10
THE FINAL PROBLEM
The pattern of Conan Doyle’s behaviour as a spiritualist missionary had been set by the way he had seen life as a teenaged schoolboy. Despite his own harsh family circumstances, he was a child who tried to find the essential goodness of the world, an optimist about people and nature, and yet one who railed against stupidity and prejudice wherever he found them. This specifically included his religious education. ‘Nothing can exceed the uncompromising bigotry of the Jesuit theology,’ Doyle wrote over fifty years later:
I remember that when, as a lad, I heard Father Murphy, a great fierce Irish priest, declare that there was sure damnation for everyone outside the Church, I looked upon him with horror, and to that moment I trace the first rift which has grown into such a chasm between me and those who were my guides.
If Doyle looked upon the organised Church as neither divinely conducted nor infallibly moral, in later years he still made the distinction between those who, like him, were ‘in favour of complete liberty of conscience, and others [who put] assertion in the place of reason, giving rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs,’ as he wrote in The Scotsman. Although the circumstances varied over time, it could be argued that Doyle never quite lost the characteristic schoolboy quality of being drawn instinctively to what seemed to him to be honest and forthright and unspoiled in a character, and of being prepared to defend his hero’s good name to the end. Perhaps it was this trait of Doyle’s that Houdini had in mind when he called him a ‘great kid’ rather than an altogether serious theological scholar, or that the novelist Hugh Walpole was thinking of when he wrote in his diary on 8 July 1930, ‘Conan Doyle dead. A brave simple, childish man. How hard he tried to make me a spiritualist! Very conscious of him tonight.’
In the spring of 1921, while casting around for the plots of new Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle continued not only to consult the crime pages of the daily press, but also to confer through his wife with the spirits. ‘I ought to have trusted your judgement, my own son,’ ran a note apparently dictated by his mother Mary, who had died in December 1920. In time, Doyle’s late brother-in-law Willie Hornung similarly came through to offer apologies for having ever doubted him while he was alive. Several other such posthumous communications, appearing in either written or spoken form, followed over the years. By contrast, another attempt to reach Marion Gilchrist, the Scottish spinster murdered in 1908, proved only ‘partly evidential’, Doyle admitted. The departed spirit ‘uttered but a few words in uncharacteristically coarse terms’ before terminating the séance.
Readers of The Strand appear to have mixed views about the author’s subsequent attempts to provide occult solutions to certain historical crimes. For Doyle, however, his wife’s successes as a clairvoyant greatly outnumbered her failures. ‘I know by many examples the purity of her mediumship,’ he told Houdini.
On the surface – the level on which most sceptics treated him – Conan Doyle was by now a sadly deluded old man who spent much of his time sitting around darkened dining room tables talking to dead oriental scribes, while visions of fairies danced in his head. Houdini, for one, characterised the author’s later life as ‘completely loco’, commenting that he had now abandoned his deductive faculties for the ‘applesauce’ of the séance room. However, Doyle’s beliefs were, on a deeper psychological level, an argument within his famously divided self. He reasserted his divine mission even while he remained transported by the ‘daily stories of human artifice and deceit’ he read about in the newspapers. Both spiritualist and materialist, Doyle continued to turn a coldly rational eye on criminal cases referred to him both by readers who regarded Sherlock Holmes as a real character, and by friends who urged him to exercise his detective skills and stop feeding solipsistically off his infatuation with the occult.
In March 1922, Doyle became involved in a case with a classic, if unusually brutal, Holmesian twist. Three months earlier, a 31-year-old London woman named Irene Wilkins had placed a classified advertisement seeking work as a cook. In due course, a telegram arrived inviting her to take a specific train to Bournemouth, where she would be met by a man named ‘Wood’ and taken to an interview. Wilkins’s parents drove her to Waterloo Station on the afternoon of 22 December 1921 and waved her goodbye. They never saw her alive again. The following morning, a farm labourer found Wilkins’s partly clothed body lying face down in a field on the outskirts of Bournemouth. She had been sexually molested, before being repeatedly hit over the head with a hammer, and her bloodied fingers showed that she had fought back against her attacker.
The subsequent investigation by the Dorset Police was not distinguished by its brilliance. Reviewing the sheer number of leads they ignored and clues they missed is again to be reminded of just why the British reading public had so taken to Sherlock Holmes. Eventually the authorities narrowed their search to a 36-year-old soldier-turned-chauffeur, already known to them for his habit of passing forged cheques, named Thomas Allaway.
Allaway convinced investigators that he had been with another woman on the night of 22 December, and, after registering their moral distaste for their suspect, they let him go. At that stage, Conan Doyle’s friend Ralph Blumenfeld, the managing editor of the Daily Express, wrote to him to complain of the police handling of the case and to ask his advice. Doyle cabled back:
Dear Blumenfeld, I find it hard to think that the letter [a specimen taken from Allaway] is in any hand but that which wrote the telegram. Could not a trap be laid in this way? The man naturally wants to get out of the country. He is a chauffeur. Suppose you put an advertisement in the Express and other papers: ‘Skilled chauffeur. A gentleman starting on an extended tour in Spain needs services of driver. Steady man over 25 years – for four months. Apply by letter.’ The replies would be very likely to contain one from him. All which are like his writing could be interviewed. He could fill up papers for a passport. Then you could see scratches, etc, on hands. Don’t you think this is a possible line?
Readers of the Holmes canon will immediately recognise the plot device of 1904’s ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’, where a newspaper advertisement similarly flushes out a maniacal harpoonist named Cairns.
Blumenfeld did as Doyle suggested, although in the end Allaway incriminated himself by continuing to pass bad cheques liberally around the south coast and Home Counties, sufficient for the Reading Police to eventually make an arrest. He was tried at Winchester in July 1922 and found guilty of murder. Blumenfeld later called Doyle’s involvement ‘undoubtedly the one worthwhile initiative of the whole affair’. Thomas Allaway was hung that August.
Sherlock Holmes’s reappearance in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, published in February 1922, was an unusually self-referential work by an author who normally cast around in the newspapers for his plots, not the recesses of his own life. It seemed Doyle had not so much transcended his infidelity to his first wife Louisa during her final years as been trapped by his attempts to rationalise it when he wrote of the hatred of a woman whose ‘own physical charms had faded’ towards her husband’s younger female companion, and added:
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy, and though my wife had no cause for the latter, she was aware that this girl exerted an influence upon my mind and my acts that she herself never had.
More materially, Conan Doyle revisited some of the scenes that had taken place near his Sussex home in August 1908, shortly after he moved there with his new wife, when it came to the plot of ‘Thor Bridge’. A 58-year-old local woman named Caroline Luard, a retired major general’s wife, had been found dead on the steps of the couple’s beachfront summer home. She had been relieved of her jewellery and her underclothes, and had two bullet wounds to the temple. Her husband had apparently been walking nearby, and he had a curious reaction on first reaching the crime scene. ‘The brutes!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve killed her!’
Suspicion soon fell on the general himself, and
on a mysterious tramp seen in the vicinity, but Caroline Luard’s murder remains unsolved to this day. Doyle wondered if the victim might have somehow committed suicide by shooting herself twice through the head in the hope of implicating her husband, much as happens in ‘Thor Bridge’. Another possibility was that the general had made murderous enemies during his years of service overseas, and that some sort of vendetta had ensued – a storyline with more than an echo of The Sign of the Four to it.
Ralph Blumenfeld thought Doyle’s skills as a detective ‘entirely true and intrinsic’, but agreed that on this occasion his friend had failed to crack the case’s ‘manifest impossibilities and contradictions’; while a subsequent attempt to raise Caroline Luard in the séance room produced only ‘some choice epithets [and] a particularly rank odour’ apparently issuing from the medium’s womb.
For both Doyle and his fictional alter ego, there were always unsolved, or insoluble, cases as well as those with a clean finish. ‘Thor Bridge’ opens with a teasing reference to one Isadora Persano, ‘the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a matchbox in front of him which contained a remarkable worm, said to be unknown to science’, among other problems Sherlock Holmes had at one time investigated and abandoned as hopeless failures. It’s surely one of Holmes’s endearing qualities that, despite the prevailing image, his career never bears the stamp of omnipotence or infallibility – the canon is just as full of his self-reproaches for his own sloth or blindness as it is with the proverbial ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’.
Doyle, too, had his shortcomings as a detective. Around 1925 he wrote a note to himself with an overview of some of the cases that had recently caught his attention. There was the ‘Queer letter from Australia’, for example, or the matter of the ‘Wapping Poltergeist’, or the riddle of the ‘Falkland Island Seer’, all of which would remain unsolved on Doyle’s desk, much like those failed cases of Holmes’s consigned to Dr Watson’s battered tin dispatch box held in the vaults of his London bank.
In March 1925, Conan Doyle paid another of his visits to the Home Office, just as he had in the Edalji affair, to raise questions about a recent criminal conviction. This involved a 26-year-old Sunday school teacher turned chicken farmer named Norman Thorne, who happened to be a neighbour of Doyle’s in Crowborough. The crime combined a classic love triangle with some of the horrors that characterised the Crippen trial, with Doyle’s pathologist friend Sir Bernard Spilsbury again providing the expert forensic testimony that helped secure a conviction.
The clean-cut and outwardly unassuming Thorne had impressed Doyle by joining the Band of Hope, a local teetotal society, and by naming his small poultry business after the Methodist Wesley brothers. On the surface, he seemed to be shy and withdrawn – his friend William Latter (Doyle’s chauffeur) called him ‘the least demonstrative person I’ve known’, someone who ‘sang lustily in church, [but] otherwise said little’.
Despite his apparent show of temperance, the soft-spoken Thorne had a weakness for young women, however. Having left his fiancée Elsie Cameron in London, he had begun to step out with a local Crowborough girl named Bessie Coldicott. In November 1924, Elsie wrote to inform him she was pregnant. Thorne replied, ‘There are one or two things I haven’t told you for more reasons than one. It concerns someone else as well … I am between two fires.’ Elsie appeared not to understand, because she wrote back politely suggesting that they get married. Thorne’s next letter abandoned subtlety to announce, ‘What I haven’t told you is that on certain occasions a girl has been here with me late at night … She thinks I am going to marry her, and I have a strong feeling for her.’ This was enough for Elsie to hurriedly buy a third-class rail ticket from London to Crowborough on the morning of 5 December, in what proved to be the last journey of her life.
A month later, Elsie Cameron not having been seen by anyone in the meantime, the police came to visit Thorne at Wesley Farm. He told them he knew nothing about the matter. After Elsie’s dismembered body was found buried on his premises, Thorne changed his story. His London fiancée had indeed come to confront him, he admitted, and he had left her alone for an hour or two while he had gone out to visit Bessie Coldicott. When he returned, he found Elsie, dressed in her underwear, swinging from a beam in his hut. She had apparently hung herself in a fit of despair. Thorne had panicked, cut Elsie’s body into pieces, and disposed of the remains under one of his chicken runs.
His trial for murder began at Lewes on 11 March 1925. Bernard Spilsbury testified that he had found eight bruises on Elsie’s head, arms and legs (described by the defence pathologist as ‘trifling, as one might see at Rugby Football every Saturday’), but that there were no scars around her neck consistent with hanging. The accused was asked in the witness box whether he had truly been in love with his fiancée or with her local rival. ‘Well,’ he said after some deliberation, ‘of the two, I suppose I thought more of the other girl.’ The jury returned with a guilty verdict after twenty minutes, and the judge sentenced Thorne to death.
After visiting the scene of the crime and minutely examining the beam where Elsie Cameron had supposedly hung herself, Doyle told the Morning Post:
I think that there is just one chance in a hundred that Thorne was not guilty of murder, and as long as there is one, I do not think he ought to be hanged. The evidence is strong, but it is circumstantial. Personally, I am against capital punishment except in very extreme cases, and to justify it I think the evidence should be stronger than it was in this case.
For once, Doyle’s characteristic sympathy for potential victims of injustice failed to win the day. Thorne, protesting his innocence to the end, was hanged in the grounds of Wandsworth Prison on 22 April 1925. The day before, he wrote a letter to his father declaring himself a ‘martyr to Spilsburyism’. Doyle never disguised his personal distaste for Thorne’s romantic ménage à trois, but clung stubbornly to his belief that a man’s life ‘should not rest on the accuracy or otherwise’ of one individual’s disputed technical opinion.
On 3 December 1926, the 36-year-old thriller writer Agatha Christie vanished from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire. She was despondent following her mother’s death that spring and the subsequent discovery of her husband Archie’s affair with a younger woman. The next morning, Christie’s car was found abandoned at the side of a ditch, its headlights still burning. For the next ten days, as police and thousands of civilian volunteers combed the Home Counties, the press teemed with rumours about the disappearance. Had Christie drowned herself in a nearby, supposedly haunted spring called the Silent Pool? Others suggested the incident was a publicity stunt to promote sales of her latest book, while some clues seemed to point in the direction of murder at the hands of her cheating husband. All the elements of a classic whodunit were there. It was a case that fairly cried out for the attention of Sherlock Holmes.
When the Surrey Police asked Conan Doyle for his help, it was in his dual role as both ‘the world’s foremost detective mind’ and their county’s sometime deputy lieutenant, an honorary position he had held for several years while based at Undershaw. Doyle soon added a third strand to his investigative credentials. This was his familiarity with the world of ‘psychometric prophecy’, and there was some precedent for his use of it in broadly similar cases. In September 1921, the worried parents of a missing 15-year-old London schoolboy named Oscar Gray had appealed to the creator of Sherlock Holmes for his help. To their surprise, Doyle had taken the psychic approach to the problem, turning the matter over to two clairvoyants. ‘The results were by no means perfect,’ he was later forced to admit in the Daily Express, ‘but I am sure that Mr and Mrs Gray found consolation in them, and in some ways they were accurate.’ (The teenager was found to have merely run away from home and joined the army.)
We’ve seen that in 1925, just a year before Agatha Christie’s disappearance, Doyle had corresponded with a Scottish spiritualist circle about the particulars of Marion Gilchrist’s murder. This, too, c
ould be counted only a mixed success. The psychics had confidently predicted that Oscar Slater would escape the death penalty in the affair, although this was only to repeat the decision publicly announced some fifteen years earlier. But Doyle’s missionary zeal would never allow him to acknowledge to the public or to himself just how poorly the mediums had performed when measured against Sherlock Holmes’s standards. The few such prophetic successes were down to the ‘psychic gospel’; the silences and failures were down to something else. So when Doyle now obtained a glove of Agatha Christie’s, it wasn’t to subject it to the sort of microscopic examination Holmes performed in his fifty-sixth and final short story appearance, 1927’s ‘Shoscombe Old Place’, and in several other adventures before it, but instead to pass it to a bespectacled, 40-year-old London clairvoyant named Horace Leaf.
Leaf took the glove, with apparently sensational results. Doyle later recalled:
I gave him no clue at all as to what I wanted or to whom the article belonged. He never saw it until I laid it on the table at the moment of consultation, and there was nothing to connect either it or me with the Christie case … He at once got the name Agatha.
Leaf went on to announce, ‘The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday, in a location with connection to water.’
This proved to be another notable feat of what Doyle called ‘mediumistic divination’ – Christie was found not on Wednesday, but on Tuesday, staying at a spa hotel in Yorkshire, although as the defecting author’s name and possible hiding place were already on the front page of every British newspaper by the time Leaf made his prediction, there may also have been more worldly means at work. It remains unclear whether it was a case of Christie having suffered a full-scale mental breakdown; of being in a trance, or fugue state, brought on by trauma or depression; or of contriving her own disappearance as a public revenge on her husband. Recent research suggests that she may have retreated to the hotel simply as a cry for help, if not in a forlorn attempt to save her marriage.
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 35