by David Pirie
There are, however, some suggestive facts. The last child born to Doyle’s mother, when her husband was already far into his illness and Waller ruled the roost, was christened Bryan Julia Doyle (Julia being the name of Bryan Waller’s mother). Eventually Waller moved Mary Doyle to his estate in Masongill in the Pennines where she lived until she was eighty, and where rumours have survived to this day not merely about the relationship, but about the true parentage of Bryan Julia Doyle.
So what on earth can life have been like for Doyle living in this household, which bears a startling resemblance to Hamlet with Doyle as prince, throughout his most formative teenage years, years when he met Bell and the seeds of Sherlock Holmes were sown? As yet, we have no letters to consult. But Doyle’s own silence on the subject is suggestive. According to many biographers, Waller must have been a crucial influence and probably determined Doyle’s career choice. But in the whole of Conan Doyle’s writing there is not a single solitary mention of him. Doyle’s autobiography is written as if Waller never existed. Even so, this spectacularly evasive book, published well after Doyle’s mother’s death, does contain one chilling if elliptical reference to the whole affair, and it was surely placed by Doyle in the full knowledge that Waller himself, unlike his mother, was still alive to read it. ‘My mother,’ Doyle wrote of his student days, ‘had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others …’
‘Disastrous’? The adjective speaks volumes, but the author makes no further attempt to explain it, moving on instead to describe ‘the most notable’ encounter of his university life, and the man who represented everything that the vain and bullying Waller did not — Joseph Bell. ‘For some reason I have never understood,’ Doyle writes with obvious feeling, ‘he singled me out …’
It is hard to imagine a more important moment for the young Doyle than the arrival of Joseph Bell at this desperate time. At home were two highly disturbing fathers, the one pathetic and insane, the other a threatening usurper. And then, like a miracle, enters the handsome charismatic teacher who ‘singles’ him out. Thin, wiry, dark, handsome, with the long fingers of a pianist and the aquiline features of an actor, Joseph Bell was one of the foremost medical academics of his generation, a consulting surgeon and also, incidentally, Queen Victoria’s personal doctor when in Scotland. Even in the guarded prose of his autobiography Doyle was emphatic in describing the man as the most important person he met in all his crucial years in Edinburgh. Indeed in one of the few letters available (thanks to the Bell family) Doyle famously wrote to his former teacher: ‘It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.’
It is no surprise that the drama and emotional release of such a meeting in such extraordinary circumstances was the spark that ignited Holmes. And, for me, it was not merely an irresistible spur for a thriller, but for an imaginative reconstruction of Doyle’s whole world. I decided to make the entry to this world not Edinburgh but the other most tortured and mysterious period of Doyle’s life, namely the years leading up to the turn of the century. The writer had killed off his detective and was tending his invalid wife even though he had already fallen in love with another woman. Believing, as I do, that many of Doyle’s best stories are grounded in his own conflicts and his pain, and that the outer man belies the inner, I found it productive and exciting to look back from this later period on a series of difficult and occasionally traumatic cases undertaken with Joseph Bell.
The idea of Bell and Doyle as a somewhat reluctant team is not quite as fantastical as it seems. For there is no question that Joseph Bell did have a secret. Shortly before Doyle met him in 1878 he had been called in by the Crown to sort out a murder case in Edinburgh which was going badly wrong. The murderer was a Frenchman called Eugene Chantrelle, the victim was Chantrelle’s wife, but there had been many blunders in the case and Joseph Bell managed to steer the doctors and police back on the right track, before personally tracing the likely cause of death to a doctored gas pipe. At least three contemporary accounts by pathologists and colleagues attest to the Doctor’s crucial role, yet Bell preferred to work in confidence and insisted his name was kept out of the trial.
He was especially careful not to attend the execution but on this occasion he had underestimated his man. For Chantrelle knew Bell’s role at first hand and may well have seen a way of getting revenge. On the gallows itself, as many witnesses attest, Chantrelle made a point of airily asking the forensic pathologist Littlejohn to pass on his compliments to the absent Dr Bell for bringing him to justice.
This sudden unexpected publicity for Bell could explain why he sought anonymity in all the cases that followed. We know there were other cases, from many colleagues, but the details are far harder to establish. It was not until 1892 that the resourceful reporter Harry How made the connection between Holmes and Bell, shortly before Doyle decided to bring his own fictional detective’s career to an end at Reichenbach.
What Doyle made of Bell’s forensic and detective work remains a complete mystery. The Chantrelle case happened in the year the two men first met so he could hardly have avoided hearing about it. But Doyle never alluded to it in public, presumably because, like so much else in these Victorian lives, he knew it was confidential.
The obvious question then is what else was confidential? After Doyle’s university training we can discover almost nothing of the relationship between the two men, but the few letters we have suggest there was one. Of course, there can be no certainty that Doyle’s papers, if they ever appear, will solve all such questions. Doyle may well have guarded his inner world even from those closest to him but the frequent signs of cover up and destroyed evidence only arouse greater curiosity. When Bryan Waller died in Masongill in 1932, members of his staff were urgently instructed to go to the attic and hurl from the window on to the lawn all Waller’s personal papers including notebooks and diaries. These were then taken to the back of the house and burned on a bonfire. But one servant glanced at a diary and according to her statement it contained a jealous lament, by the woman Waller married late in life, about her husband’s continuing relationship with Mrs Doyle.
Later, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Arthur and for many years guardian of the Doyle estate, restricted access and threatened legal action when any interpretation or fact did not suit him. Letters were made available at his whim, and withdrawn again, when the conclusions of this or that biographer did not appeal. After Adrian died, the long and complex legal case began, making it hard to establish even the whereabouts of many of the papers. One cache in Switzerland appears in the end to have yielded very little. But even as we await a resolution to the more practical aspect of the mystery I think we can already reach two conclusions. The first is that Doyle’s casual and distanced account of the origins of Sherlock Holmes is not the whole truth. Given all the personal circumstances the author was trying to hide, the ambivalence he showed towards his great creation seems entirely understandable.
The second is that at last we are starting to get closer to a proper understanding of Doyle himself. And, while his greatness is not in question, indeed his reputation grows, everything points to a far more extraordinary, troubled and mysterious man than was ever dreamed of by his public.
THE NIGHT CALLS. Copyright © 2002 by David Pirie. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
First published in United Kingdom by Century
The Random House Group Limited
eISBN 9781429979382
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pirie, David, 1946—
The night calls / David Pirie.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312
-29104-3
1. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859—1930—Fiction. 2. Prostitutes—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Bell, Joseph, 1837-1911—Fiction. 4. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. 5. Physicians—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6116.I74N54 2003
823’.92—dc21
200305626
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: July 2003