The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  Doyle concentrated less on his fellow crime writer’s motives and more on the ‘exciting new role’ that clairvoyance seemed to play as a cutting-edge investigative tool that would ultimately supersede all other merely ‘mortal and subjective’ techniques. ‘The Christie case has afforded an excellent example of the use of psychometry as an aid to the detective,’ Doyle said in a letter to the Morning Post:

  It is, it must be admitted, a power which is elusive and uncertain, but occasionally it is remarkable in its efficiency. It is often used by the French and German forces, but if it is ever employed by our own it must be sub rosa, for it is difficult for them to call upon the very powers which the law compels them to prosecute.

  These hopes for the British authorities to take a more enlightened approach to their criminal enquiries were somewhat dashed by the subsequent remarks of a senior Scotland Yard commissioner. ‘We do not keep hopeless lunatics in the police forces of this country,’ he announced.

  Horace Leaf lived until 1971, often claiming to be in touch with a spirit world where his friend Conan Doyle carried on ‘writing books, playing cricket and smoking cigars much as before’. He once conducted a séance where Doyle’s signature apparently materialised on a slate, and the author also later appeared to him in the form of a talking cat. Despite these achievements, over the years Leaf would find his services only sparingly required by the official police. Later in the 1960s, he began to experiment with a ‘freer, more allusive’ form of mediumship that sometimes involved the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Leaf’s memoir Death Cannot Kill contained the accounts of many more post-mortem conversations with Doyle, who had apparently revealed to him that he was hard at work in heaven writing more Sherlock Holmes tales.

  Doyle and Agatha Christie never met, at least in the flesh, and she appears not to have acknowledged his help at the time of her disappearance. Clearly, theirs was not one of those peer relationships based on mutual artistic respect and goodwill. In 1929, Christie published a story called ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’, which perhaps owes something to Doyle’s own 1911 Sherlock Holmes mystery ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’. In the Christie version, her sleuth Tommy Beresford seems to be a cross between Holmes and Inspector Clouseau, down to his writing ‘a little monograph’ and playing the violin excruciatingly badly. Later in the story, Beresford discovers that the lady in question isn’t missing at all, but has simply gone to a spa for a rest cure. ‘And you will oblige me,’ he’s left to remark to his Dr Watson figure, ‘by not placing this case upon your records. It has absolutely no distinctive features.’

  Conan Doyle’s double life as a hard-boiled crime writer and occult visionary had taken on a new complexity when, in May 1924, he published an article in the Daily Express describing his recent encounter with the late Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. As we’ve seen, Doyle and several friends (including Horace Leaf) had met at around midnight in a darkened London house. Leaf recalled that they had sat down around the dining room table and joined hands, at which point Doyle had cleared his throat and announced, ‘This is the most urgent message for the world, and I will carry it, will carry it, will carry it, will carry it, carry it, carry it’. It was like a stuck record. In time his voice became more and more indistinct, and then faded away altogether. For some minutes, the group had sat there motionless, exchanging the occasional nervous remark between themselves. Then, suddenly, the female medium sitting on Doyle’s left tightened her grip on his hand and whispered, ‘I see him! He is there! He is standing on the stairs looking down at us!’

  ‘In a moment,’ Doyle told the readers of the Express:

  … the table began to move. It rose and fell in a steady rhythm. My experience of table-sittings, which is a large one, has shown me that undeveloped spirits always make violent and irregular – often circular – movements, and that steady movement is a sign of a deliberate, thoughtful mind.

  Having established their visitor’s mental state, the sitters had then asked him his name. ‘Lenin, the Russian leader,’ he announced in a series of Morse code-like raps, transmitted in the darkness. Doyle, who took the Bolshevik’s physical presence among them on trust, as he himself could see only his fellow sitters and the material objects around them in the room, then asked, ‘Could you spell something in Russian?’

  ‘Yes,’ he heard tapped out in the gloom.

  ‘Some lingual tests were then given, but I found it hard to follow them, for spelling out with the alphabet is hard work even in one’s own language,’ Doyle admitted. However, he was sufficiently impressed to ask the unseen figure in their midst if he had a message for them.

  ‘Yes,’ Lenin rapped, before adding his aphorism about the artist’s essentially radical role in society. Doyle had absorbed this, and then in turn advised the spirit to reconcile himself to death. Doyle wrote in the Express:

  I explained to him the conditions under which he now lived, and the need to turn his thoughts away from worldly matters. I begged him to cease to annoy innocent people, and I told him that he could only work out his own salvation by adapting his mind to the new conditions, by being unselfish, and by striving for higher things.

  Perhaps Lenin was suitably chastened, because there was no immediate response to this admonition. In some versions of the tale, the sitters had then heard a soft but climactic ‘Spasiba’ rapped out on the table in front of them. At that, the spirit had again withdrawn up the stairs.

  It was as though the forces of life and death – a childlike trust in the visions of the séance room, and a Victorian Scotsman’s dour belief in rigorous social order on earth (where even a ghost should know his place) – were pitched in unresolved battle somewhere in Doyle’s soul. In his favour were a sincere desire for truth, along with courage and admirable persistence. Doyle’s critics would have countered with allegations of almost infantile naiveté when it came to his notion of the redemption of mankind. This duality surfaced again in ‘The Sussex Vampire’, published only weeks before the Lenin séance, in which Holmes explicitly rejects any occult intrusion on his investigations. In ‘The Retired Colourman’, a story that followed in 1926, Doyle allowed his phlegmatic detective a rare comment on the human condition. ‘Is not all life pathetic and futile?’ Holmes asks. ‘We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.’

  In August 1927, Doyle read of the judicial execution at Boston’s Charlestown State Prison of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchists who had been convicted of murdering a shoe factory cashier and his guard in the course of an armed robbery seven years earlier. As in the Oscar Slater case, the evidence against the accused seemed to rely on a mixture of conflicting eyewitness testimony and disputed forensics, along with a good deal of character assassination. To their many supporters, Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried less on the basis of the facts of the crime and more as a highly public rebuke of their outspoken political views. As the foreman of the jury commented after announcing the guilty verdict, ‘Damn them, they ought to hang anyway’.

  ‘It is impossible to read the facts,’ Doyle remarked of the Massachusetts pair, somewhat incongruously in a book entitled Our African Winter, ‘without realising that they were executed not as murderers but as anarchists’. In particular, Vanzetti, a fishmonger, struck him in near spiritual terms. ‘He should not have been [prosecuted] under the pretence that he was an ordinary vulgar criminal,’ Doyle wrote. ‘Far from this being the case, Vanzetti was a man of such rare and exalted character that one thinks of St Francis of Assisi as one reads his utterances. His personality is likely to grow into a legend.’

  Doyle had relatively little of substance to offer as an unofficial detective in the case, although in time he pointed to the fact that Vanzetti claimed to have been peddling eels elsewhere in Boston on the day of an earlier crime of which he had also been convicted. Sixteen eyewitnesses, all of them Italian, had come forward to support his alibi. What was more, Doyle wrote, ‘T
he dusty old invoice had been preserved, and it was shown that on the day before Vanzetti had actually [taken possession] of a barrel of eels. Surely that alone should be enough for any reasonable man?’

  The case seemed to fascinate Doyle, and in the weeks ahead he often compared it to the Slater affair, which also reached a climax later that year. More recent ballistics evidence suggests that Nicola Sacco was probably guilty of firing the shots that had killed the two employees at the shoe factory, and that Vanzetti was his passive accomplice. We will likely never know. Doyle was then approaching his seventieth birthday, and there was little reason for him to involve himself in the murky details of a criminal case some 3,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. But just as Holmes sometimes fell into a stupor, staring listlessly out of his window and shooting up cocaine to overcome his lassitude until a new client arrived, so his creator found himself ‘terrifically energised [and] roused’ by each fresh potential miscarriage of justice to come his way. The Sacco and Vanzetti case may not have been personally relevant, but it was further proof to Doyle that ‘police and judicial procedure all over the “civilised” world [was] little better than in the days of the Inquisition’.

  We’ve touched on two other international cases whose singular details found their way onto Conan Doyle’s crowded desk during the last years of his life. The first involved the brutal murder in November 1927 of 18-year-old Irene Kanthack while out walking her cairn terrier early one evening in the exclusive Zoo Park area of Johannesburg. The local police had quickly determined that ‘a native’ must have been responsible for the crime, which included the classic mystery writer’s conventions of a whimpering, bloodstained dog, a partly clothed body, and a wristwatch on the victim’s arm apparently broken to show the time of her death.

  Doyle himself was in South Africa a few months later, and consulted with the investigating detectives on the case. Writing about this ‘unsolved mystery of first-class importance’ in Our African Winter, he dismissed the official theory that Irene Kanthack had been abducted by a black man, taken away to be raped and murdered, and then brought back some time later to be lain out in the wood where she was found.

  ‘This is quite inadmissible,’ Doyle wrote:

  It certainly was not so. The body was hid within a very few yards of the place where the poor girl had been slain, and had certainly never been anywhere else. That being so, we are presented with a curious problem. In a space of time which could hardly have been more than twenty minutes, the criminal had been able to drag the body across, and then cover it with such skill that for three days it lay hid, though Boy Scouts and others were hunting every yard of the wood.

  I would venture to draw two deductions from this. The first is that in all probability there were at least two criminals, since from what I saw of the undergrowth I should not think it possible for one man to have collected sufficient boughs and foliage to have covered the body in time. It is a pity that it rained heavily, for those boughs were certainly stained with finger-prints before they were washed off.

  My second deduction would be that the criminals were probably Europeans or men of some brain power, who lived at a distance, and wanted time for getting away. A native living in a hut within a few hours journey would naturally have made off and left the body.

  Leaving aside Conan Doyle’s apparent belief in the superior intellect of South Africa’s European settlers, this showed a significant advance on the stalled official investigation into Irene Kanthack’s death. Doyle had gone on, it will be remembered, to discover a nearby room rented by a mysterious scarred white man, and that – again in classic crime story format – this had been found to be covered in collages of pornographic drawings and sensational headlines torn from the local newspapers. The police, even so, had declined to visit the premises, or to investigate the scarred man, and there the matter rested.

  There were innuendoes that the lead detective in the case, a Colonel Trigger, had himself done away with the victim, and allegations that his colleagues had destroyed the evidence. Although a man named Brown was eventually charged with the murder, the case against him soon collapsed when a magistrate called the evidence presented in court ‘tainted beyond all bounds of credibility’. The murder of Irene Kanthack remains unsolved today. Doyle thought it all a ‘sorry case of uniformed blindness and obduracy’ to rank along with the worst excesses of the Edalji and Slater affairs, and further proof, perhaps, that the Inspector Lestrade type was not one limited to the British force.

  The second tragedy to come to Conan Doyle’s notice during his African tour concerned a sensational murder in Umtali, part of the present-day city of Mutare in Zimbabwe. A middle-aged Anglo-South African couple of only a few hours acquaintance, Mary Knipe and Job Winter, had gone for a walk in the town’s central park on the warm late evening of 6 November 1928. It was a quiet and relatively secluded spot, popular with courting couples, although the local police chief, Major Flintwich, later made much of the fact that there was a ‘kaffir hut [with] six or seven miscreants’ located nearby. The more you study Doyle’s African casebook, the more you find its distinguishing features (apart from the Dickensian names) to have been the violent deaths of a series of attractive white women and the instinctive belief on the part of the authorities that a black man must be responsible.

  The facts in this case were that at about nine o’clock a passer-by had heard loud screams coming from a corner of the park and, on going to investigate, found Mary Knipe’s lifeless body lying across a path. She had evidently been stabbed several times in her chest and stomach. The horrified passer-by had then heard a male voice say somewhere in the gloom, ‘Here I am. I am knocked out.’ At that, Job Winter had staggered out from behind a tree, lain down on the grass, and repeated brokenly, ‘Who hit me? Who hit me?’ It was later discovered that he had suffered a broken jaw, as well as other serious blows to the head, and, to a qualified doctor like Conan Doyle, it was apparent that these injuries were almost certainly not self-inflicted. Winter could remember nothing of any attack beyond the fact that at some stage he had seen ‘a native’ pass by the bench on which he and his companion had been seated.

  There was one other curious point that had immediately struck Doyle when he came to hear the story from a local judge. When Winter was on his way to hospital following the attack, he had said not, ‘What happened to Miss Knipe?’ or even ‘Is she alive?’, but, ‘I have to catch my boat tomorrow’, followed by, ‘You’re not going to make a case out of this, are you?’ Perhaps he was genuinely in shock.

  Inspector Bond, who took over the investigation, seemed to Doyle to have:

  … acted in an intelligent way … He searched everywhere for a weapon, but found none. He noted that the earth in front of the seat shows signs of disturbance, but could find none at the back or sides. He then traced drips of blood with two small pools of blood along the path to the point where the body was found – about forty yards in all. The woman had evidently backed away down the path screaming, while her assailant had showered blows upon her … She may have fallen at the two points where the pools of blood were. There was no indication of robbery.

  The police eventually charged Job Winter with the crime but, as in the Irene Kanthack affair, a judge dismissed the case before trial. Mary Knipe’s brutal murder also remains unsolved today.

  Doyle visited the scene, and as a result came to believe that it might have been a simple but tragic case of mistaken identity. He wrote:

  One conceivable theory is that the attack was not meant for the prosaic and middle-aged couple, but that in the dark the assailant chose the wrong people. It is possible that [another nearby] couple were the real objects of the vindictive hatred of some jealous rival.

  According to this reading of events, Mary Knipe had been targeted accidentally – she would have looked similar to any other white woman when seen from behind in the dusk – and following the assault the killer had simply fled into the night taking the murder weapon with him. Notwit
hstanding his measured praise for Inspector Bond, the case as a whole did nothing to alter Doyle’s belief in the ‘almost incalculable stupidity and prejudice’ of police forces all over the world.

  After returning from his African tour in April 1929, Conan Doyle published a 5,000-word ‘open letter to all elderly folk’ in which he noted matter-of-factly, ‘You and I are suffering from a wasting and incurable disease called old age, and there is but one end to it’. He turned 70 the following month. His final literary act was to collect a series of essays on the occult into a slim book called The Edge of the Unknown.

  Doyle had several health scares, once collapsing during a speech to a London psychic meeting, but he fought on to the end. He began 1930 with guns blazing, not only taking on the Catholic Church and others whom he saw waging an ever-intensifying anti-spiritualist conspiracy, but also starting an internecine war with the SPR, whom he now accused of being ‘entirely for evil’.

  Conan Doyle’s specific bone of contention with the SPR again highlighted some of his strengths and weaknesses as an investigator. Once his mind was made up he was an indefatigable crusader for the truth as he saw it. Set against this, there was the fact that his methods often fell below the exacting standards of observation, analysis and underlying psychological insight that Sherlock Holmes had made his own. Doyle was becoming more dogmatic with age; he refused to read case notes or other documents of more than a few pages, but still insisted that he could get to the truth of a matter by consulting the spirits.

  Instead of applying himself as a forensic detective, the art of deduction increasingly consisted of Doyle sitting in a darkened room while his wife Jean practised her automatic writing or channelled their psychic guide, Pheneas. As a whole, these family séances were not notable for their pervasive sense of openness or transparency. Doyle was wary of admitting anyone who might disturb the ascendancy which his wife exercised over their closely controlled circle. The messages that resulted ran the gamut from continuing predictions of man’s wholesale doom down to the most trivial details of the children’s education or the optimum spot for a summer holiday. Several years earlier, Houdini had been one of those who thought it ‘really sad when a great man like Doyle comes to hold his own wife up as a Messiah … One must be a chump to believe some of these things,’ he concluded.