‘The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’
In 1893, Sherlock-Holmes-mania was in full swing. In fact, it seemed like the whole world was in thrall to the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, with one notable exception – his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Doyle’s fractious relationship with his detective-son was rooted in the author’s hope to be regarded as something more than a scribbler of crime stories. His great desire was to create epics of historical fiction – a sort of Walter Scott for a new generation. The Holmes stories came almost too easily to him – well-paying trifles that distracted him from more serious works like Micah Clarke and The White Company. As he rattled off tale after tale of Holmes’s exploits for the avid readership of the Strand Magazine, his frustration at being pigeonholed grew. If only the damned magazine would not throw so much money at him to write more of the potboilers.
Like a deranged criminal, Doyle saw only one way to free himself from the tyranny of his fictional progeny. He planned to throw Sherlock to his death down an Alpine waterfall – an act he would execute before the year was out. Holmes was to plunge to his seeming doom over Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls in the story ‘The Final Problem’. It would be a literary event of extraordinary magnitude, rendering countless readers bereft. Indeed, when the story was published, crowds of young men gathered at the Strand’s offices in London wearing black armbands as a symbol of their mourning.
Yet just as Doyle was preparing to consign his most famous son to history, the two men upon whom Holmes was most closely modelled were about to explode into the public consciousness as players in the most talked-about real-life murder trial for years, that of Alfred Monson. To add to the fevered interest, one of them – Joseph Bell – had recently been ‘outed’ as the primary inspiration for Baker Street’s most beloved resident. That a similar connection had not been drawn with Henry Littlejohn is testament to the unfussy way in which Bell and Littlejohn joined forces to investigate their real-life cases. So how had the lives of Bell, Littlejohn and Doyle become interweaved?
Their combined story begins at Edinburgh University in 1876, when Doyle took up his medical studies there while Bell and Littlejohn were two of the most respected men on the faculty.
Bell had been born in Edinburgh in 1837 into an esteemed medical family. That he would pick up the professional mantle was all but inevitable, but his natural feel for medicine (as both a practitioner and teacher) was still breathtaking. He finished his formal studies at the university’s Medical School in 1859 and subsequently served as house surgeon to Professor James Syme, the great pioneering surgeon of his generation. Then, at the age of just twenty-six, Bell was tasked with organizing classes in systematic and operative surgery at the university.
Remarkably, given this blistering start to his career, he kept up the pace for years to come. Mid-century Edinburgh was a hotbed of progressive medical practice and social reform, and, as the likes of Syme reached the end of their working lives, Bell became a leading figure in moving things on again. Not only were his students trained to the highest levels, but he also sought to refine and improve the systems in which medical professionals worked. He was, for instance, a great mentor of nurses, recognizing their importance in the delivery of the best medical care rather than viewing them as lowly skivvies as had hitherto been their more usual fate. In his desire to elevate the professional standing of nursing, he became a friend and confidant of Florence Nightingale, even dedicating his book – Some Notes on Surgery for Nurses – to her in 1887. Among his many other achievements, he was elected president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, campaigned to have women admitted to the city’s Medical School, was the first surgeon at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (an institution that opened in 1860 after years of campaigning by Bell and a number of his colleagues, not least Littlejohn), and still found time to edit the Edinburgh Medical Journal for almost a quarter of a century. Away from medicine, he was a devout churchgoer, a justice of the peace and a deputy lieutenant (that is to say, the hand-picked assistant of the Queen’s personal representative in the local county). In short, he was a doer on a grand scale, driven by a genuine desire to improve the conditions of his fellow citizens.
Nor was Littlejohn any less energetic, despite being the older man by some eleven years. He, too, was an Edinburgh native, but his pathway into medicine was a much less obvious one. His father had been a master baker and Henry, the seventh of nine children, might have got lost in the crowd. But his passion for medical knowledge won through and he graduated from the city’s university in 1847. He then spent a year working on the continent before returning to his hometown as assistant pathologist at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
In this role, Littlejohn became intimately familiar with death in many, varied and often gruesome forms. It was a natural move, then, when he became Edinburgh’s police surgeon in 1854. This was a post that made many demands on his time. He was not only responsible for the medical welfare of all police staff and prisoners, but was also among the first ports of call for officers investigating serious incidents – whether accident or criminal act. He was regularly called upon to carry out forensic investigations – in an age when forensic medicine was in its infancy – and to conduct post-mortems. He was, as well, a familiar face in the Scottish courts, offering evidence as an expert witness on everything from catastrophic rail accidents to sexual assaults and child murders. Present at virtually every significant criminal trial conducted in Edinburgh in the second half of the nineteenth century, he gained a view of Scotland’s underbelly that few could rival and even fewer envied.
His work as police surgeon gave him a significant public profile in the city, and his fame only grew when in 1862 he was appointed the first Medical Officer for Health for Edinburgh, charged with promoting the health and safety of the general public. The role had been created in part as a response to the collapse of a tenement building the previous year on the city’s high street that had left thirty-five people dead. For a man already stretched by his position with the police, Littlejohn attacked his new job with extraordinary vigour. Indeed, he was about to carry out much of the work for which he would become best known.
In 1865, he published a landmark study, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the City of Edinburgh. Despite its driest of titles, the review sparked a revolutionary overhaul of the Edinburgh landscape. Littlejohn painted a vivid picture of urban poverty and decay, of a city beset by overcrowding and crawling with filth – all of which, as he comprehensively showed, led directly to the spread of poor health. His account was the spur that the local authorities needed to pass the 1867 Edinburgh City Improvements Act – a piece of legislation that ushered in slum clearances, the construction of a new and infinitely better drainage system, and the building of the wide, grand streets that mark out Edinburgh even today as a particularly elegant and appealing metropolis. In a way that only a handful can legitimately claim, Littlejohn changed the face of the city in which he lived.
A catalogue of other notable achievements followed. For example, he took the fight to those infectious diseases that had long beset the city’s poor, who had historically been condemned to live one on top of another. Not only did he establish a permanent hospital for those suffering with infectious diseases, but he also spearheaded a change in the law that made it compulsory to notify the authorities of every case of potential contagion. He was also the chief adviser to the Board of Supervisors, an organization that from 1873 was the city’s main authority for public health. And if all that were not enough, he served as chairman of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and founded the Scottish Burial Reform and Cremation Society. Yet perhaps the greatest proof of his effectiveness is to be found in the raw statistics – the city’s mortality rate fell from 34 per 1,000 people in the 1860s to 14 per 1,000 by the turn of the century.
Both Bell and Littlejohn, then, were great public servants and medical trailblazers – the sort of men upon whom empires are built. But for the young Doyle, they were also inspirational teachers capable of extraordinary feats of mental gymnastics. Bell in particular regularly lit up his lectures with dazzling demonstrations of deductive reasoning, which Doyle copied down and adapted into the character of Sherlock Holmes. Littlejohn, on the other hand, lectured on forensic science in the university’s extra-mural school, breathing life into a subject that, by Littlejohn’s own estimation, had been largely ignored up to that point.
Littlejohn was a natural-born entertainer. Even as the years advanced, he maintained a lithe and youthful appearance and was an easily identifiable figure around the city in his trademark top hat and frock coat. He was also blessed with an infectious sense of humour and an impish glint in the eye. He liked to terrify unwary onlookers, for example, by positioning himself between tram stops and then launching himself at a carriage as it sped by. It was a routine that he executed so often that the tram drivers knew not to slow down as he came into view, secure that he would safely scramble on board even as eyewitnesses feared a tragedy was about to play out.
His showmanship translated into the lecture theatre, too. An expert in the fields of pathology, toxicology and assorted other medico-legal subjects, he began lecturing in medical jurisprudence (that is to say, the law as it relates to medicine) from 1855. Beginning with barely twenty students, by the 1880s his talks had gained such a reputation that they regularly attracted crowds upwards of 250. Calling on his first-hand experience of police investigations and criminal trials, he filled his addresses with the most up-to-the-minute ideas and theories – he was, for instance, a great champion of the then-nascent science of fingerprinting and was an early advocate for the use of photographic evidence. His vast knowledge was conveyed with both humour and colour, as he continually sought new ways to enliven his lectures. Trips to court and visits to actual crime scenes were a particular highlight for both Littlejohn and his students.
While Doyle never publicly confirmed he had been present at Littlejohn’s lectures, it is all but unthinkable that he would have missed the opportunity to attend these talks in medical jurisprudence and forensic medicine at the Surgeons’ Hall. Not least, Littlejohn was great friends with Bell, and Bell was Doyle’s foremost mentor while he studied in Edinburgh. Even if Doyle had not found his way to Littlejohn’s sessions of his own accord – unlikely as that seems – Bell would have been sure to have sent him on his way. And while Littlejohn was perhaps the more flamboyant of the two teachers, Bell was renowned for his own theatrics that illuminated the student days of Doyle and a great many of his contemporaries.
Bell’s sharp features, flash of neat white hair and penetrating blue eyes saw him regularly likened to an eagle. It was a strangely appropriate comparison, given the preternatural way he could swoop upon truth and fact as if they were his prey. Bell was of the firm belief that a doctor should hone his powers of observation so that apparently even the most trivial detail might assist in diagnosis. He practised quite as well as he preached, and his deductive set pieces became the stuff of legend.
One of Doyle’s contemporaries, Dr Harold Jones, wrote years later of how Bell went about encouraging his charges to ‘use your eyes … use your ears, use your brain, your bump of perception, and use your powers of deduction’. On one memorable occasion he ushered a patient before a group of students and urged a particular pupil to diagnose his medical condition. The unlucky fellow flailed about for the correct answer, concluding that the man suffered from disease of the hip joints. Bell leant back in his chair, his chin resting on hands pressed together at the fingertips. ‘Hip – nothing!’ he began, in a tone guaranteed to deflate the ego. ‘The man’s limp is not from his hip but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see 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 hand 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 whisky bottle protruding from the patient’s right-hand coat pocket … Never neglect to ratify your deductions.’
Another of his party tricks was to pass a test-tube of amber-coloured liquid among his class. It was, he informed them, a powerful drug with an extremely bitter taste, and in order to assess each student’s powers of observation he wished them to sample it one by one. But, he told them, being a fair man, he would not demand of them that which he wouldn’t do himself. He promptly dipped a finger in the potion, put his finger in his mouth and pulled an appropriately pained face. Every member of the group then followed suit, so that the room was soon filled with faces set in an array of contortions. As Bell surveyed them, he began to laugh quietly to himself. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you had developed the power of perception, the faculty of observation which I speak so much of, for if you had truly observed me, you would have seen that, while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was the middle finger – aye – which somehow found its way into my mouth.’
Such was Bell’s confidence in his own observational abilities that he was prepared to trust his powers even in the face of apparently incontrovertible evidence. He told the story, for instance, of how he had once drawn a few preliminary conclusions about a patient in front of a room of attentive students. He informed the assembled throng that the rather short man who had walked in with something of a swagger was most likely a bandsman in a Highland regiment. The swagger, Bell stated, was characteristic of a piper, while his general demeanour suggested a military background. Given his relative lack of height, a position as a bandsman seemed most logical. When he asked the patient to confirm whether or not he was correct, he was temporarily floored when the man said he was actually a shoemaker. Bell, though, remained convinced that his initial appraisal had been right and asked a couple of his assistants to keep the man in a side room. Having dismissed the class, he went to the patient and asked him to remove his upper clothing. Immediately he spotted a small, blue letter ‘D’ branded into the skin beneath his left breast – the sign of a deserter. The patient’s evasiveness about his military career was immediately explained away.
Bell and the student Doyle quickly established a rapport, with Bell’s techniques making a profound impression on the young man. Bell recollected one consultation, for instance:
He was amused once when I walked in and sat down. ‘Good-morning, Pat,’ I said, for it was impossible not to see that he was an Irishman. ‘Good-morning, your honour,’ replied the patient. ‘Did you like your walk over the links today, as you came in from the south side of the town?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said Pat, ‘did your honour see me?’ Well, Conan Doyle could not see how I knew that, absurdly simple as it was. On a showery day, such as that had been, the reddish clay at bare parts of the links adheres to the boot, and a tiny part is bound to remain. There is no such clay anywhere else round the town for miles. Well, that and one or two similar instances excited Doyle’s keenest interest, and set him experimenting himself in the same direction, which, of course, was just what I wanted with him and all my other scholars.
In turn, the doctor was greatly impressed by the student and would recall of the young Doyle: ‘I always regarded him as one of the best students I ever had. He was exceedingly interested always upon anything connected with diagnosis, and was never tired of trying to discover all those little details which one looks for.’ That Bell considered him not only among the elite of that period’s intake of medical students but nothing less than a protégé was confirmed when he selected Doyle to serve as his outpatient clerk. This gave Doyle the opportunity to study the master’s techniques at close hand, and the more he saw, the more impressed he became. As Bell would remember it: ‘Doyle was always making notes. He seemed to want to copy down every word I said. Many times after the patient departed my office, he would ask me to repeat my observations so that he would be certain he had them down correctly.’
Doyle left Edinburgh in 1880 and briefly served as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaling vessel, during which a fall overboard almost resulted in his death. A second voyage on a cargo and passenger ship destined for West Africa was no less eventful – the vessel was battered by storms, Arthur fell victim to a typhoid epidemic and even as the ship returned to the relative safety of Liverpool Docks its hull was ablaze. So, it was hardly surprising that he next opted for the rather more genteel life of a general practitioner in Southsea, near Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. Yet life as a doctor was not all that he wanted it to be. For one thing, business was not so good that he could set aside his financial worries. Given Doyle’s own family background – his father was an illustrator whose career was blighted by alcohol abuse and psychological problems – money was an important consideration for him. When he submitted a tax return in 1883 showing that he had earned insufficient money to make him liable for tax, the tax office returned it emblazoned with the comment ‘most unsatisfactory’. Doyle resubmitted it with his own additional observation: ‘I quite agree.’
Alongside the lack of financial security that his work afforded him, Doyle’s desire to earn a living as a writer burned bright. He had already enjoyed some success, having a story published for the first time while still a student (in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal). By 1885 he was playing with the idea of turning his hand to detective yarns. He was a fan of the genre – particularly the legendary investigator Dupin created by Edgar Allan Poe – and though detective fiction was yet to find literary respectability, he sensed he might have some aptitude for it. Bell kept swimming into his thoughts as he formulated his ideas for a detective novel. ‘I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell,’ Doyle would write, ‘of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science.’
Within a year, Doyle had taken the kernel of an idea – an idea with Joseph Bell at its heart – and turned it into the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novella-length A Study in Scarlet that appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. Holmes would get a second airing in another novella, The Sign of the Four, in 1890. But it was when Doyle turned to the short-story format, publishing in the Strand from 1891, that the Holmes phenomenon exploded. Before long, Doyle was the best-paid writer in the land and there was guaranteed interest in anything to do with his literary offspring. That included the question of whether he was based on a real-life individual.
If Doyle had wanted to keep the cat in the bag, he was peculiarly unsuccessful in doing so. When the first twelve short stories were collected in a single volume, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1892, he dedicated it ‘To My Old Teacher, Joseph Bell’, who in turn favourably reviewed it for the Bookman. It did not take a super-sleuth to draw a link between the writer, his creation and his old mentor. Several months earlier – in a May 1892 interview with one Raymond Blathwayt for the Bookman – Doyle had provided another hint as to the identity of the inspiration behind Holmes. Doyle told Blathwayt: ‘Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment, if I may so express it, of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, who would sit in the patients’ waiting room with a face like a Red Indian and diagnose the people as they came in, even before they opened their mouths.’ In the same month, Doyle wrote to Bell to confirm that he had been immortalized in print. His letter read:
My dear Bell,
It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the outpatient ward. Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man who pushed the things as far as it would go – further occasionally – and I am so glad that the result has satisfied you, who are the critic with the most right to be severe.
The evidence was also there in the stories themselves, for those who were familiar enough with Bell’s modus operandi. Just consider the similarities between one of Bell’s recorded demonstrations of deduction and an exchange between Holmes and his equally brilliant brother, Mycroft, in the 1893 story, ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’. In Bell’s case he was, in the usual manner, presented with a patient about whose background he knew nothing. Their conversation went as follows:
Bell: Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.
Patient: Aye, sir.
Bell: Not long discharged?
Patient: No, sir.
Bell: A Highland regiment?
Patient: Aye, sir.
Bell: A non-commissioned officer.
Patient: Aye, sir.
Bell: Stationed at Barbados.
Patient: Aye, sir.
Bell: You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but 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.
While Doyle did not directly lift the episode for use in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, the echoes are clear. To set the scene, Sherlock and Mycroft are sat together in the bow-window of the latter’s exclusive London club:
‘To anyone who wishes to study mankind, this is the spot,’ said Mycroft. ‘Look at the magnificent types! Look at these two men who are coming towards us, for example.’
‘The billiard-marker and the other?’
‘Precisely. What do you make of the other?’
The two men had stopped opposite the window. Some chalk marks over the waistcoat pocket were the only signs of billiards which I could see in one of them. The other was a very small, dark fellow, with his hat pushed back and several packages under his arm.
‘An old soldier, I perceive,’ said Sherlock.
‘And very recently discharged,’ remarked the brother.
‘Served in India, I see.’
‘And a non-commissioned officer.’
‘Royal Artillery, I fancy,’ said Sherlock.
‘And a widower.’
‘But with a child.’
‘Children, my dear boy, children.’
‘Come,’ said I, laughing, ‘this is a little too much.’
‘Surely,’ answered Holmes, ‘it is not hard to say that a man with that bearing, expression of authority, and sun-baked skin, is a soldier, is more than a private, and is not long from India.’
‘That he has not left the service long is shown by his still wearing his ammunition boots, as they are called,’ observed Mycroft.
‘He had not the cavalry stride, yet he wore his hat on one side, as is shown by the lighter skin on that side of his brow. His weight is against his being a sapper. He is in the artillery.’
‘Then, of course, his complete mourning shows that he has lost someone very dear. The fact that he is doing his own shopping looks as though it were his wife. He has been buying things for children, you perceive. There is a rattle, which shows that one of them is very young. The wife probably died in childbed. The fact that he has a picture-book under his arm shows that there is another child to be thought of.’
Sherlock is evidently Bell to the nth degree. A wily newshound from the Strand called Harry How was the first to positively make the connection in June 1892. Doyle immediately warned Bell that his cover was blown and that he should expect a deluge of attention, including ‘lunatic letters from Constant Readers who would request his assistance in rescuing maiden aunts from certain starvation in sealed attics at the hand of homicidal neighbours’.
Quite what Bell made of this unexpected new fame is not clear. To friends and family, he suggested he found it all rather wearisome and some of the sillier aspects of Holmes-mania probably tested his patience. However, he did not find it so troubling that he wouldn’t give interviews to the press on his links to the great detective. He also agreed to write the introduction to an 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet. Behind the scenes, too, he continued to fuel the Sherlock beast, responding to Doyle’s plea to help him with plots. One storyline involved a murderer who used germs, with Bell implying he knew of a real-life case that followed much the same lines. Doyle rejected it on the principle that the public was not yet ready for such a horrifying tale (although he would explore the theme in the 1917 story, ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’). ‘Doyle’s the clever man. It’s nothing to do with me,’ Bell told one interviewer of his part in the creation of Holmes, though this was evidently nothing but false modesty.
Then, at the peak of interest in the Ardlamont case, Bell decided to go public with revelations that he was not merely the medical alter ego of Holmes but had been involved in true-life criminal investigations for decades. ‘Well, for twenty years or more I have been engaged in the practice of medical jurisprudence on behalf of the Crown,’ he told a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette, adding, ‘but there is little I can tell you about it. It would not be fair to mention that which is the private knowledge of the Crown and those associated therewith …’ So, the real-life inspiration for Holmes had even more in common with the detective than had previously been suspected. ‘Any deductions and inferences, and so on which I have been the means of placing at the disposal of the authorities are simple and commonplace,’ he explained in a typically understated way. He went on to discuss how the powers of observation Doyle had seen so many times within the university setting could be used to progress a police enquiry:
The vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of the trifles. 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 an eyelid or what not, which differentiates men.
Finally came the explanation for how he had come to be an instrument of the police – his relationship with Littlejohn: ‘I must explain that Dr Littlejohn is the medical adviser, and he likes to have a second man with him. He is a very intimate friend of mine, and it so happens that for more than twenty years we have done a great deal together, and it has come to be the regular thing for him to take me into cases with him. But I have no official connection with the Crown.’
It is curious that Doyle so readily acknowledged the influence of Bell in the invention of Holmes but never went on record to credit Littlejohn while the latter was still alive. It simply does not make sense to think that Littlejohn did not feature prominently in Doyle’s imaginings as he conjured with the idea of a literary detective. Bell was Doyle’s primary coach and counsel in Edinburgh, most certainly, but Bell and Littlejohn were true friends – in their later years Littlejohn presented Bell with a large silver cup inscribed ‘in memory of a constant friendship’ – and as not only a favoured student of Bell but his assistant as well, Doyle could not have failed to come into contact with Littlejohn on a regular basis. As a student of crime and criminal investigation, Doyle would surely have actively sought out contact with the man who was, after all, the official police surgeon and the leading light in Scottish medical jurisprudence. On top of that, he must have known that Bell was also a regular companion on his police work. In short, Littlejohn could not be anything but the other principal model for Holmes.
Where Bell provided the blueprint for Holmes’s logical deductions, Littlejohn was the prototype for the renegade forensics pioneer. As Harold Jones revealed in an article for the long-defunct Tit-Bits magazine in 1900: ‘while Joseph Bell is the original Sherlock Holmes, another Edinburgh professor “had a finger in the pie”, so to speak. While Joseph Bell gave Doyle the idea of the character Holmes, the man who, unknowingly perhaps, influenced Doyle in adapting that character to the detection of crime, was Sir Henry Littlejohn.’ Yet, Doyle’s only recorded nod towards the police surgeon came in March 1929, in a little-reported speech to an audience of Edinburgh graduates residing in Nairobi. According to a report in the East African Standard, Doyle ruminated on the unsatisfactory methods of detection exhibited in so much of the crime fiction he had read in his youth before reflecting that ‘neither Joe Bell nor Littlejohn would have gone about things in that way’. It was their methods, Doyle told his audience, that first induced him to write a detective story from the point of view of the scientific man.
So why was Littlejohn largely written out of the record, while Bell was so actively inserted into it? Might there have been some personal acrimony between Doyle and Littlejohn? A reason why Doyle would not want the police surgeon bathed in the reflected glory of his literary hero? It is a possibility. But perhaps the silence surrounding Littlejohn had more noble causes. If this wasn’t an act of outright deception by Doyle, was it not instead a gentle piece of deflection? Was Bell thrust into the limelight so that Littlejohn could remain outside it? In the end, Bell was the hobbyist in terms of detection, the ‘second man’ in his own words or, to put it another way, the unofficial consulting detective. For Littlejohn, the stakes were rather higher, with criminal investigation much more clearly within his professional remit. If the shadow of Holmes had hung over him, it would have inevitably complicated his labours. That would surely be reason enough to have kept his association with Sherlock quiet. Bell and Doyle were both the kind of upstanding individuals who would do all in their power to ensure that the life-and-death work that Littlejohn practised on a day-to-day basis was not compromised by public hysteria over an imaginary character. But, to be sure, the ties that bound together Littlejohn, Bell, Doyle and Holmes were strong.
By the time that Cecil Hambrough lay dead in the woods at Ardlamont in August 1893, Littlejohn, Bell and Doyle had each seen and contended with much over their prestigious careers. Each of them in their own way had confronted the dankest recesses of the criminal mind, while themselves being subject to public scrutiny. Yet not even their combined intellects and imaginations could have foreseen the drama that was about to unfold.