“The Case of Oscar Slater,” published cheaply to encourage a wide readership, revived the calls for a new trial. In the House of Commons, questions about the case were addressed to McKinnon Wood, the secretary of state for Scotland. The reply offered little cause for optimism: “No new considerations have, in my opinion, emerged such as would justify me in reopening the case.”
Meanwhile, new disclosures came to light, along with further evidence of police negligence. Slater’s alibi, it emerged, had been confirmed by a grocer named MacBrayne, who saw him standing on his own doorstep at the time of the murder. MacBrayne had not been called to testify at the trial. An even more disturbing revelation came from Lieutenant John Trench, a Glasgow police detective. After a long struggle with his conscience, Lieutenant Trench came forward with an electrifying piece of information: on the night of the murder, Helen Lambie, the victim’s companion, had named the man she saw fleeing from Miss Gilchrist’s flat. That man was not Oscar Slater.
Incredibly, this allegation was not thought significant enough to warrant a new inquiry. For his troubles, Lieutenant Trench found himself dismissed from the force and denied a pension. Conan Doyle was mortified. “How the verdict could be that there was no fresh cause for reversing the conviction is incomprehensible,” he wrote in The Spectator. “The whole case will, in my opinion, remain immortal in the classics of crime as the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy.”
For the moment, all appeared lost. The next move—though Conan Doyle could not have known it at the time—would be Oscar Slater’s.
19
A Perfectly Impossible Person
Most vividly of all, however, there stands out in my memory the squat figure of Professor Rutherford with his Assyrian beard, his prodigious voice, his enormous chest and his singular manner.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
“My methods of work are not made out to any particular plan,” Conan Doyle had told a reporter in 1905. “I write when the mood is on me. I never dictate a single word, but write the entire story with my pen. I write slowly and very seldom make any corrections afterward. Often when I have done so I have found the result so unsatisfactory that I have restored what I had originally written. If I do make an alteration it usually entails reconstruction of part of the story. First impressions always seem to me the best.”
That interview appeared under the headline “Conan Doyle’s Hard Luck as a Playwright,” which gave an indication of the path his career would take in the first years of his new marriage. Much of his time would be spent writing and producing plays based on his own works, an enterprise that “if it was not lucrative it at least provided us with a good deal of amusement and excitement.”
As for his “hard luck,” this referred to a drama he had written featuring Brigadier Gerard, his popular hero of the Regency period. “I have offered it to nearly every London manager,” Conan Doyle said, “but without success. They all seem to fight shy of it. Why, I cannot say. I am still confident, however, that it is a good play—and they are equally certain that it is not.” Meanwhile, William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes continued to play to packed houses.
After several months, Brigadier Gerard found an unlikely champion in Lewis Waller, an actor who became known as “the flapper’s idol” for his dashing portrayals of D’Artagnan, Hotspur, and Henry V. An experienced theatrical manager, Waller agreed to produce the play and star in the title role. As rehearsals began, Conan Doyle found it difficult to relinquish control of his character. In his novels, he could fill page after page with fond descriptions of gold-slashed lancers, jeweled swords, and finely wrought dueling pistols. In the theater, this passion for historical detail became troublesome. Arriving at a dress rehearsal, Conan Doyle was aghast to see a group of Hussar officers, lately returned from Napoleon’s last campaign, marching onto the stage in sparkling chestnut and silver uniforms. “These men are warriors,” he cried, “not ballet dancers!” At the playwright’s insistence, the costly uniforms were taken outside and dragged through the dirt and mud. Such authenticity did not appeal to Waller. As the star of the show, he insisted that his own uniform remain unblemished.
Waller and his pristine costume debuted in the spring of 1906. He gave, in Conan Doyle’s estimation, a “glorious performance,” but the actor’s heartthrob image seemed at odds with the material. Audiences were accustomed to seeing Waller as a steely-eyed hero; many of his fans failed to see the intended humor in his portrayal of the trouble-prone Brigadier. “Do you know,” one first-nighter commented, “there are times when I can hardly keep from laughing?” Apparently the confusion was shared by many. The crowds neither laughed nor cheered, with the result that Brigadier Gerard was not a great success. Conan Doyle regretted the short run, but came away with a deep respect for the Spanish-born Waller. “I am not clear what blood ran in Waller’s veins, Hebrew or Basque or both,” he wrote. “I only know that it went to make a very wonderful man.”
Three years later, the two men collaborated again on The Fires of Fate, an unabashed melodrama better suited to Waller’s talents. Based on Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the Korosko, Waller again played a dashing military man, Colonel Egerton, who is informed during the first act that a rare form of sclerosis of the spine will kill him in a year. After a brief flirtation with suicide, Egerton decides instead to lead a party of tourists on an adventurous expedition up the Nile River. In true Conan Doyle style, Egerton meets and falls in love with a pretty American, Sadie Adams of Massachusetts. Because of his illness, however, he must refrain from declaring his affections.
Destiny takes a hand when the party is captured by Dervishes. Realizing that a fate worse than death awaits the comely Miss Adams, Colonel Egerton, though gravely wounded by a blow to the head, manages to crawl off and signal for help. Reinforcements arrive and effect a rescue. A happy ending appears within reach, but for the problem of Colonel Egerton’s terminal disease. Conan Doyle’s solution, albeit inventive, appears rather dubious in the light of his medical training. Earlier, Egerton had learned that a fellow sufferer was cured by the impact of a railway accident. It emerges that a blow on the head from a Dervish has much the same effect, allowing Conan Doyle to bring the drama to a crowd-pleasing conclusion.
Conan Doyle considered the play to be his finest dramatic work, and on opening night—June 16, 1909—the audience seemed to agree with him. A scene in which the sinister Dervishes attack the helpless travelers—made more realistic by Conan Doyle’s insistence on whips and cudgels—caused widespread alarm in the audience. In the front stalls, a friend of Innes Doyle had to be restrained from charging the stage to assist the besieged tourists. Later, Colonel Egerton’s brave ordeal in signaling for help brought the audience to its feet. “Such moments to a dramatist,” Conan Doyle wrote, “give a thrill of personal satisfaction such as the most successful novelist never can feel.”
The thrill was short-lived. The Fires of Fate closed after a few months, and only lasted that long because both Waller and Conan Doyle put up money for the production expenses. Conan Doyle remained optimistic, blaming the unsteady box office receipts on an unseasonably hot summer, but Waller soon turned his attention to another project. Conan Doyle would always regret what he considered to be the play’s premature burial.
As he cast about for his next theatrical venture, Conan Doyle turned his attention to a dusty, half-finished manuscript from his younger days. In 1894, as A Story of Waterloo went into rehearsal, the ever-ambitious Conan Doyle had made a start on a second play, called The House of Temperley, also intended as a vehicle for Henry Irving. The young playwright’s interest in boxing suggested a colorful backdrop for the piece, though it seemed an unlikely milieu for the aging Sir Henry. After a brief attempt at collaboration with his brother-in-law Willie Hornung, Conan Doyle abandoned the project. Never one to waste an idea, he used the research and situations to produce the novel Rodney Stone.
The House of Temperley, subtitled A Melodrama of the Ring, followed th
e misfortunes of Sir Charles Temperley, an inveterate gambler who must risk his fortune and family honor on a bare-knuckle boxing match. Just before the fateful match is to take place, the boxer upon whom Temperley has staked ten thousand pounds is kidnapped. Temperley’s own brother Jack, a soldier, must fight in his stead against the brutal Gloucester Dick.
A Story of Waterloo had been a sleek, modest production, with a simple set and a small handful of supporting actors. The House of Temperley, by contrast, was a great lumbering ox of a play, with forty-three actors, seven set changes, and a lengthy boxing match as its climax. As he revised and finished the long-dormant manuscript, Conan Doyle must have realized that its lavish scale would alarm all but the most iron-willed theatrical producers. Undiscouraged by the limited successes of Brigadier Gerard and The Fires of Fate, he decided to finance the bare-knuckle epic out of his own pocket.
The decision appears rash, but the role of impresario suited Conan Doyle’s take-charge personality and allowed him to regain the creative control he enjoyed in fiction. With his usual optimism, he took out a costly six-month lease on the Adelphi Theater and engaged a director and a platoon of actors. He oversaw nearly every aspect of the production and insisted on an authenticity of period detail that extended to antique props and furniture—at even greater expense to himself.
Though Conan Doyle had tried to weave a love story into the first act, the play’s real interest lay in the climactic bare-knuckle bout between Jack Temperley and Gloucester Dick. Conan Doyle brought in a military boxing instructor to coach the actors, and the resulting spectacle skirted a fine line between entertainment and blood sport. The actor who played Gloucester Dick would suffer a broken finger, a lost tooth, and a cracked rib.
As production expenses mounted into the thousands of pounds, on top of a £600 weekly outlay in payroll and rent, even Conan Doyle had to admit that he was “plunging rather deep.” The opening night, on February 11, 1910, would have been a tense affair for the impresario. To his horror, the audience sat through the first act in what could only be called a respectful silence. Anxiously, Conan Doyle began scribbling notes—“too anaemic”—on his program. The crowd came to life, however, as the action shifted to the boxing ring. “Only those who attend a performance of the piece can have any idea how life-like these passages are made on the stage,” wrote the reviewer for the Athenaeum. “Such zest cannot but affect an audience, and the play obtained the heartiest first-night reception of any of the year.” A relieved Conan Doyle emerged to cheers at the final curtain.
The playwright’s first-night elation soon gave way to a producer’s nightmare. Despite enthusiastic reviews, The House of Temperley played to half-empty houses. “Ladies were afraid to come,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and imagined it would be a brutal spectacle.” As the play’s main interest lay in watching the actors pummel each other with their fists, such reservations were not entirely unfounded. Conan Doyle added an appealing curtain-raiser called A Pot of Caviare, but ticket sales continued to dwindle. The death of King Edward VII on May 6 brought down the final curtain. The Adelphi, along with all of the other London theaters, went dark for the mourning period. The House of Temperley made a few scattered appearances toward the end of the month, but these ceased in early June.
One bright spot in this gloomy period was a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt—whose term as U.S. president had ended the previous year—at a small luncheon hosted by a mutual friend. Roosevelt, who was passing through London on the return leg of an African safari, dominated the gathering with what Conan Doyle called the “raciest” talk he had ever heard. The former president was “a very loud hearty man,” Conan Doyle recalled, “with a peculiar wild-beast toothy grin, and an explosive habit of slapping his hand down for emphasis.” Conan Doyle found much to admire in Roosevelt’s exploits as a military man, sportsman, and adventurer. “Colonel Roosevelt is a superman if there ever was one,” he told an American journalist. Roosevelt, for his part, respected Conan Doyle’s political views and public crusades. A longtime fan of Sherlock Holmes, Roosevelt also inquired after the health of the great detective, whose latest adventure, “The Red Circle,” had just appeared in The Strand.
As it happened, Sherlock Holmes was very much on Conan Doyle’s mind. Even before The House of Temperley had officially closed, it was clear that the play’s failure would leave him with heavy debts and an expensive lease on an empty theater. It was, he admitted, a “difficult—almost a desperate—situation.” Desperate times called for desperate measures, so the beleaguered author returned once again to Baker Street and his ever-reliable cash cow.
Years later, Lady Conan Doyle would express wonder at the speed with which her husband wrote and produced his new play, which went from blank page to full production in little more than three weeks. Such efficiency, she declared, “must surely be a record.” If so, it was born of necessity. The excitement and jolly times of Conan Doyle’s theatrical ventures had now become, in his phrase, “a little too poignant.” His losses must be recovered.
The new play took its inspiration from “The Speckled Band,” one of the earliest and best of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, though Conan Doyle made substantial changes to the story. Much of the cast and crew of The House of Temperley transferred over to the new production, with better-known actors brought in for the leading roles. H. A. Saintsbury, who had given hundreds of performances as Holmes in a touring company of the Gillette play, stepped in to play the detective. A Shakespearean actor named Lyn Harding portrayed the villainous Dr. Grimesby Rylott—“Roylott” in the original story—and argued so vehemently with Conan Doyle over the interpretation of the role that their mutual friend J. M. Barrie had to be called in to mediate. Conan Doyle eventually conceded to the actor’s point of view, with the result that the character of Rylott nearly overwhelmed Sherlock Holmes.
A number of other changes were made as opening night approached. Conan Doyle had originally called the play The Stonor Case, but his colleagues, anxious to capitalize on a proven winner, persuaded him to revert to the more familiar The Speckled Band. A scene in which Holmes indulged his cocaine habit was revised to allow an intervention from Billy the page boy. A familiar episode from the original story—in which Dr. Roylott bends a fireplace poker and Holmes straightens it out again—had to be abandoned when no sufficiently pliable prop could be found.
One of the greatest difficulties concerned the title character, a poisonous snake who was to menace the heroine in the play’s climactic scene. Yet again Conan Doyle insisted on using the most realistic props available. The production crew—and, one imagines, the actors—favored an artificial snake. Conan Doyle, seeking a more spine-tingling effect, imported a fearsome-looking rock python. Even he had to admit that the snake made a poor actor. The python, he wrote, “either hung down like a pudgy yellow bell rope, or else when his tail was pinched, endeavored to squirm back and get level with the stage carpenter, who pinched him, which was not in the plot.”
One can only imagine the stage carpenter’s trepidation as the curtain went up on June 4. Happily, all went according to the script and Conan Doyle emerged to a thunderous ovation at the final curtain. “It went wonderfully well,” he reported to the Ma’am. “I don’t think I have ever seen a play go so well.”
The critics had high praise for the performances of H. A. Saintsbury and Lyn Harding, and many made special mention of Saintsbury’s skill at disguises—a feature of the play Conan Doyle playfully concealed by assigning a program listing to “Mr. C. Later,” who proved to be Holmes disguised as a butler.
The rock python fared less well, though Lyn Harding had coaxed it into taking an opening night curtain call. Critics had harsh words for its wan performance, which they variously described as “palpably artificial” and no more terrible than a “large and unwieldy sausage.” Stung by the criticism, the crew rigged up an effective mechanical duplicate, but Conan Doyle would not allow the substitution. Later, however, the two snakes were furtively switched so that
Conan Doyle expressed a strong preference for the fake, believing it to be real. Thereafter, the mechanical snake took over the part, leading to one of the most chilling scenes in the production. When Grimesby Rylott, in his death scene, crashed to the floor with the snake coiled firmly about his head, the audience watched with mounting alarm as the creature slowly uncoiled and slithered across the stage toward Dr. Watson, played by Claude King, who thrashed it thoroughly with his cane while the audience shrieked in terror. Presumably the artificial snake received a warmer reception at the final curtain.
The success of The Speckled Band allowed Conan Doyle to recoup his losses with interest. Two touring companies were already on the road by the time his irksome six-month lease on the Adelphi expired. The original production transferred to the Globe.
For all its success, even Conan Doyle had to admit that The Speckled Band was inferior to William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes. The detective was slow to appear in the Conan Doyle effort and gave little evidence of his customary brilliance. “The real fault of the play,” the author wrote, “was that in trying to give Holmes a worthy antagonist I overdid it and produced a more interesting personality in the villain.” Even so, Conan Doyle would always be grateful to the actors who had helped him out of his financial straits. More than a decade later, when a revival starring Saintsbury and Harding struggled to break even, Conan Doyle generously declined his royalties to help the production find its feet.
As The Speckled Band settled in for a long run, Conan Doyle decided to bring his career as a playwright to a discreet close. “I am not leaving stage work because it doesn’t interest me,” he told a journalist. “It interests me too much.” Thereafter he advised his friends never to put money of their own into theatrical ventures.
Though Sherlock Holmes had allowed him to salvage a bad situation, Conan Doyle must have regretted the necessity of resorting to his old warhorse, the character who had so often overshadowed his other ambitions. Now, as his attention turned back toward fiction, and with Sherlock Holmes preying on his mind, Conan Doyle wandered down an oddly familiar path. Drawing inspiration from his own past, he set out to create an audacious new character, whom he modeled on a professor of medicine from the University of Edinburgh. This new character would be intensely brilliant and wildly eccentric, and his adventures would be chronicled by a less intelligent, but admirably stalwart companion.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 31