The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  This fictional witchcraft, made so plausible by Doyle’s deft pen, became an international fad. But very often an Edinburgh graduate would recognize from whom Doyle had derived this genius. In 1893, the year before his death, Robert Louis Stevenson, after meeting the “ingenious and very interesting” Sherlock Holmes in print for the first time, asked A. Conan Doyle in a letter from Samoa, “Only one thing troubles me. Can this be my old friend, Joe Bell?” A. Conan Doyle was quick to tell Stevenson, the press, and the world that the prototype for Sherlock Holmes was, indeed, Dr. Bell. As Doyle wrote to Dr. Bell, “I fear that one effect of your identity being revealed will be that you will have ample opportunity for studying lunatic letters, and that part at least of the stream that pours upon me will be diverted to you. You will hear alas from the youth in the south of Portugal, from the American lady with the curved spine, from the Liverpool merchant who bums to know who Jack the Ripper is, from many folks who believe that their neighbors are starving maiden aunts to death in hermetically sealed attics.”

  At first, Dr. Bell labeled pestering reporters “fiends” and pretended annoyance with A. Conan Doyle. But he was secretly pleased at being regarded as the original of Sherlock Holmes and at the wide publicity given his methods. Dr. Bell occasionally passed along suggestions for Holmes stories, some of which Doyle regarded as impractical. When Dr. Bell suggested in 1892 that Holmes joust with a germ murderer, Doyle replied, “I think that a fine thing might be done about a bacteriological criminal, but the only fear is lest you get beyond the average man, who won’t be interested unless he thoroughly understands.” However, Doyle was pleased with most of Dr. Bell’s other suggestions. Once, Dr. Bell passed along his anecdote about the bandsman in the Highland regiment, who insisted that he was a shoemaker to hide the fact that he was a deserter. Doyle gratefully accepted it, writing, “The deserter-cobbler is admirable, and I wish I had a dozen more such cases. All you tell me is most useful.” And in another letter to Dr. Bell, “Your sketch of the crime is capital. It wants some other red herring across the scent besides the ex-soldier, but there is the nucleus. I shall certainly, with your kind permission, avail myself of the idea.”

  Even though, in speaking of his Edinburgh mentor, A. Conan Doyle pointed out that “it was toward the detection of disease rather than of crime that his remarkable talents were directed,” Dr. Bell could never resist dabbling in a first-class murder. This-was his primary extracurricular activity. The Crown welcomed Dr. Bell’s detecting genius. As an amateur detective, without official status, Dr. Bell worked hand in hand for twenty years with Sir Henry Littlejohn, professor of medical jurisprudence, and police surgeon to the city of Edinburgh. Dr. Bell’s greatest success, in the years before he became known as Sherlock Holmes, was the part he played in the sensational Chantrelle case.

  Eugene Chantrelle, a onetime Paris medical student, was a powerful, handsome man with mutton-chop whiskers. He had come to Edinburgh in 1866, to teach languages, and within a year had seduced a fifteen-year-old pupil named Elizabeth Dyer and been forced to marry her. The marriage was a singularly unhappy one. In moments of enthusiasm, Chantrelle, cursing, would beat his wife black-and-blue, boast that he would yet poison her, and then leave her alone while he made the rounds of the city’s bordellos.

  In October, 1877, fearing that his fragile wife might meet with an accident, Chantrelle thoughtfully insured her life for $5,000. Early one morning, about ten weeks later, the housemaid heard a moaning from one of the upstairs bedrooms. Rushing to Madame Chantrelle’s room, the maid found her unconscious. Beside her bed were a partially filled glass of lemonade, some orange slices, and a few leftover grapes. After calling Monsieur Chantrelle, the maid ran out for a doctor. Returning, the maid found Chantrelle hurriedly stepping away from the window. The lemonade glass was empty, the orange slices and grapes gone. When the doctor arrived, Chantrelle told him he thought his wife had been overcome by a gas leakage. At once, the doctor sent a note to Sir Henry Littlejohn: “If you would like to see a case of coal-gas poisoning, come up here at once.”

  Littlejohn, accompanied by Dr. Bell, studied the bedroom and the ailing woman, and then removed her to the Royal Infirmary. There, after several hours, she died. Chantrelle was told she had died of narcotic poison. He protested, “But you know we have had an escape of gas!” Nevertheless, he was arrested for murder.

  Littlejohn and Dr. Bell had, indeed, found evidences of poison. There were many green-brown vomit spots on her pillow, and two on her nightgown. These contained opium in solid form, mingled with grape seed fragments—matching a smaller portion of the same contents which were found in her alimentary canal. Checking with chemists. Dr. Bell found Chantrelle had recently purchased thirty doses of opium.

  Chantrelle loudly insisted his wife had died accidentally from leaking gas. Investigating, the gas company located a broken gas pipe behind Madame’s window shutter. The maid, claiming there had been no smell of gas in the room when she discovered the body but a faint smell when she returned to find Chantrelle moving away from the window, thought Chantrelle himself had wrenched the pipe loose to make the death appear accidental. To this, Chantrelle replied he could not have broken the pipe, since he did not even know it existed. Suspicious, Dr. Bell began snooping about, and finally located a gas fitter who admitted repairing the pipe behind the shutter for Chantrelle only a year before, while “Chantrelle watched with interest the operation.” With this evidence, plus proof that Chantrelle had been in serious financial difficulties, the Crown brought the French schoolmaster to the dock. The trial lasted four days. The jury was out one hour and ten minutes. The verdict: “Guilty of murder as libelled.”

  On May 31, 1878, Chantrelle, gay dog to the last, started his long march. Recalling the scene, a former student of Dr. Bell’s, Z. M. Hamilton, reported, “The morning of the execution, Chantrelle appeared on the scaffold beautifully dressed and smoking an expensive cigar. Dr. Littlejohn was there in accordance with his duty. Just before being pinioned, Chantrelle took off his hat, took a last puff on his cigar and, waving his hand to the police physician, cried out, ‘Bye-bye, Littlejohn. Don’t forget to give my compliments to Joe Bell. You both did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold!’”

  A far more spectacular affair, if a less satisfactory one for Dr. Bell, was the celebrated Monson case. This case had its beginnings in 1890, when a London financier. Major Dudley Hambrough, hired a bankrupt young Oxford graduate named Alfred Monson to tutor his seventeen-year-old son, Cecil, for the Hants Militia. Three years later, having won Cecil’s affection, Monson managed to insure him with the New York Mutual Assurance Company for $100,000, with Mrs. Monson designated as sole beneficiary. One early morning shortly thereafter, Monson and a companion took Cecil hunting in a nearby woods. A few hours later, Monson returned to announce calmly Cecil Hambrough was dead. Monson claimed that after they had separated, he had heard a shot and gone in its direction. “I then saw Hambrough at the bottom of the sunk fence on his left side, with his gun beside him. We lifted him up, and he was quite dead.”

  Everyone agreed death was accidental. Cecil had doubtless stumbled and shot himself. After a brief time, Monson applied for the $100,000 insurance indemnity. The company replied that Cecil was a minor, and hence the policy was invalid. Monson admitted he knew that, but had hoped to bluff payment out of them anyway. Consequently, the company became suspicious, and a month later, Sir Henry Littlejohn and Dr. Bell exhumed the body and re-examined the remains.

  The two doctors found the skull had suffered a triangular wound, that it was shattered only locally, that there was no blackening or scorching of the skin from gunpowder. Re-enacting the crime, Dr. Bell showed that to produce such a wound the shot had to be fired nine feet from the body by a second party. Had Cecil killed himself, by either intent or accident, the gun would have been but two or three feet from his skull, would have blown his head apart, and blackened and scorched what was left of it.

  Monson was indicted for murder. The Cr
own, using one hundred and ten witnesses, tried to show that Monson had earlier attempted to drown Cecil by boring a hole in a rowboat and, at a strategic moment, removing the plug. Failing in this attempt, he had shot Cecil from behind. In support of this contention, Dr. Bell, who was receiving much fanfare as the living Sherlock Holmes, went to the witness stand and testified, “Mr. Hambrough died in consequence of a gunshot wound, and I have not been able to make out any way by which the injury could have been done either designedly or accidentally by Mr. Hambrough himself.”

  However, the presiding judge. Lord Kingsburgh, was sitting at his first trial. In his reminiscences later, he admitted lying awake nights in “dull perspiration, turning things over and over.” In his final charge, preferring a safe and sure verdict, he reminded the jury not to be swayed from objective justice by Monson’s bad character. In a little over an hour, the jury announced, “Not Proven on both charges”—a quaint Scottish verdict meaning acquitted.

  To his last days. Dr. Bell remained convinced that Monson was guilty. “He got off because it was Kingsburgh’s first case,” Dr. Bell told his wife. “Kingsburgh was afraid to start off with a death sentence.” It pleased Dr. Bell to learn that Monson eventually wound up in prison for again attempting to defraud an insurance company.

  Dr. Bell went after an impossible crime, as others attack difficult crossword puzzles. In 1888, when the fiendish, insane Jack the Ripper was prowling London’s side streets. Dr. Bell cooperated with the police. Receiving a report detailing all the clues. Dr. Bell did most of his work on the case without leaving Edinburgh.

  No one knew whether Jack the Ripper was male or female, but all agreed he was the greatest monster of modern times. His surgical slaughters, since celebrated in plays, movies, and novels, began in August of 1888, when a prostitute was found in a Whitechapel gutter with her throat slit and her body cold-bloodedly mutilated. The next month three more prostitutes were dissected. Miss Chapman, her head almost severed from her body, was found in the backyard of a tenement, her internal organs extracted and neatly laid at her feet. Miss Stride was killed on the lawn of a house in which a party was taking place (a man riding a pony cart interrupted the dissection, the pony shied, and the Ripper ran). Miss Eddowes was cut down in an alley, and when the killer finished he wiped his hands on her dress. The fifth was the worst. Mary Kelly, aged twenty-four, a beautiful prostitute, was found naked on her bed, her ears, nose, vital organs removed and arranged neatly around her corpse, with her bloody heart placed on the pillow. “The operator must have been at least two hours over his hellish job,” stated Scotland Yard. “The madman made a bonfire of some old newspapers, and by this dim irreligious light, a scene was enacted which nothing witnessed by Dante, in his visit to the infernal regions, could have surpassed.”

  These were the five certain murders. There may have been three others. London was terrified, and everyone possessing a long-handled knife or a knowledge of anatomy was suspected. There was a Polish barber, seen running from a Ripper murder (the killings ceased when he moved to Jersey City). There was an insane Russian physician. There was an American sailor. There was an English doctor, who was found floating in the Thames after the last crime.

  Bringing a friend of his into the investigation, Dr. Bell sifted the evidence. “There were two of us in the hunt,” he said later, “and when two men set out to find a golf ball in the rough, they expect to come across it where the straight lines marked in their mind’s eye to it, from their original positions, crossed. In the same way, when two men set out to investigate a crime mystery, it is where their researches intersect that we have a result.” Dr. Bell and his friend made independent investigations. From the suspects brought in, Dr. Bell deduced the murderer, wrote his name on a strip of paper, placed it in a sealed envelope. His friend did likewise. They exchanged envelopes. In both, the same name occurred. At once, Dr. Bell communicated with Scotland Yard. A week later, the murders ended. If this was merely coincidental, or if Dr. Bell was in any way responsible, no one will ever know. But the murders did end—and Jack the Ripper was never arrested.

  Despite all his publicity as the original of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Bell abhorred the spotlight. He was a reticent man, and interviewers actually learned little about his background or his private life.

  Joseph Bell, product of five generations of surgeons, was the eldest son of a devout and renowned physician. At the age of twenty-two, Bell took his medical degree at Edinburgh University, and two years later, became house surgeon in the Royal Infirmary. His courage was amazing. On one occasion, at a time when diphtheria was a little-understood disease, an ailing child suffering from diphtheria was wheeled into surgery. After the operation, poison accumulated and, since there were no mechanical means for suction, the child was given little chance to live. Without a moment’s hesitation, Dr. Bell put his lips to the child’s, sucked the poison from its throat, and saved its life. As a result, Dr. Bell himself caught diphtheria, which permanently impaired his voice. When the elderly Queen Victoria, visiting Edinburgh, heard the story, she personally congratulated Dr. Bell. “The dear old lady was so friendly,” he reported afterward, “and I was not one bit flustered.”

  Dr. Bell devoted much of his medical career to crusading for nurses, and through this crusade he gained Florence Nightingale and Robert Louis Stevenson as two of his closest friends. At a time when nurses were little better than Street women, with no interest whatsoever in their patients, Dr. Bell fought to bring dignity to the profession. Later, when nursing had become fashionable. Dr. Bell fought equally hard to keep out pretty girls who were primarily interested in wearing uniforms. Dr. Bell’s only published book, brought out in 1906, was Notes on Surgery for Nurses. Dr. Bell’s wedded life was idyllic but short-lived. He married at the age of twenty-eight, and his wife, Edith, died nine years later. On her tombstone, he had carved, “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.” He immersed himself in work, filled his home with friends, and grew into old age a crusty widower. He lost the Sherlock Holmes look, and a student remembers him toward the end as “a brisk Scotsman, rather under middle height, of compact but not stout build, and of energetic manner. He had a weathered, rather red, full face and iron-gray hair and eyebrows, with little tufts of iron-gray whiskers on each cheek.” He walked with a limp, due to an old hunting fall, and his eye was so keen he could identify any bird on the wing. He liked to drive fast, never drank, and felt cigarettes made his feet grow cold.

  In company, Dr. Bell expressed very definite opinions on all matters. “Hysterical people are generally liars,” he would say. Or, “I have no patience with bigots. There is always some hypocrisy in conjunction with bigotry.” Or, after visiting the remains of Wellington and Nelson, “I should not have liked to know them. One should not see a hero too near.” He was Empire-minded, defending the Boer War to a friend: “You surely don’t want us to be kicked out of South Africa. Once a nation begins to give in, it is a dying nation, and soon will be a dead one.” He liked parables and Sir Walter Scott and pitied “poor Dreyfus.” Like all amateur detectives, he regarded policemen as flatfoots. “You cannot expect the ordinary policeman to stand eight hours on his legs and then develop a great mental strength.”

  Above all, he had a sense of humor. When visitors begged him to recount tales of his deductive prowess, he enjoyed relating the story of his visit to a bedridden patient. “Aren’t you a bandsman?” Dr. Bell asked, standing over the patient Aye,” admitted the sick man. Dr. Bell turned cockily to his students. “You see, gentlemen, I am right. It is quite simple. This man had a paralysis of the cheek muscles, the result of too much blowing at wind instruments. We need only inquire to confirm. What instrument do you play, my man?” The man got up on his elbows. “The big drum. Doctor!”

  Dr. Bell died in October, 1911, at the age of seventy-four. His funeral was impressive, attended by the Seaforth Highlanders, by a deputation of nurses, by endless influential medical men, and by swarms of poor people he had treated. He was de
ad, but he did not rest long.

  A. Conan Doyle, before dying in 1930, became intensely interested in spiritualism. Doyle, who had once killed Sherlock Holmes and brought him back to life, now attempted to resurrect the prototype. One night at a seance, he announced that the late Dr. Bell had materialized and spoken to him. As proof, Doyle produced a spirit photograph of Dr. Bell attired in flowing hair and a long gown. When Dr. Bell’s daughter, Mrs. Stisted, saw the photograph, she was furious.

  “It looked nothing at all like Father,” she says today. “And anyway, if he were going to return and appear before anybody, I am most sure he would appear before me!”

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  The genesis of this story occurred during casual readings of long ago, in which I would occasionally find a hint that a real person, with astounding deductive skills, had inspired the creation of the fictional Sherlock Holmes. Later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s autobiography, My Memories and Adventures, confirmed that there had been such a living prototype of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s book also informed me that the man’s name was Dr. Joseph Bell, and he had been an instructor in medicine at the University of Edinburgh.