediate judgement, ‘ineffable twaddle!’
‘From a drop of water,’ said the writer, ‘a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it . . . The Science of Deduction and Analysis,’ insisted the writer, ‘is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.’ The writer was, of course, Holmes himself. Facing Watson’s scepticism, he explained that he had ‘a turn both for observation and for deduction’. It is partly as a result of this exchange that Holmes is regarded as the master of deduction – the skill of moving from an accepted premise to a specific conclusion. An example of deduction might be to say that all apples are fruit, so all Braeburns must be fruits, too. However, this is only a single strand of Holmes’s method of detection. More often, we see him practising inductive reasoning – extrapolating conclusions about unobserved events from observed evidence. A man lies dead. A bloody knife lies beside him. He was probably stabbed. The more information gathered, the more secure the conclusion becomes, hence Holmes’s assertion: ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ But Holmes also employed a related technique – that of abductive reasoning, where observed evidence is used to find the most likely explanation for the existence of that evidence, without being able to categorically prove the thesis. A post-mortem examination will reveal if our victim died from stab wounds. A letter lies on the floor nearby, to the victim from his wife. She has fallen in love with another and has fled abroad to start a new life. Did reading the letter prompt the victim to take his own life? We cannot be sure but the evidence would suggest a strong probability. So, the Master of Deduction should really be considered the Master of Abduction.