Arthur and Sherlock Read online

  Arthur and Sherlock

  To

  George Gibson

  with admiration and affection

  By the same author

  NONFICTION

  The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond

  The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

  In the Womb: Animals (Companion to a National Geographic Channel television series)

  Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination

  Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form

  Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Phantom Coach: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Ghost Stories

  The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

  Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

  The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes

  The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes

  Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief by Maurice Leblanc

  The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis

  Contents

  Overture: Remembering

  Part 1: Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle

  1. A Super-Man

  2. Your Powers of Deduction

  3. Art in the Blood

  4. Seven Weary Steps

  5. Athens of the North

  6. No Man of Flesh and Blood

  7. Ode to Opium

  8. Drinking Poison

  9. Intemperance

  10. Dr. Conan Doyle, Surgeon

  11. A Wealth of Youth and Pluck

  12. The Circular Tour

  13. The Unseen World

  Part 2: Prophets and Police

  14. The Method of Zadig

  15. The Footmarks of Poe

  16. How Do You Know That?

  17. Games of Chess, Played with Live Pieces

  Part 3: Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson

  18. Dr. Sacker and Mr. Hope

  19. Bohemians in Baker Street

  20. A Little Too Scientific

  21. The Book of Life

  22. A Basilisk in the Desert

  23. A Born Novelist

  24. The Preternatural Sagacity of a Scientific Detective

  25. Truth as Death

  26. Watson’s Brother’s Watch

  27. Dread of Madhouses

  28. Adventures in the Strand

  29. Deerstalker

  30. To My Old Teacher

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography and Further Reading

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Plate Section

  “What clue could you have as to his identity?”

  “Only as much as we can deduce.”

  “From his hat?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered felt?”

  “Here is my lens. You know my methods.”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR. WATSON

  IN “THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE”

  OVERTURE

  Remembering

  A shiny brass plate suspended from a wrought-iron railing along the street proclaimed

  DR. CONAN DOYLE

  SURGEON

  Patients wishing to consult Arthur strode along Elm Grove until they were three doors from its west end, where it met King’s Road. The sign stood before number 1, Bush Villas, the first of two narrow three-story houses squeezed between and sharing walls with other establishments. On the left, as seen from the street, rose the brick bell tower and elegant arching windows of the newly renovated Elm Grove Baptist Church. On the right stood the handsome curving façade of Bush Hotel, which advertised as both “Commercial and Family” and which boasted the largest billiard saloon in Southsea. Always preoccupied with sports and physical activity, broad-shouldered Arthur enjoyed playing billiards in the hotel and playing bowls on the broad green behind it.

  The flat’s large, square front windows faced almost due north and thus received strong light without glare. Patients entered through the arched entryway on the left, adjacent to the church, where the front door opened into a hall that led to a small waiting room and a consulting room on the ground floor. Stairs led up to the surgery and a private sitting room, and another flight climbed to a pair of bedrooms on the top floor, which patients never saw.

  In early 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle was a few months shy of twenty-seven. For less than four years, he had operated—not always with success—a medical office in Southsea, a bustling residential section of Portsmouth, England. Lacking the funds to buy into an established practice, he had resolved to build his own from scratch, and after a little research he decided upon Portsmouth as a promising setting. In local sporting circles and scientific societies, he was known for his sociability and his hearty, infectious laugh.

  Four years after settling here, he was no longer so poor that he had to buy creaky chairs and a faded rug on credit to furnish the sitting room. He did not sleep in his ulster, as he had for the first couple of weeks at Bush Villas when he owned no bed linens. He did not have to cook bacon on a little platform rigged on a wall over the gas jet. He no longer borrowed money from his mother back home in Edinburgh. Gradually his income had climbed, but his fear of creditors had faded only when he married the petite and soft-spoken Louise Hawkins—nicknamed “Touie”—with whom he fell in love after caring for her younger brother during his last days. Patients still trickled in, but Arthur no longer peered anxiously down through the wooden blinds to count passersby who stopped to read his brass nameplate.

  They were not rich, Touie and Arthur, but they were comfortable. The most important luxury that Arthur could now afford was more opportunity to write. Since moving to Southsea, he had spent as much time as possible at his desk, upstairs in the space to which patients were never admitted. He filled page after page with his neat, small script. Gazing thoughtfully out the window beyond his desk, he became so intimate with the view from his study window that later he wrote it into one of his novels—the sound of rain striking a dull note on fallen leaves and a clearer note on the gravel path, the pools that formed in the street and along the walkway, even a fringe of clear raindrops clinging to the underside of the bar atop the gleaming gate. With the windows open in warm weather, he could smell the damp earth.

  Here Arthur wrote stories of mystery, adventure, and the supernatural, and rolled them up and inserted them into mailing tubes for the postman. Having once thought of these unsolicited writing efforts as returning quickly and reliably like carrier pigeons from the magazines and newspapers to which he sent them, he gradually met greater success. He also wrote articles about his hobby, photography, ranging from colorful accounts of steaming along the coast of Africa to technical advice on how to prepare lenses.

  In the style of the time, however, most of his stories were printed anonymously, resulting in a growing reputation with editors while he remained unknown to the public. Finally he decided that he must write a novel. Only his name on the spine of a long work of fiction, he told himself, could begin to build readers’ awareness of him. He had written one awkward little novel whose only copy had been lost in the mail, but he was determined to try again.

  He was drawn to detective stories out of his own interest. He had long admired the logical mind of Edgar Allan Poe’s unofficial detective C. Auguste Dupin. He had enjoyed the adventures of Émile Gaboriau’s eagle-eyed police detective Mon
sieur Lecoq. The bold man-hunters of penny dreadfuls, Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket from Bleak House, Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff from The Moonstone, Anna Katharine Green’s more recent New York policeman Ebenezer Gryce from The Leavenworth Case—many such detectives already cavorted in Arthur’s imagination when he decided to create his own.

  He had no experience with real-life detective work. As he turned over plot ideas in his mind, however, he recalled his years as a student at medical school in Edinburgh—his birthplace, to which he returned in 1876 at the age of seventeen, after boarding schools in England and Austria. And especially he thought about his favorite professor, a short, hawk-nosed wizard named Joseph Bell. A surgeon and a brilliant diagnostician, he had impressed his young student in many ways. Arthur had always admired Bell’s oracular ability not only to diagnose illness but also to perceive details about patients’ personal lives. Arthur thought of the professor’s quirky habits—his intense gaze darting at fingertips and cuffs to read a patient’s history of work and play, his attention to subtleties of accent, to mud splashes on boots. He recalled Bell’s commanding way of speaking with such confidence that he won over every person who argued with him.

  As a detective, Arthur thought, Joseph Bell would have approached crime-solving with systematic, modern knowledge. He would need practical experience in chemistry and forensic medicine, as well as encyclopedic knowledge of the history of crime. He must attend to the large implications of small details. Such a character would be a new development in crime fiction—a scientific detective.

  In the late winter and early spring of 1886, at his window above Elm Grove, in his small office away from the scurry of marriage and medicine, among books and piles of papers, Arthur wrote page after page, sending his memory back almost a decade into the past.

  Part 1

  Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle

  The student must be taught first to observe carefully. To interest him in this kind of work we teachers find it useful to show the student how much a trained use of the observation can discover in ordinary matters such as the previous history, nationality, and occupation of a patient.. . . Physiognomy helps you to nationality, accent to district, and, to an educated ear, almost to county. Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual upon the hands. The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason.

  —JOSEPH BELL, M.D.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Super-Man

  So now behold me, a tall strongly-framed but half-formed young man, fairly entered upon my five years’ course of medical study.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES

  Arthur Doyle led the patient into a crowded gaslit amphitheater, through a cluster of medical students surrounding Dr. Joseph Bell’s chair, and left him standing before the professor. The man’s attitude was respectful but not servile. He did not remove his hat. In a Scottish accent, he explained that he had come to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary seeking treatment for the early stages of elephantiasis.

  As usual with patients, at first Dr. Bell showed no expression, in his reserved way that seemed to young Arthur how a Red Indian in North America might behave. From childhood Arthur had enjoyed tales of the American frontier, and such imagery leapt easily to mind. Bell pressed his fingertips together as he leaned back in his chair, looked the patient over, and remarked for the benefit of his students, “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Not long discharged?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A Highland regiment?” Although he spoke with the crisp accent called “educated Edinburgh,” Bell’s high-pitched voice did not match the tanned, muscular body that made him look younger than his forty years.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “A non-com officer?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Then came what seemed a far-fetched guess: “Stationed at Barbados?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  After the patient departed, Bell explained his inferences—that the man did not remove his hat because he had been in the military, that he had not been long out of service or he would have regained civilian habits, that his air of authority indicated he had been a noncommissioned officer rather than a common soldier. And obviously he was a Scot. “As to Barbados,” he added, “his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.” The patient might have contracted the disease in other parts of the British Empire—India or Afghanistan as well as the West Indies—but apparently Bell’s deduction was correct.

  Bell had received no prior information about the man other than Arthur’s note of his illness. Although he was an excellent surgeon and clinical teacher, as well as personal physician to Queen Victoria whenever she visited Scotland, Bell was most renowned for his diagnostic skills. He tended to begin an interview by deducing personal details about the patient’s illness, profession, and life by flicking his gray-eyed gaze—half-critical and half-sardonic, Arthur thought—from hat to elbows to boots. He maintained that an observant man ought to learn a great deal before the patient spoke. Regarding female patients, he went so far as to claim that doctors ought to foresee which part of her body a woman was about to discuss by her posture and how she held her hands.

  When he explained his reasoning, Bell was lecturing, not inviting discussion. Few professors and students mingled at Edinburgh University in the late 1870s; sometimes no words were exchanged with individual students. Many sat or stood before the students and delivered lectures, the salient points of which were to be recorded in notes scribbled by the array of silent young men in their dark coats and ties—some mustached or bearded, but many youthfully clean-shaven like Arthur. Arthur would pay his four guineas for anatomy lectures, for example, and would be expected thereafter to diligently attend class. However, Bell was more personable, more interested in his students, than most professors. He was known as an unusually kind figure, especially to women and children, as well as to students as long as they were prepared for class.

  After teaching systematic and operative surgery for years, Bell was appointed senior surgeon to the infirmary in 1878. He was among the “extra-academical instructors,” professors not directly employed by Edinburgh University whose classes were recognized as available for credit toward a degree. Bell’s own mentor, the legendary James Syme, had led a campaign to recognize extramural instruction, which had finally been authorized in 1855, while Bell was a student. Under this program, which had long been flourishing by the time Arthur enrolled in 1876, students could study with surgeons and others at the internationally renowned infirmary, as well as with other small groups of medical professionals headquartered around Surgeons Square—Park Place School, Surgeons’ Hall, Minto House School, and others. They could attend classes or other instruction at the Royal Public Dispensary, the Edinburgh Eye Infirmary, the Royal Maternity Hospital, the Sick Children’s Hospital, and elsewhere in the city. They could also study for credit in Leipzig or Paris or other recognized medical universities.

  Tired-looking young men in black coats or tweed, laden with books and notebooks, poured from the gates to the hospital, tapping their walking sticks against the stones and at times stepping aside to avoid a carriage clattering down the cobblestones. Among the many wards in the grand three-winged, U-shaped Royal Infirmary building, two housed patients whose ailments were considered instructive to the students who thronged the wide central staircase, often dodging pairs of nurses carrying a patient between them in a sedan chair. I WAS NAKED AND YE CLOTHED ME, read one of the signs between Ionic columns out front, and the other I WAS SICK AND YE VISITED ME. The charity infirmary was the culmination of a century and a half of donation and subscription—and where money was short, glassmakers had glazed windows without charge and joiners had donated sashes. Completed in 1741, the infirmary was proving inadequate to succor the hordes of suffering poor, and additional buildings were rising.

  For the first time in his li
fe, Arthur felt engaged by a course and a teacher. Eager to help his mother through financial straits—at least to keep her from having to contribute to his college costs—he was trying to cram each year’s classes into a half year so that he might spend the rest of the year assisting a doctor, getting his expenses covered and gaining experience. Eager to excel and curious about almost everything, he scrawled countless notes. At times it seemed to Dr. Bell that Arthur wanted to transcribe every word he said. Often, after a patient left, the student asked the professor to repeat details so that he might get them correct.

  Joe Bell—as students and friends affectionately called him—was Arthur’s favorite professor. Rather short, with angular shoulders, an aquiline nose, and a weathered, ruddy face, he was an easily recognized sight around campus and town. Even at a distance, he was known by his twitchy, uneven walk—a brisk stride conquering a limp.

  Working as clerk for the famed surgeon and teacher presented quite an opportunity for an ambitious student. Tall, broad-shouldered Arthur was quick-witted, forthright, and diligent; in his late teens, he was beginning to outgrow the rebellious temper of his early years. His eyes, with their unusual two tones of blue in the iris, were as busy as his professor’s.

  Arthur had admired Bell’s theatrical diagnostic routine since before beginning work in the outpatient ward. Every six months, each surgeon appointed several dressers (assistants) to help him handle the traffic. Bell chose Arthur, along with a few other trusted dressers, from among many young men. Arthur did not think of himself as an outstanding student; he had earned grades of Satisfactory in all classes except for an S-minus in clinical surgery. But Bell came to consider him one of the most promising men who had studied under him—a youngster fascinated by all aspects of diagnosis and attentive to the large implications of small details. Surgical outpatients might walk in with any sort of complaint: wounds or chronic pain, ailments ranging from respiratory to gynecological. Bell demanded that students be prepared for whatever misfortune might appear. The new infirmary was completed in 1879, and during the next year fifteen thousand patients passed through its outpatient clinic.