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  Monkeying Around

  ‘The Creeping Man’, published in 1923, has the ability to split Holmes fans. To some it is the kind of exuberant narrative that marks out Conan Doyle’s genius. To others, the story of a man who undergoes something of a personality change in pursuit of reversing the effects of aging is considered a pot-boiler bit of sci-fi nonsense. Yet it has perhaps a little more scientific veracity than it is sometimes credited with. Or at the very least, it had a legitimate basis in real-life scientific endeavour, even if that endeavour was subsequently discredited and ridiculed. From the late nineteenth century, there had been a school of thought that the effects of aging might be stalled by injecting material from the testicles of various animals, among them dogs. A French scientist of Russian extraction, Serge Voronoff, took things on a stage further when he began grafting testicular tissue from monkeys on to humans. Claiming remarkable results in boosting wellbeing and restoring vigour, by the 1920s he was able to charge private clients large amounts of money for his work. Small volumes of baboon and chimp tissue were surgically inserted into the patient’s scrotum in a bid to stave off senility and prompt physical and mental rejuvenation.

  NO MORE BABOONS

  With sad predictability, it became apparent over time that Vornoff’s work brought none of the benefits that he claimed. The ‘famous doctor who inserts monkey glands in millionaires’, as the poet E. E. Cummings once described him, found himself falling out of favour so that by the time he died in 1951, he was considered little more than a crank. But when Conan Doyle was composing ‘The Creeping Man’, Voronoff was still a man on the up.

  Following in the Footsteps

  Perhaps the classic caricature of Holmes depicts him inspecting footprints in the dust through a magnifying glass. As with many clichés, it is rooted in truth, for the examination of footsteps plays a part in a great many of the canonical investigations. Indeed, Holmes said of the art of tracing footsteps: ‘There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected’ and duly wrote a monograph on ‘the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses’. In 1953, Conan Doyle’s sons, Adrian and Denis, cited that paper as evidence that their father had invented the use of plaster of Paris for preserving footprints – another proof, they suggested, of their thesis that the ‘police systems of the modern world are founded on the new ideas in criminology, expressed by our father in his detective stories . . .’ While Holmes may have innovated the plaster of Paris technique, some years earlier police ensnared a suspect by getting her to reproduce footprints found at a crime scene in the medium of cows’ blood. This footprint evidence played a vital part in the sensational trial of Jessie McLachlan for the murder of her friend, Jessie McPherson, in Glasgow in 1862. The victim, a domestic servant, was found hacked to death with a meat cleaver and suspicion initially fell on her master’s aged father. However, the court was presented with the evidence that it was McLachlan who was responsible for producing a series of bloody footprints close to the victim’s body. She was subsequently convicted of murder and served out a long sentence.

  THROUGH A LENS DARKLY

  The Jessie McLachlan case was also the first British trial to admit crime scene photographic evidence. However, it was several more decades before such evidence was commonplace in the British judicial system. Scotland Yard, for instance, only employed specialist photographers from 1901, simply using regular commercial photographers to snap crime scenes up until that point. For a man so generally ahead of his time when it came to forensic techniques, Holmes himself was peculiarly slow to pick up on this trend. It was only in ‘The Lion’s Mane’, published in 1926 but set circa 1907, that he gave a nod to the power of photography. Producing an enlarged print of a victim’s wounds, he declared: ‘This is my method in such cases.’

  ‘You certainly do things thoroughly, Mr Holmes,’ his companion said.

  ‘I should hardly be what I am if I did not,’ he shot back. It was a curiously disingenuous exchange, given that there is no evidence that he ever produced another crime scene image in this way. Of course, there might be reams of photos locked away in Watson’s old tin dispatch box. Or maybe Holmes was just hoping to gloss over the fact that in this one area at least, he was a little behind the times.

  On the Shoulders of Giants

  Holmes is the most recognizable of all fictional detectives and Conan Doyle stands almost unrivalled among the pantheon of crime fiction authors. Arguably the only other author who might claim to be his equal in terms of global and enduring popularity is Agatha Christie. Her breakthrough novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 so there was a brief period in which her career and Conan Doyle’s overlapped. She did graciously acknowledge the debt she owed to her literary progenitor. Reflecting in her autobiography on what sort of detective she wanted to write about, she said: ‘There was Sherlock Holmes, the one and only – I should never be able to emulate him.’ Emulate or not, she decided her hero needed ‘a grand name – one of those names that Sherlock Holmes and his family had. Who was it his brother had been? Mycroft Holmes.’ Sure enough, Hercule Poirot was born. Moreover, as the series developed, she came to realize she was subconsciously echoing Holmes, writing – as she put it – ‘in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant [Captain Hastings], with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and now I added a “human foxhound”, Inspector Giraud, of the French police.’ In the 1963 novel, The Clocks, she even allowed Poirot to pay personal tribute to Conan Doyle. In the Belgian’s words:

  It is the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that I salute. These tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived. But the art of the writing – ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.

  Another pair of her heroes – this time, Tommy and Tuppence – got in on the act in The Case of the Missing Lady (1972) when they tried to pass themselves off as Holmes and Watson. The shadow of the great detective and the good doctor loomed large indeed.

  THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE GLOVE

  Conan Doyle did not have much to say on the record about Christie’s creations but he did play an intriguing cameo role in the saga of her eleven-day disappearance in 1926. Asked whether he might be able to assist the enquiry, he took one of Christie’s gloves for inspection by a medium with whom he was familiar through his psychical research. Needless to say, their experiments on the glove yielded nothing of much value.

  A Wimsey-cal View

  Christie was not the only one of the Golden Age crime writers to fall for Holmes. Dorothy L. Sayers – most famous as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, who debuted in Whose Body? in 1923 – was something of a superfan. An inaugural member of the Sherlock Holmes Society, she combined her feel for crime writing and her prodigious academic abilities (she was a graduate of Oxford’s Somerville College) to produce a series of much-loved essays on Holmes, which she composed between 1928 and 1946. She wrote a treatise, for instance, on the relationship between the tales of Holmes and those of Dupin, and another that sought to accurately timetable the events depicted in ‘The Red-Headed League’. More famously, she investigated the mystery over Watson’s wives and the question of his first and middle name. And in 1954, she wrote a radio play for the BBC’s ‘A Tribute to Sherlock Holmes on the Occasion of His 100th Birthday’. Called A Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes, it brought Wimsey (in a youthful form) and Holmes (in his dotage) together for the first time. It would prove to be the last Wimsey piece she would ever write and it was doubtless a fitting way for him to exit the scene.

  A SIDNEY SUSSEX FELLOW

  Dorothy Sayers also made a strong case that Holmes was a graduate of the University of Cambridge (specifically Sidney Sussex College) based on some vague references in ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Sco
tt’ and ‘The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual’, mixed with a good dollop of imaginative speculation.

  A Clubable Fellow

  Sherlock’s brother Mycroft was famously described as among the ‘most unclubable men in town’. Nor was Sherlock given to an excess of sociability, yet a raft of clubs and societies have sprung up in his honour over the years. The first one in the UK appeared in 1934 and owed much to Dorothy L. Sayers. She and a number of now legendary Holmesians – among them Ronald Knox (see here) and the American journalist and author, Vincent Starrett – met for a sherry party hosted by the Scottish writer and broadcaster, A. G. Macdonell. The gathering declared themselves the Sherlock Holmes Society and sporadic dinners were held before the organization was wound up in 1938. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Starrett was also involved in the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars, which had its inaugural meeting in January 1934. The original membership included Christopher Morley, a newspaper man who had previously co-founded The Saturday Review of Literature. He contributed a regular column to that publication, often discoursing on Holmes and related subjects so that he had come to be regarded as Ronald Knox’s counterpart in America. The Baker Street Irregulars held their first annual dinner at the end of 1934 and counted among the guests William Gillette, Frederic Dorr Steele (Holmes’s principal illustrator in the US) and even Gene Tunney, better known as a world heavyweight boxing champion. The Irregulars took firm root and continue to thrive to the current day. Back in Britain, though, it was not until 1951 that the embers of the Sherlock Holmes Society were reignited. That year, a Holmes-themed exhibition was put on as part of the Festival of Britain. Its organizers decided to resurrect the Society too, renaming it the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Today, it is thought that there are at least several hundred societies throughout the world dedicated to the detective, although the rise of social media means there are probably many more ad hoc groupings as well.

  Identifying Irene

  Perhaps the most memorable female character in the entire canon is Irene Adler, who appears in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. An American-born opera singer with an exotic personal life and ‘the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men’, she became known by Holmes as simply ‘the woman’. Where few managed ever to get one over on the great detective, she comprehensively matched him move for move. It has been long suggested that the inspiration for the character of Adler was the famed actress and lover of Edward, Prince of Wales, Lily Langtry. Born in 1853, Langtry came from the small island of Jersey (a UK dependency), while Adler came from across the Atlantic in New Jersey. Like Adler, Langtry was famous for both her looks and talents as a performer, winning acceptance into elevated social circles. The married Langtry was linked to a number of aristocratic paramours, but it was her relationship with Edward, which began in 1877, that garnered most attention, especially after she was introduced to Queen Victoria. However, by 1880 she was pregnant by another man and involved with several others, so that her relationship with the prince gradually faded. She led quite the life of drama and intrigue which must surely have come to the notice of Conan Doyle, and she is undoubtedly a good candidate for the Adler blueprint.

  ALTERNATIVE WOMEN

  However, there are other contenders for the original of ‘the woman’. Prominent among them are Lola Montez – an Irish-born performer renowned as a Spanish dancer who became the lover of King Ludwig I of Bavaria – and Ludmilla Stubel – the opera-dancing lover and, later, wife of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria.

  Arise, Sir Sherlock

  In ‘The Three Garridebs’ (published in 1925), Watson noted: ‘I remember the date [June 1902] very well, for it was in the same month that Holmes refused a knighthood for services which may perhaps some day be recorded.’ The choice of month was a considered one for it was then that Conan Doyle himself was offered his knighthood. The honour, however, did not sit easily with the author. He received it not for creating Holmes nor for any of his other fictional work, but in recognition of his efforts to bolster support for the Boer War in a pamphlet entitled ‘The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct’. Conan Doyle had been brought up by his mother to admire the chivalric tradition and he had avidly consumed tales of King Arthur and his Round Table. This childhood fascination went on to find expression in works such as The White Company and Sir Nigel. But he was not sure that honours and titles served much purpose in the modern world. He regarded them as – outside of military and diplomatic circles at least – ‘the badge of the provincial mayor’. It came down to a question of pride. As he told his mother: ‘Fancy Rhodes or Chamberlain or Kipling doing such a thing! And why should my standards be lower than theirs.’ Nonetheless, in June 1902 he dined with Edward VII and from then felt he could not reject the honour without seeming rude. He was at least buoyed by the congratulations of his contemporaries, among them H. G. Wells, who told him that ‘none . . . combine so happily as you do a large part in the public mind with the genuine respect of those who care keenly for literature’. But Conan Doyle refused to be styled as ‘Sir Arthur’ in his literary works, arguing: ‘I am A. Conan Doyle without any trimmings and will so remain.’ Holmes’s rejection in June 1902 was surely Conan Doyle living vicariously through his creation.

  Keeping It in the Family

  Arthur Conan Doyle was not the only Conan Doyle to write stories about Sherlock Holmes. In the 1950s, his youngest son, Adrian, got in on the act, too. In the mid-1940s, he worked with John Dickson Carr, a celebrated mystery writer, on what became a lauded biography of his father. In the early 1950s the two combined again to author a series of short stories faithful in style and tone to the original tales, each based on references in the canonical stories to undocumented cases. With the exception of one story first published in Life magazine, the tales appeared first in Colliers, which had been the original publisher of most of the canonical stories in the US. Their twelve stories were then released as a collection in 1954. It met with only moderate success although the Conan Doyle name assured them a certain place in the Holmesian landscape. There were also rumours that the writing partnership was not always a happy one.

  THE NEW TALES

  Adrian’s stories were entitled as follows: ‘The Gold Hunter’, ‘The Wax Gamblers’, ‘The Highgate Miracle’, ‘The Black Baronet’, ‘The Sealed Room’, ‘Foulkes Rath’, ‘The Abbas Ruby’, ‘The Dark Angels’, ‘The Two Women’, ‘The Deptford Horror’ and ‘The Red Widow’.

  Putting Your Finger on It

  It is not too much of a stretch to say that Holmes was the foremost exponent of fingerprint evidence working in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. It is another example of him leading and real-world detectives following. William James Herschel, a British colonial administrator in India, is often credited with being the first person to systematically use fingerprints as a method of identification. Indeed, he argued for their administrative use in the Indian courts as early as 1877. Previously, it had been customary for criminals to simply disappear and slip through the net for years at a time with no reliable means of documenting their identity. Then, in 1880, a Scot called Henry Faulds first proposed the use of fingerprints in criminal investigations, by comparing the prints of a suspect to those found at a crime scene. Francis Galton carried out ground-breaking analysis of prints from the early 1890s, cataloguing different characteristics and calculating the odds of two people having identical prints at something approaching one in 64 billion. In 1892, Argentina opened the first fingerprint bureau for law enforcement officers, but it would be a further nine years before Scotland Yard followed suit. Not until 1905 was a murderer first convicted in the British courts on the basis of fingerprint evidence (brothers named Stratton were convicted of killing a shopkeeper and his wife in Deptford, London, thanks to a print found on a cashbox). Yet Holmes had routinely used fingerprint evidence since the early 1890s, utilizing the technique in seven cases – perhaps most notably to ensnare the culprit in ‘The Norwood Build
er’.

  Take That!

  Holmes might be best known for the power of his brain, but he was pretty handy at combat sports, too. He stated his preference for fencing, and claimed in ‘The Solitary Cyclist’ that he had ‘. . . some proficiency in the good old British sport of boxing’. We know, too, that he once went three rounds with McMurdo the prize-fighter from The Sign of the Four, while in ‘The Yellow Face’ Watson described him as ‘one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen’. Holmes put those skills on display in ‘The Solitary Cyclist’ when he boxed the ears of a rogue called Woodley, who had to be sent ‘home in a cart’.