The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  On the night of 9 June that year, Margery, her husband and three of their friends had sat down at a table in the attic of their Lime Street home, put a suitably mournful record on the Victrola phonograph, and turned off all the lights. At first nothing had happened. Then, slowly at first, Margery had begun to rock back and forth in her seat with increasing violence, her eyes blazing. At the climax of this frenzy, she suddenly froze in place, paused for a moment, pressed her hand to her forehead, and then remarked in a ‘gruff, masculine’ tone, ‘I said I could put this through!’ It was the voice of her dead brother, Walter, speaking.

  Six months later, Margery and her husband had embarked on a European tour. She caused something of a stir there by performing in the nude at several Paris séances, before going to England to sit for a photograph by William Hope, which showed an image of Walter unmistakably standing behind her. Even the sceptical Daily Express was left to conclude, ‘There must be [a] question that some supernatural agency was at work’ in her case.

  At the séance held at the Conan Doyles’ London flat, Margery, dressed for the occasion in a short kimono, was able to make the table rock up and down and a dried flower materialise on the floor, all while her feet remained under close observation, nestling on her host’s lap. Doyle later wrote to Crandon, his fellow doctor, fondly remembering his charming wife, whom he believed ‘will live in history’. As a woman and a psychic, she had a double claim on his respect. Margery had ‘created belief,’ Doyle added, not so much in physical phenomena such as the ectoplasm, but in herself as a reputable medium, ‘uniquely endowed with superhuman powers to convey the words, and even the distinctive phrasing and idiom’ of the dead.

  Still unconvinced by any of this, Houdini went to Boston and had Margery sit for him while locked into a large wooden crate of his own design. With holes bored in the device for the medium’s head and arms, the general effect was of someone bolted into a steam box in a sauna. Perhaps as a result, Margery failed to manifest any ectoplasm, although she still went on to address both Houdini and the others present in her late brother’s voice. The spirit was evidently not pleased at the restrictions placed on his sister’s movements. ‘Houdini, you God damned son of a bitch!’ Walter roared, displaying some of the robust manner for which he was known during his earthly life as a motor man. ‘I put a curse on you now that will follow you every day for the rest of your short life. Now get the hell out of here and never come back!’

  Houdini did so. ‘I charge Mrs Crandon with practicing her feats daily like a professional conjuror,’ he wrote in a subsequent article for Scientific American magazine, which sponsored his investigation. ‘Also that … she is not simple and guileless but a shrewd, cunning woman, resourceful in the extreme, and taking advantage of every opportunity to produce a “manifestation”.’

  Margery appeared to him to have combined with equal facility the role of femme fatale, ventriloquist, and oracle (she also dabbled in astrology), and her seeming ability to produce objects ranging from rose petals to the occasional small bird released into the air owed less to her powers of divine mediumship than to what he called her ‘surgically enlarged vagin’. The Crandons were not pleased with Houdini, whom they continued to predict would come to an untimely end.

  In England, the Doyles’ spirit guide Pheneas gave a similar verdict. ‘Houdini is going rapidly to his Waterloo,’ he announced one evening in August 1924, in the course of once again speaking about a future disaster that would overwhelm mankind. ‘He is exposed. Great will be his downfall before he descends into the darkness of oblivion!’ Two days later, Lady Doyle wrote directly to Margery to tell her:

  All you have done is going to have very great results in the future … When the upheaval comes [and] America is stricken, as she will be … you will be a great centre … and they will flock to you and Walter as a bridge of knowledge and hope and comfort … We are also told that Houdini is doomed and that he will soon go down to the black regions which his work against Spiritualism will bring him as his punishment.

  During the next two years, Walter made several further appearances at which he prophesied the imminent ruin of the sceptics in general and of the ‘little kike’ in particular. ‘He will be gone by Halloween,’ he promised at the end of one séance in September 1926.

  Meanwhile, Houdini himself had finally moved against Conan Doyle, doing so with his customary aggression – going from lavishly praising his friend to publicly denouncing him without any apparent intermediate reassessment. In July 1924, the New York Times quoted Houdini as calling Doyle ‘a bit senile’ and ‘easily bamboozled’. From there, he went on to lampoon the 65-year-old author from the stage. He told one audience in Boston that he felt ‘very sorry’ for Doyle. ‘It is a pity that a man [should] in his old age, do such really stupid things.’ Soon all pretence of civility was gone, and the magician remarked that it was his ‘sacred duty’ to confront ‘any such neurotic believer in the occult as Sir Arthur’.

  Another chance to do so came early in 1925, when Doyle wrote an article entitled ‘Northcliffe Speaks Again!’ about the late tabloid press baron. ‘Conan Doyle [has been] hoodwinked from New York to San Francisco and back again,’ Houdini observed:

  I knew Lord Northcliffe when he was plain Harmsworth, and he came to my dressing room in London. I will write something on a piece of paper and seal it, and I challenge the spirit of His Lordship to tell us the subject matter … One must be half-witted to believe some of these things.

  In July, Houdini took the opportunity of another public performance in Boston to mock this ‘mere scribbler’ and ‘mental chump’ who at the same time was a ‘menace to mankind’. ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle states that I am a medium,’ he announced. ‘That is not so. I am well done.’ After the guffaws had died down, an audience member then stood up to yell, ‘I will tell you one thing, you can’t fill a house like Conan Doyle did twice’.

  ‘Well, all right,’ Houdini shouted back. ‘If ever I am such a plagiarist as Conan Doyle, who pinched Edgar Allan Poe’s plumes, I will fill all houses.’

  ‘Do you call him a thief?’

  ‘No, but I say that his story “Scandal in Bohemia” is only the brilliant letter [sic] by Poe … I walked into his room at the Ambassador Hotel and I saw twenty books, French, English and German, a paragraph marked out of each one of the detective stories. I don’t say he used them …’ Houdini continued, but the rest of what he said was lost in the ensuing uproar.

  Although Houdini’s specific complaints varied, in the years ahead he would cling to his essentially hostile view of Doyle as tenaciously as a dog to a trouser leg. Some of the dispute was conducted in person, and some through the pages of the press. ‘Houdini, Stirred by Article, May Sue Sir Arthur’, ran one headline in the Boston Herald. ‘I am more saddened than incensed,’ the magician noted. ‘Conan Doyle believes because he wishes to believe. There is no end to his credulity.’

  At one séance held in a central London house, Doyle and some friends apparently made contact with the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who had died three months earlier. The revolutionary hero parted from the circle with the cryptic advice, ‘Artists must rouse selfish nations’. In time, Houdini addressed the same historical era from a different perspective. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that Rasputin was the direct cause of the fall of Russia,’ he told a Chicago theatre audience in 1926:

  He was a medium who claimed he could bring back any one of the biblical characters. He held the Czar and more particularly the Czarina in his clutches, and it was through his mediumistic work that he called down vengeance on his own head.

  Houdini had been unmoved when told about Conan Doyle’s earlier séance. ‘I will be elected Pope ere Comrade Lenin returns among us,’ he said.

  On the Friday morning of 22 October 1926, while lying on a couch in his Montreal dressing room, Houdini was punched several times in the midriff by a 30-year-old amateur boxer and postgraduate divinity student named Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead. Whi
tehead had previously asked if it were true that the magician had abnormally strong stomach muscles, and had taken his grunted confirmation of this as tacit permission for the assault. Although Houdini made little complaint at the time, three days later he collapsed following a performance in Detroit and was rushed to hospital.

  It now seems likely that he had been suffering from appendicitis even before Whitehead’s visit, and that the subsequent blows had ruptured his intestine. Peritonitis had set in, virtually a death sentence in the days before penicillin. On the afternoon of 30 October, Houdini dictated a letter to a friend acknowledging, ‘I feel none too well at the moment’, but insisting, ‘I will get over this waviness in no time’.

  Around 2 a.m. the next morning, he looked up and told his younger brother Theo, ‘I guess I’m all through fighting’. They were to be his last words. Houdini died later that afternoon of what the doctors called ‘Diffuse peritonitis [with] complications’. The time of death was given as 1.26 p.m. on Sunday, 31 October – Halloween.

  Houdini’s fate ‘was most certainly decreed from the other side,’ Conan Doyle wrote to their mutual friend, the author Fulton Oursler. ‘The spirit world might well be incensed against him if he was himself using psychic powers at the very same time when he was attacking them.’

  Le Roi Crandon later wrote from Boston to tell Doyle of a séance he had held on Halloween night 1926. Both he and his wife had been so ‘thoroughly excited’ by the timing of Houdini’s death that they had wanted an immediate consultation with the spirits. ‘The loved one came in,’ Crandon wrote:

  … and after greetings [I] said, ‘Walter it is apparent that we should not ever take what you say lightly. Houdini passed over today …’ Walter whistled more or less in a minor key and said that Houdini would have a long period of acclimatization, that he would be much confused and resistant to the idea of death, and added, ‘I am not sure but that I shall have something to do with Houdini and his admission’.

  Dr Crandon himself died in December 1939, aged 69, after falling down a flight of stairs. There were allegations that in later years he and his wife had engaged in child sex-trafficking. Following the loss of her husband, Margery seemingly suffered a period of alcoholism and depression. A young Boston Guardian reporter named John Hamer would remember calling by appointment at the Lime Street home one morning to find the front door ajar and ‘the lady of the house lying on her back in the hall, drunk, dead to the world’. The former society beauty ‘cut a pitiable sight, half-clad, her hair matted like Medusa’s, snoring as she breathed’. Margery told a researcher who visited her bedside in her final days to ask if she had ever faked phenomena, ‘You’ll all be guessing for the rest of your lives’. She died overnight on Halloween 1941, fifteen years after Houdini; she was 53.

  At the heart of Conan Doyle’s spiritualism there lay not so much a process of observation and analysis as a need to believe so powerful that it arguably overwhelmed his conscious faculties. Houdini’s scepticism only increased Doyle’s missionary zeal. Their relationship ‘literally defined’ him, he noted. Indeed, the general contours of their rivalry continued even after Houdini’s death. In January 1928, the magician’s widow Bess wrote to tell Doyle something of her current life in New York, and to mention in passing that a mirror had recently broken in her home. Doyle seized on this as a manifestation. He wrote back:

  I think the mirror incident shows every sign of being a message [from] Houdini. After all, such things don’t happen elsewhere. No mirror has ever broken in this house. Why should yours do so? And it is just the sort of energetic thing one could expect from him.

  Perhaps Conan Doyle accepted the ‘new revelation’ simply because for the most part it seemed to tell him what he most wanted to hear. His late family members were all blissfully happy in the afterlife. Several had returned to assure him so. There was no death.

  Meanwhile, the brave mediums and clairvoyants who brought the world this psychic gospel continued to be ridiculed and persecuted in a way that surely roused his crusading instincts. Doyle told Hamlin Garland:

  The [sceptics] have themselves fallen into the pit that they have dug. I shall bring out a pamphlet to rub it in. The stupidity of these [people] is incredible, but it comes from the fact that they start not with the question ‘Is this thing true?’, but rather with ‘How is this trick done?’

  On 15 August 1929, Doyle and his family were at the New Forest home that Pheneas had urged them to buy as a sanctuary in the coming global apocalypse when a fire took hold of the cottage’s thatched roof. By the time the emergency services arrived from Southampton, most of the house’s upper half had been destroyed. Doyle later wrote a letter of thanks to the villagers who had rallied round to help drag his furniture onto the lawn, although ‘one or two, I regret to say, showed a disposition to remove the goods even further’. In time, the insurance company determined that the fire had broken out in the kitchen chimney, but Doyle wondered whether there might not be a paranormal aspect to it. A few days after the event, Pheneas again materialised to announce that there had been a ‘bad psychic cloud’ hanging over the burned part of the building. It had been necessary to remove this, the spirit explained, so that what remained could be used for ‘high purposes’ when Armageddon finally came.

  Conan Doyle eventually grew impatient with Pheneas, whose prophecies of doom seemed to him to ‘inevitably roll forward from year to year’. He nonetheless continued to believe that the messages his wife wrote down or the voices she spoke in were the authentic words of an Ubanian-era scribe. Doyle told Oliver Lodge that he would not have laboured so long and hard ‘to advance a mere hypothesis’. He thought Pheneas as ‘vital a presence as any living Pope or bishop’, and ‘considerably better endowed with divine grace’.

  By 1929, an increasingly frustrated Doyle insisted that man’s final crisis really must come soon, ‘and certainly before the year 1930’. While still ‘philosophically convinced’ by the spirit’s regular pronouncements about the end of the world, he was becoming restive about the precise timetable. Over the course of seven years, this ‘infallible guide’, as his medium called him, had provided more than 1,000 forecasts about everything from cataclysmic floods and earthquakes to the timing of the best train for Doyle to take from Crowborough to London. Little, if any, of Pheneas’ more apocalyptical view of events had materialised. ‘I have moments of doubt,’ Doyle now admitted:

  When I wonder if we have not been victims of some extraordinary prank played upon the human race from the other side … I have literally broken my heart in the attempt to give our Spiritual knowledge to the world and to give them something living, instead of the dead and dusty stuff which is served out to them in the name of religion.

  Although Doyle told Oliver Lodge in 1928 that he was considering publishing a sequel to Pheneas Speaks, and that this second book would be ‘much sterner stuff’ than the original, he first delayed and ultimately abandoned the project. The spirit, he noted, explaining his decision, was becoming ‘increasingly disinclined’ to put a specific date to his ill tidings. In another letter, Conan Doyle told Lodge that he had visited the photographer William Hope in an effort to get a promotional picture of Pheneas. A bearded face had duly appeared, Doyle reported, though ‘not of sufficient clarity’ for commercial use.

  With his public championing of Pheneas, Conan Doyle risked even greater ridicule than had met publication of The Coming of the Fairies. Although he went to his grave ‘believing implicitly’ in this latter miracle, one he added was ‘endorsed by witnesses of unimpeachable honesty [among them] my own children’, in 1983 the then elderly women at the heart of the affair admitted that ‘most’ of their original pictures of sixty-six years earlier had been faked. The two cousins had cut out illustrations from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a 1914 annual (in which Conan Doyle himself had published a story) and propped them up with hatpins in the grassy banks behind the Wrights’ home. Frances Griffiths added that the girls had ‘not wanted to embarrass Sir Arthur
’ at the time, and had been horrified to see the story of the fairies take root for the next sixty years.

  We can applaud both Doyle’s courage and his tenacity in seeking what he called the ‘true, intrinsic and entire cause’ of psychic phenomena, and in promoting spiritualism as a whole as ‘the first really reasonable system ever given to the world’. The reader alone must judge whether some of the occult’s more dramatic narratives appealed to Doyle’s adventurous imagination, and perhaps got the better of his rational faculties. It is a question that might fairly be applied in the case of Pheneas, the loquacious Arabian scribe from the ancient city of Ur.

  Sherlock Holmes was never bound by the obvious, but at the same time nor was his the sort of mind to ignore the evidence that lay immediately in front of him. Might Holmes have been struck, for example, by the curious coincidence of a story that ran prominently in several British newspapers, and even in the pages of The Strand magazine, in the weeks immediately before Pheneas’ first appearance at the Doyles’ family séance table in December 1922?

  It was the gripping account of the 42-year-old English archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his ongoing excavation of the Mesopotamian town of Ur, which he and his colleagues had come to believe was the true site of the flood described in the Book of Genesis, as well as of several other biblical disasters.

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  6 Houdini later examined the photograph, which he considered to be the result not so much of a supernatural occurrence as of a pre-prepared plate, or double exposure, ‘just as anyone with adequate levels of oxygen to the brain would have seen’.