The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  Yes, Hemingway lives and will survive his mortal critics, be they a Spanish Marqués pr an American literary Brahmin. What I could not tell the Marqués de Espinardo in our conversation in 1947, is now known to the whole world.

  As Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon:

  “The sun is very important…The Spanish say, ‘El sol es el mejor torero.’ The sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.”

  Today, more than ever, the sun shines on Ernest Hemingway, and as a consequence, his long shadow falls across, envelops, and obscures every Marqués on earth.

  19

  The Incredible

  Dr. Bell

  One evening, about the turn of the last century, after enjoying a weekend shoot in Scotland, a dozen guests sat around a dinner table discussing human monsters, famous murders, and unsolved crimes. One of the guests. Dr. Joseph Bell, the eminent Edinburgh surgeon and medical instructor, had the others wide-eyed with his deductive acrobatics.

  “The trouble with most people,” he said, “is that they see, but do not observe. Any really good detective ought to be able to tell, before a stranger has fairly sat down, his occupation, habits, and past history through rapid observation and deduction. Glance at a man and you find his nationality written on his face, his means of livelihood on his hands, and the rest of his story in his gait, mannerisms, tattoo marks, watch chain ornaments, shoelaces and in the lint adhering to his clothes.”

  The guests were skeptical. One challenged Dr. Bell to give an example of applied observation. Promptly, Dr. Bell obliged.

  “A patient walked into the room where I was instructing the students, and his case seemed to be a very simple one. I was talking about what was wrong with him. ‘Of course, gentlemen,’ I happened to say, ‘he has been a soldier in a Highland regiment, and probably a bandsman.’ I pointed out the swagger in his walk, suggestive of the Highland piper; while his shortness told me that if he had been a soldier, it was probably as a bandsman. But the man insisted he was nothing but a shoemaker and had never been in the army in his life. This was rather a floorer, but being absolutely certain, I told two of the strongest clerks to remove the man to a side room and strip him.

  “Under his left breast I instantly detected a little blue D branded on his skin. He was an army deserter. That was how they used to mark them in the Crimean days. You can understand his evasion. However, this proved my first observation correct. He confessed having played in the band of a Highland regiment in the war against the Russians. It was really elementary, gentlemen.”

  Most of the guests were impressed. But one listener jocularly remarked, “Why, Dr. Bell might almost be Sherlock Holmes.”

  To which Dr. Bell snapped, “My dear sir, I am Sherlock Holmes.”

  Dr. Bell was not jesting. He was, indeed, the original Sherlock Holmes, the real-life inspiration for the immortal detective of fiction. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” A. Conan Doyle wrote Dr. Bell in May, 1892. Thirty-two years later, still grateful to Dr. Bell, author Doyle publicly admitted, “I used and amplified his methods when I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on their own merits.”

  Unlike the detective. Dr. Bell wore neither deerstalker cap nor ankle-length Inverness cape, and used neither magnifying glass nor cocaine. Where Sherlock Holmes was the eccentric bachelor in his cluttered rooms at No. 221B Baker Street, Dr. Bell was entirely the family man with a son, two daughters, and two sprawling multi-gabled homes of his own. Where Sherlock Holmes dwelt in a shadow world bounded by Moriarty and Watson, Dr. Bell was a surgeon whose courage won compliments from Queen Victoria, whose crusades for nurses earned the friendship of Florence Nightingale, whose classroom sorcery influenced five decades of Edinburgh University undergraduates ranging from A. Conan Doyle to Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir James Barrie.

  However, the one unique thing which the detective and the doctor held in common overshadowed all their differences. Just as Sherlock Holmes was the foremost fictional practitioner of what he termed “the science of “deduction and analysis,” so his real-life model. Dr. Bell, was perhaps the most brilliant master of observation the world has seen in the last one hundred years.

  Many of Dr. Bell’s views on the science of observation became household words, after the character Sherlock Holmes mouthed them through sixty classic stories. “Let the inquirer begin,” advised Sherlock Holmes, “by mastering more elementary problems. Let him , on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs…By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.”

  In story after story, Sherlock Holmes reiterated his rules for deduction and analysis. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles…It is a curious thing that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting…I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children…I always put myself in the other man’s place, and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances.”

  These rules merely echoed the real-life gospel of Dr. Joseph Bell. “I always impressed over and over again upon all my scholars the vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of the trifles,” Dr. Bell once told a reporter. “The great majority of people, of incidents, and of cases resemble each other in the main and larger features. For instance, most men have apiece a head, two arms, a nose a mouth, and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences, in themselves trifles, such as the droop of the eyelid or what not, which differentiate men.”

  In an essay on crime, penned a half century ago. Dr. Bell wrote, “The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable. Poison a well at Mecca with the cholera bacillus, and the holy water which the pilgrims carry off in their bottles will infect a continent, and the rags of the victims of the plague will terrify every seaport in Christendom.”

  What were some of these “infinitely little” factors Dr. Bell regarded as important in observation? “Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands,” contended Dr. Bell. “The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason…The soldier and sailor differ in gait. Accent helps you to district and, to an educated ear, almost to county…With a woman, especially, the observant doctor can often tell, by noticing her, exactly what part of her body she is going to talk about.”

  While Dr. Bell felt that the development of observation was a necessity to doctors and detectives, he felt equally strongly that it was a thrilling sport for laymen. The vain Sherlock Holmes disagreed, holding little hope for the common man. “What do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell…a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction?” bemoaned Sherlock Holmes. But Dr. Bell felt the unobservant public might care a good deal, once let in on the game.

  Every man, argued Dr. Bell, can transform his world from one of monotony and drabness into one of excitement and adventure by developing his faculty of observation. For this reason—though once he complained in exasperation, “I am haunted by my double, Sherlock Holmes!”—Dr. Bell heartily approved of A. Conan Doyle’s detective stories that popularized his ideas. “Doyle shows how easy it is, if only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends, and, by an extension of the same method, to baffle the criminal and lay bare the manner of his crime…His stories make many a fellow who has before felt very little interest in his lif
e and daily surroundings think that, after all, there may be much more in life if he keeps his eyes open.” Once aware of the entertainment and instruction to be had from careful observation, the average man will find his workaday world much the richer. Like Sherlock Holmes, he will be able to detect from a man’s hat that his wife does not love him, from a man’s cane that he fears being murdered, from a man’s pipe that he is muscular, left-handed, careless, and wealthy.

  Throughout his life. Dr. Bell continued to amaze his circle with the observation game. “When the family traveled in a train,” his surviving daughter, Mrs. Cecil Stisted, recalls, “he would tell us where all the other passengers in the carriage were from, where they were going to, and something of their occupations and their habits. All this without having spoken to them. When he verified his observations, we thought him a magician.”

  His students also thought him a magician. Years after Dr. Bell’s death, A. Conan Doyle told an interviewer, “Dr. Bell would sit in his receiving room, with a face like a red Indian, and diagnose people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, and even give them details of their past life, and hardly ever would he make a mistake.”

  Inside the spired Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, in the packed lecture amphitheater beneath the flickering gaslights. Dr. Bell daily tried to prove to his pupils that observation was not a form of magic but a science. According to one former pupil, Dr. Harold Emery Jones, writing in Collier’s in 1904, Dr. Bell’s standard demonstration of this, its running commentary given in a voice full of dry humor before each new group of medical students, involved taking up a tumbler filled with an amber-colored liquid. “This, gentlemen, contains a very potent drug,” Dr. Bell would explain. “To the taste it is intensely bitter. Now I want to see how many of you gentlemen have educated your powers of perception. Of course, we might easily analyze this chemically, but I want you to test it by smell and taste; and, as I don’t ask anything of my students which I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, I will taste it before passing it around.”

  Dr. Bell would then dip his finger into the liquid, put the finger to his mouth, suck it, and grimace. He would then pass the tumbler around. Each student would dip his finger into the vile concoction, suck it, and promptly make a sour face. When the tumbler had made the rounds, Dr. Bell would gaze at the assembly and begin laughing. “Gentlemen,” he would say, “I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed this power of perception, which I so often speak about, for, if you had watched me closely, you would have found that, while I placed my forefinger in the bitter medicine, it was the middle finger which found its way into my mouth!”

  In the Royal Infirmary wards, in the dispensaries, especially in the out-patient department where ailing citizens were brought forward by student clerks. Dr. Bell practiced what he preached. Glancing at a newcomer. Dr. Bell remarked, “A cobbler, I see.” He explained to his students that “the inside of the knee of the man’s trousers was worn; that was where the man had rested the lapstone, a peculiarity only found in cobblers.” Another time, when a laborer appeared with a spinal complaint, Dr. Bell said to him, “Your back must ache badly, but carrying a heavy hod of bricks won’t improve it,” The laborer was astounded, and cannily inquired, “I’m no’ saying ye’re wrang, but what tell’t ye I was a bricklayer to trade?” Dr. Bell replied by pointing to the laborer’s peculiarly rough homy hands. On yet another occasion, Dr. Bell studied his visitor a moment, then announced to his students, “Gentlemen, I am not quite sure whether this man is a cork-cutter or a slater. I observe a slight callus, or hardening, on one side of his forefinger, and a little thickening on the outside of his thumb, and that is a sure sign he is either one or the other.”

  Once, when a tall weather-beaten patient entered the ward. Dr. Bell looked at him and said to his students, “Gentlemen, a fisherman. It is a very hot summer’s day, yet the patient is wearing top-boots. No one but a sailor would wear them in this season. The shade of his tan shows him to be a coast sailor. A knife scabbard beneath his coat, the kind used by fishermen. And to prove the correctness of these deductions, I notice several minute fishscales adhering to his clothes and hands.”

  Students of Dr. Bell’s would remember, for years after, some of the master’s deductive feats. Dr. Harold Emery Jones recalled that Dr. Bell would summon his charges up front to try their own hand at observing. “What is the matter with this man, sir?” Dr. Bell once asked of a quaking student. “No, you mustn’t touch him. Use your eyes, sir. Use your ears, use your brain, your bump of perception, and use your powers of deduction.” At sea, the confused student blurted, “Hip-joint disease, sir.” Dr. Bell scowled, shook his head. “Hip-nothing! The man’s limp is not from his hip, but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see that there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoes where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen, and has no hip trouble at all. But he has not come here to be treated for corns, gentlemen. His trouble is of a much more serious nature. This is a case of chronic alcoholism, gentlemen. The rubicund nose, the puffed, bloated face, the bloodshot eyes, the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles, with the quick, pulsating temporal arteries, all show this. These deductions, gentlemen, must however be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance, my diagnosis is confirmed by the fact of my seeing the neck of a whiskey-bottle protruding from the patient’s right-hand coat pocket…never neglect to ratify your deductions.”

  At one time, when young Doyle was Dr. Bell’s student assistant, a patient entered and sat down. “Did you like your walk over the golf links today, as you came in from the south side of town?” inquired Dr. Bell. The patient replied, “Why yes, did your honor see me?” Dr. Bell had not seen him. “Conan Doyle could not understand how I knew,” Dr. Bell related later, “but on a showery day such as that had been, the reddish clay at bare parts of the golf links adheres to the boot, and a tiny part is bound to remain. There is no such clay anywhere else.” Years later, writing “The Five Orange Pips,” A. Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say to a visitor, “You have come up from the southwest, I see.” The visitor replied, “Yes, from Horsham.” And Holmes explained, “That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite distinctive.”

  But the most famous example of Dr. Bell’s skill was the one A. Conan Doyle told in his autobiography. A civilian outpatient, a total stranger to Dr. Bell, came into his ward. In silence, Dr. Bell studied the visitor, then spoke:

  “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Not long discharged?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A Highland regiment?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “A non-com officer?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stationed at Barbados?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Dr. Bell turned to his students. “You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man, but he did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

  Years after, A. Conan Doyle was still sufficiently impressed by this incident (“very miraculous until it was explained,” he admitted) to reproduce it closely in his Sherlock Holmes story, “The Greek Interpreter.”

  A. Conan Doyle, after five years as a struggling medical student, graduated from Edinburgh University in 1881. He nailed up his oculist shingle and waited for patients. Six years later, he was still waiting. Lacking a practice, desperate for any kind of income, Doyle turned to writing. After one false start, and under the influence of Gaboriau and Poe, he decided to try a detective story. And for it he wanted a new kind of detective. “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie tricks of spotting detai
ls,” Doyle recollected in his autobiography. “If he were a detective, he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science…It was surely possible in real life, so why should I not make it plausible in fiction? It is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it—such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards. The idea amused me. What should I call the fellow?”

  He called him Sherlock Holmes after an English cricketer named Sherlock and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  In describing the detective, Doyle again remembered his old instructor. Dr. Bell had been forty-four when Doyle last saw him. “He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high and discordant.” With this as Doyle’s model, Sherlock Holmes became the familiar tall, stooped, hawk-faced, intense, and inscrutable human bloodhound. His first appearance, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, with “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887, was inauspicious. But as a result, an American editor, three years later, ordered more Sherlock Holmes stories and the detective was on his way to literary immortality.

  Sherlock Holmes’s deductive tricks thrilled readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Each Holmes stunt was discussed and admired by fans everywhere. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” when a frantic young man burst into the rooms on Baker Street and announced himself as John McFarlane, Sherlock Holmes lazily replied, “You mentioned your name, as if I should recognize it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.”

  In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” after studying an unknown’s seedy, hard felt hat. Holmes concluded, “That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him…He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect. He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days and which he anoints with lime-cream.”