Sheer curiosity prompted me to begin investigating the life of this mysterious Dr. Bell. I was eager to learn all that I could about a human being possessing such remarkable gifts. The research was not easy. It required tracing many sources, across many years, to construct a full man on the skeletal frame of a name. Some progress was made when I discovered in a London rare-book shop a privately printed memoir entitled Joseph Bell, an Appreciation by Jessie Saxby. A major step was made after I learned that one of Dr. Bell’s heirs, a daughter, Mrs. Cecil Stisted, was alive in Egerton, Kent, since Mrs. Stisted kindly shared with me personal reminiscences of her father, and loaned me his letters and scrapbooks. Other valuable information was obtained when I located some writings by Dr. Bell, and then tracked down and interviewed former students of his in such widely separated cities as Edinburgh, Calgary, Chicago.
As my research notes mounted, I think that I hoped to write a slender biographical book about Dr. Bell. But, in the end, I saw that while there was not enough background material to justify a book, there was quite enough for a thorough magazine article. So I wrote the article, instead. In abridged form, “The Incredible Dr. Bell” appeared as the lead story in The Saturday Review of Literature for May 1, 1948, and then was republished in the Reader’s Digest for June, 1948.
Pleased by the favorable international response to the story, I wondered if I should attempt another book project I had long had in mind. For years, I had wanted to write a biographical collection with the subheading, “Lives of extraordinary people who inspired memorable characters in fiction,” in which I would reveal who had actually been Robinson Crusoe, Emma Bovary, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in real life. I decided to go ahead with the project. I did even more research on Dr. Bell, then expanded and developed my article further, and on this cornerstone of one chapter I built my first published book, The Fabulous Originals, which appeared in the United States in 1955. In the years after, my story of Dr. Bell continued to be widely circulated, since the article was included in an anthology, The Saturday Review Gallery, and my own book containing the Dr. Bell chapter was eventually published in England, Australia, Germany, and Spain.
Many persons who had known Dr. Bell, some of whom had assisted me in researching my story, wrote to me. One of these was Dr. Douglas Guthrie, lecturer on the history of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote me on October 10, 1955, after reading my chapter:
I at once turned the pages to read of “The Real Sherlock Holmes,” and was so fascinated that I could not stop until I had finished that chapter. Although I am not quite such a Doyle “fan” as the folk who foster what they call The Sacred Canon in their societies, I am an unrepentant admirer of Sherlock Holmes and find him much better than any character in more modern thrillers. Perhaps the reason is, that I remember seeing Joseph Bell when I was a student, and I remember the eagerness with which the early Adventures in the Strand Magazine were read, and the rush to buy each new number.
You will be sorry to learn, if you have not heard already, of the death of Mrs. Cecil Stisted, of Egerton, Kent, about a year ago: the last remaining member of the family of Dr. Joseph Bell. Her son, Mr. Joseph Bell [Stisted], is still in the house, so far as I know.
Among those who also responded to my article, and then to my book chapter on Dr. Bell, although less appreciatively—in fact, most angrily—was Adrian Conan Doyle, son of the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
I do not know Adrian Conan Doyle, except as one who has dedicated a good deal of his life to perpetuating his father’s image as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The only biographical information I have on Adrian Conan Doyle is that which appears on the jacket of a book, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. In this volume, there are a dozen newly written Holmes stories, half contributed by Adrian Conan Doyle himself, and half done in collaboration with the estimable John Dickson Carr, but all based on tantalizing references to other Sherlock Holmes cases, made by Watson in Sir Arthur’s own stories. From the book jacket, we learn that “Adrian Conan Doyle is the youngest son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his father’s literary executor,” that he had previously published a personal adventure story about deep-sea fishing off Africa, that he was raised in the Victorian tradition, and that “the son—like the father—has a lust for adventure, cherishes relics of the past and, above all, has the same sense of chivalry that so completely characterized Sherlock Holmes. Adrian Conan Doyle uses the very desk on which his father wrote.”
I find this as impressive as I have always found Adrian Conan Doyle formidable. And it gives one a better understanding of what I shall now relate—what happened to me when Adrian Conan Doyle learned that I credited Dr. Joseph Bell with being the inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes.
Actually, I was neither the first nor the only one of Dr. Bell’s champions to incur Adrian Conan Doyle’s wrath. Four years before my story was published, Mrs. Stisted had chanced to display to the press some letters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to her father, which proved that Dr. Bell had been the real-life prototype of Sherlock Holmes. At once, Adrian Doyle entered his public defense of his father as being the prototype in the pages of the Edinburgh Evening News:
“It is neither my wish nor my intention to belittle the remarkable characteristics of Dr. Bell, nor to question the attributes of the doctor’s influence upon my father. But it is my intention to rectify a most fallacious impression that Sherlock Holmes was, in fact, merely a literary reflect of Dr. Joseph Bell. My father’s letters quoted by Mrs. Stisted open no fresh ground whatever, for as my father’s old friends will agree, one of his most marked and lovable characteristics was the genuine pleasure that he derived in placing the major part of the credit for any of his successful adventures upon the shoulders of others rather than upon his own.”
This sounded the waning note, although with gentlemanly and chivalrous restraint, out of respect (no doubt) to the sex and age of the enemy. It was almost the last time that Adrian Doyle would show such public restraint in dealing with the hosts of the Dr. Bell camp.
In 1943, the popular English biographer, Hesketh Pearson, published an unauthorized life entitled Conan Doyle. In it, he wrote:
“There were living models for both Holmes and Watson. Doyle always declared that Dr. Joseph Bell, surgeon at the Edinburgh infirmary, was the model for Sherlock Holmes, but Bell once confessed that Doyle owed ‘much less than he thinks to me.’ What happened, obviously, was that Bell stimulated Doyle’s fancy, which, once released, far surpassed the original.”
Hesketh Pearson then went on to describe, at length.
Dr. Bell’s deductive gifts, and several times referred to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s debt to his old instructor. (I might add, here, that when Hesketh Pearson later read my story of Dr. Bell, he wrote me, “Though this isn’t of the least importance…you call my Life of Doyle unauthorised. Actually the Doyle family, in the person of Adrian, gave me access to private material, which I acknowledged in the Note at the beginning; but of course the book was written quite independently and they disliked my honest treatment of their father, especially, I fancy, the way I deal with his spiritualism.”
Whether it was the manner in which Pearson dealt with Sir Arthur’s spiritualism, or simply his remark that Dr. Bell had “stimulated” the invention of Sherlock Holmes, or both reasons, the Pearson biography had a particularly inflammatory effect upon Adrian Doyle. In 1945, lance directed at Pearson, the youngest Doyle published a slender book. The True Conan Doyle, aimed, as the American jacket blurb stated, “against the self-styled biographers who wrote glibly and voluminously about Arthur Conan Doyle without ever having known him personally and without having access to the family documents.” The jacket blurb then went on to state that Adrian Doyle’s rebuttal had “created a furor among Conan Doyle enthusiasts.” In his monograph, Adrian Doyle began:
“During the past year, I have been distressed by the number of letters that have reached me from both acquaintances and strangers in protest against an alleged ‘bi
ography’ of my father by a Mr. Hesketh Pearson. As the majority of my correspondents were, naturally, under the impression that the manuscript was submitted to me before publication, I must assure them that that was not the case. In its portrayal of my father and his opinions, the book is a travesty.”
Thirteen pages later, Adrian Doyle arrived at the peak of his counterattack:
“Mr. Hayden Coffin, the American journalist, has offered us interesting confirmation in his recent statement to the press that my father told him in a private interview in 1918 that—‘If anyone is Holmes, then I must confess that it is I.’ For half a century, a variety of writers and critics have, with insufficient knowledge, confused the public mind by placing all the credit, and not a minor part of that credit, for Sherlock Holmes at the feet of Dr, Joseph Bell, which is analogous to the ridiculous position that could arise if the plaudits due to a brilliant virtuoso were reserved only for the teacher who gave him the original music lessons. Conan Doyle was too great in himself to be annoyed by this misconception. Indeed, I know that he derived no small degree of amusement from it. And yet he threw out a clue when he wrote—‘a man cannot spin a character out of his inner consciousness and make it really lifelike unless he has the possibilities of that character within himself.’
“Dr. Bell’s remarkable characteristics brought to their full growth the deductive propensities latent in Conan Doyle. They did that, and they did no more. If the good doctor had been endowed with the power to create extraordinary gifts that were not already innate, then the Edinburgh University course of 1876-81 would have produced, among the many hundreds of students that passed under his aegis, a spate of incarnated Sherlock Holmes!”
This was the situation then—the lull before the real storm—when I published the most contemporary popular biography of Dr. Joseph Bell three years later. Adrian Doyle read my article in The Saturday Review of Literature, for he promptly wrote that publication:
“I have in my possession the inside facts of the correspondence and friendly association that linked my father and his old professor. Dr. Bell. I wish to place it on record that there is not a word of truth in Mr. Irving Wallace’s statement that Dr. Bell made an assertion that he was Sherlock Holmes. On the contrary, he denied it most flatly, while on the other hand, in 1918, my father put on record the fact that Sherlock Holmes was none other than himself.”
More amused than irritated, I saw no point in heightening the conflict. I do not mean to sound lofty, not when facing so indomitable a combatant as Adrian Conan Doyle, Keeper of the Name, but I felt that my story of Dr. Bell, much of it based on documented facts from the Bell family, would withstand any doubts engendered in readers by the Youngest Son.
When the public reception accorded my Dr. Bell article encouraged me to expand upon it and include it as the initial biography in my first book, The Fabulous Originals, I foresaw no further difficulties with Adrian Doyle. I thought that, having had his say, he considered the matter closed. I was never more mistaken.
The English edition of The Fabulous Originals appeared throughout Great Britain in 1956, under the notable imprint of Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd. The English edition was widely and favorably received, and one major review, written by the renowned and respected Cyril Connolly, appeared under the heading “Borrowed From Life” in the Sunday Times of London. In his essay, Mr. Connolly considered the Dr. Bell chapter one of “the three most interesting studies in this book.” He spoke of Conan Doyle’s “obsession” with Dr. Bell. He went on:
“Conan Doyle envied the effortless, eccentric superman who was also an aesthete, while he waited in vain for patients in Portsmouth….Dr. Bell practiced deduction and astounded his students. Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes from him, and when the fact was known Dr. Bell began to be consulted by Scotland Yard, grew more like Holmes and claimed to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper.”
In Geneva, Switzerland, Adrian Doyle read the Cyril Connolly review, and, clearly enraged, took down his rusty lance and charged off to defend the family honor. His immediate action was to fire off a stem communication for publication in Cyril Connolly’s newspaper, the Sunday Times. In the Sunday Times, the son argued the case for his father as the real Sherlock Holmes and trusted this would put down “Mr. Wallace’s ingenuous efforts to re-create a fairy tale.”
Still brooding, perhaps about the injustice done to his father’s creativity, determined once and for all to rout and humiliate the Dr. Bell adherents, either Adrian Doyle or his relatives got in touch with their solicitors in Woburn Square, London. In January, 1957, Mark Longman, of Longmans, Green & Co., received a legal warning from the solicitors of “the family of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” The solicitors—fearsomely named Vertue and Churcher, Amalgamated with Gush, Phillips, Walters and Williams—wrote that their clients were concerned about “certain totally false and damaging statements” in my story on Dr. Bell. What disturbed their clients most, the solicitors declared, was that I had claimed as a fact that A. Conan Doyle wrote Dr. Bell asking him for Sherlock Holmes plots and thanking him for those received. Unless I could provide tangible proof of A. Conan Doyle’s doing this, I was being advised to publish an immediate retraction of my statement and offer my full apologies to the Doyle family. If I failed to provide either evidence or an apology, then the Doyle family was ready to take “action” to protect the value of their copyright and Sir Arthur’s memory from fabricated writings calculated to damage it.
Learning of my position, the celebrated copyright attorney, Philip Wittenberg, checked the facts in the case and then volunteered to defend me against any legal action. He felt confident that the Doyle family did not have a sound case. While Wittenberg stood by, I wrote Longmans, Green & Co. in London:
I am enclosing all the evidence that I believe is necessary at this time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his autobiography, admitted that he had received “suggestions” for stories from Dr. Bell. And, in personal letters written to Bell, he confessed to using these suggestions for Sherlock Holmes stories. Also, in these letters, he requested that Bell send him more ideas for Sherlock Holmes plots. I am sending you copies of this correspondence.
Following the submission of this first preliminary evidence, the Doyle solicitors, Vertue and Churcher, Amalgamated with Gush, Phillips, Walters and Williams, were not heard from again. I felt I had silenced the Doyle family for all time. As before, I was mistaken, for I underestimated the wrath and energy of the Youngest Son.
In his Swiss retreat at 3 Quai Turrettini, Geneva, Adrian Conan Doyle was apparently contemplating his bent lance and sifting through a mass of clippings reviewing my book and its chapter on Dr. Bell. At last, Adrian Doyle took to his pen. If he could not have my neck in a court of law, he would have it in the court of public appeal. His letters went out to such diverse newspapers as the Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington; the Bristol Evening World, Bristol; and The Bulletin and Scots Pictorial, Glasgow.
While both J. L. H. Stisted, on behalf of Dr. Bell’s family, and I had replied to Adrian Doyle in the Sunday Times of London, and felt our presentation of the facts sufficient, we were now shaken by the force and detail of Adrian Doyle’s fresh and most determined assault. My time was valuable to me, and I saw no use in dredging up all the. old facts once more. I felt any new defense I made would engage me, possibly unto eternity, with a seemingly tireless opponent.
But then I began to read what Adrian Doyle was writing to the British press in February and March of 1957, and I knew that I must rally my strength for one last battle. There was, after all, much at stake. Possibly more for me than for Adrian Doyle. For while the son was defending the integrity of a relative, I was defending my own integrity as an author.
I studied the letter that Adrian Doyle was sending to the press. The full version of Adrian Doyle’s letter, as it appeared in the Northern Echo, February 5, 1957, read as follows:
Sir,
Owing to my absence abroad, it is only recently that my attention has been drawn t
o a book allegedly on the subject of Sherlock Holmes by a Mr. Irving Wallace.
I have never denied that Dr. Bell played a distinguished part in setting the model for Holmes’s methods in my father’s mind and in developing the latter’s own powers for observation and deduction. But that was all. As this American author quotes an 1892 letter in which my father, with typical modesty, attempted to endow his old professor with the identity of Holmes, it is worth while to consider Bell’s reply—“No, no, my dear Conan Doyle, you are yourself Sherlock Holmes, and well you know it.”
The correctness of Bell’s assertion was proved by later events, such as the Slater case, the Edalji case, the Missing Dane, etc. Mr. Wallace attempts to make play with the fact that Stevenson, when expressing his admiration for my father’s writings, identified Bell from the Holmes-trick of deduction. Of course, he did, for this was the very characteristic that first planted in my father’s imagination the idea of developing his own type of detective. But what else did Stevenson write in 1894? “In the forefront of every battle for justice will be seen the white plume of Conan Doyle.” It was a prophecy that came true.
It was Conan Doyle, not Bell, who created Sherlock Holmes, arid it was Conan Doyle, to a far greater degree than Bell, who put into practice Holmes’s methods for the solution of crime in real life. This fact was recognised almost from the first by such famous criminologists as Dr. Edmond Locard, H. Ashton-Wolfe, Dr. Katju, William J. Burns, and others, some of whom came to England for the express purpose of consulting him on difficult cases.
Though Mr. Wallace is ignorant of the real identity of Holmes, the police officials knew, certain criminals knew and so did those who wrote such letters to him as (I quote from the archives): “Sir Conan Doyle, you breaker of my shackles, you lover of truth for justice’s sake”; or “I have had an extraordinary escape and I dread to think what might have happened. I don’t know how to thank you sufficiently…for all you have done for me”; or “There are those who say you have not long to live. I won’t answer for your safety a day.”
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