The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  Still, Charles E., Styles in Crime (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1938)

  Stone, Harry, The Casebook of Sherlock Doyle (Romford: Ian Henry Publications, 1991)

  Tietze, Thomas R., Margery (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)

  Toughill, Thomas, Oscar Slater: The ‘Immortal’ Case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1993)

  Wagner, E.J., The Science of Sherlock Holmes (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2006)

  Weaver, Gordon, Conan Doyle and the Parson’s Son: The George Edalji Case (Cambridge: Vanguard Press, 2006)

  Whibley, Charles, A Book of Scoundrels (New York: Macmillan, 1897)

  ‘The Langham Hotel will find me,’ Sherlock Holmes’s client remarks in 1911’s The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax. The building played a significant part in Conan Doyle’s own detective life. (Author’s photo)

  After Conan Doyle dedicated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to his old Edinburgh University lecturer Dr Joseph Bell, Bell wrote to tell the author: ‘You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.’ (WikiCommons)

  William J. Burns (1861–1932), the pioneering midwest detective who enjoyed the title of ‘America’s Sherlock Holmes’ before retiring to write mystery stories in Florida. (WikiCommons)

  George Edalji’s police mugshot. A leading daily newspaper took one look at the young solicitor and called him ‘a degenerate of the worst kind’. (Staffordshire Record Office)

  George Edalji in court where he was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour. (Staffordshire Record Office)

  The Edaljis’ vicarage, where George allegedly let himself out of the back bedroom he shared with his father in order to disembowel local cattle. (Staffordshire Record Office)

  Dr Crippen is led off the SS Megantic in handcuffs by Chief Inspector Walter Dew. Returned to London in August, he was tried in October and hung in November. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  Crippen’s wife and victim Corrine Turner, seen here in her stage guise as Belle Elmore. (Library of Congress)

  Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914, still a materialist but on the edge of the ‘great unknown’. (WikiCommons)

  Oscar Slater. (WikiCommons)

  The victim’s room in the Oscar Slater case. (WikiCommons)

  West Princes Street, Glasgow, seen today. (Alex Holmes)

  Albemarle Street, London. Slater used an accomodation address at No. 36, the semi-derelict building on the left, just a few yards away from both Doyle’s publisher and the hotel where he often stayed when visiting town. (Author’s photo)

  Conan Doyle’s letter of 13 November 1927 to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, about the Oscar Slater case. Slater walked free from prison the next day. (Mitchell Library, Glasgow City Archives)

  Conan Doyle’s cousin Arthur Vicars, the man at the heart of the case with a Holmes-like plot involving stolen jewels, miscarriages of justice and murderous revenge. (WikiCommons)

  Arthur Conan Doyle statue inscription. (WikiCommons)

  Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly being visited by a spirit – as seen by the medium Ada Deane. (WikiCommons)

  Sherlock Holmes statue in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, close to the site of his author’s birth. (WikiCommons)

  Roger Casement, the former diplomat who despite Conan Doyle’s intervention went to the gallows as a traitor. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  Agatha Christie not long before her disappearance in 1926. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  Harry Houdini demonstrating a ‘faked séance’. (WikiCommons)

  Selection of newspaper cuttings on Conan Doyle’s spiritualist activities. ‘Is he mad?’ one headline enquired.

  Spirit writing made by Lady Conan Doyle in the words of Harry Houdini’s late mother, Atlantic City, June 1922.