‘Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use …’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’
Despite his years of dodgy dealings and nefarious plotting, as of August 1893 the law was yet to successfully call Monson to account. This was, it is fair to suppose, more the result of good fortune than criminal mastery. Monson was up to this point a run-of-the-mill fraudster who took advantage of others’ good will and leveraged the widely held belief that a man of manners and bearing could be trusted. Whenever the net started to close in – as after the fires at Cheyney Court – he simply ran away and started again elsewhere. Monson showed no sign of being a Moriarty – Sherlock Holmes’s great nemesis whom the detective referred to as ‘the Napoleon of crime’. Instead his career was hitherto characterized by inelegant schemes and a seeming overestimation of his own abilities. Crimes such as insurance-inspired arson hardly represented a sophisticated modus operandi and he only escaped punishment because the necessary evidence was hard to track down among the burning embers of his ambition. His abuse of credit granted by unwary men of banking and commerce was similarly basic, and only his willingness to exit a scene while the finger of suspicion had yet to turn into the iron fist of the law saved him.
By contrast, Bell and Littlejohn were several decades through careers that brought hitherto unknown skill and finesse to the detection of crime. The doughty Dr Watson once commented of Holmes that ‘I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defence.’ Much the same could have been said of this pair. Over more than twenty years they had worked together, applying their acute powers of observation and reasoning while adopting the latest forensic innovations, of which there had been many during their lifetimes. Faced with determining how – and by whom – a crime had been committed, they would work through a logical series of steps to trace a path back from the crime scene through the various circumstances that led to it. Their method prefigured that of Holmes as he described it in A Study in Scarlet:
The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected … Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result will be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them the result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.
Littlejohn and Bell lived in an exciting age of forensic science as it developed from a fringe activity often sneered at by the courts into a vital feature of the criminal justice system. Indeed, the two were crucial to this evolution so that Edinburgh came to be seen as the capital of the discipline, in Great Britain at least and perhaps even in the world. In particular, they propelled forward forensic pathology – the skill of determining the cause of death by examination of a corpse. In so doing, they brought new esteem to the figure of the scientific (and especially, medical) expert.
Until well into the nineteenth century, the scientific expert had enjoyed a curious status. Of course, doctors had long played a role in criminal cases, giving their opinion, for instance, on cause of death. However, they did not hold special privileges as expert witnesses. Their opinion carried no more weight than, say, a medically untrained witness sharing their own ideas on cause of death on the basis of their personal observations. It was, slightly curiously, a trial in 1782 concerning responsibility for the decay of the harbour walls in the Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea that led to a reevaluation of the role of the expert witness. From then on, it was acknowledged that scientific experts might express an opinion in the courtroom, whether or not they had directly observed the facts of the case. A new industry of professional expert witnesses was thus unleashed.
The results were predictably mixed. The sight of so-called experts slugging it out in courtrooms and contradicting each other at every turn did little to foster the faith of the public. There was also the problem of the growing number of witnesses who sought to bolster the often meagre income of the scientific researcher with appearances in the courtroom. These ‘opinions-for-hire’ hardly assuaged public doubts about the worth of the expert witness. In 1862, the esteemed English chemist and physicist William Crookes was moved to write in Chemical News:
The evidence of Experts is just now the object of general derision. Smart newspaper writers, wishing to indite a telling article, select the discrepancies in scientific evidence for a theme; noble Lords, anxious to enliven the dull debates of our hereditary legislators, find nothing so provocative of laughter as a story about the differences of ‘mad doctors’; and barristers, ready to advocate any opinion, and anxious, perhaps, for a monopoly of the ‘any-sidedness’, when addressing a jury, dilate with a well-simulated indignation on the fact that eminent scientific men are to be found in the witness box on opposite sides.
Yet even as the figure of the scientific expert was routinely decried, this was unquestionably a golden age for forensics. The first great British work of forensic medicine, Dr Samuel Farr’s Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, had appeared in 1788, and from the 1790s Andrew Duncan the Elder began to lecture in Edinburgh on the subject. In 1807, his son (Andrew Duncan the Younger) became the first professor of forensics anywhere in Britain. It was not until 1831 that the first English professorship was established at King’s College, London, ensuring that Scotland was a great many strides ahead of the game by then. In 1821, Robert Christison took over the Edinburgh professorship and proceeded to publish a series of groundbreaking works, including a Treatise on Poisons in 1829 and, in 1836 – along with Thomas Stewart Traill and James Syme – a pamphlet entitled Suggestions for the Medico-Legal Examination of Dead Bodies. This latter work provided a framework upon which medical experts could base their practice, bringing a rigour to the field that did much to liberate them from the disdain (both from lawyers and the public) that was threatening to overtake them. In due course, Littlejohn would count all three of its authors among his lecturers at the university. Bell even served as dresser to Syme in the early part of his career. By 1869, Syme had developed such respect for his former assistant’s surgical skills that he asked Bell to take over his clinical surgery classes on his retirement. Bell and Littlejohn were thus immersed in the culture of forensic innovation that Edinburgh had fomented since the turn of the century.
Edinburgh University – their alma mater – was important not only for the innovative research it supported but also for synthesizing new techniques and ideas from other centres of learning and bringing them into the mainstream. Henry Littlejohn was the most famous real-life forensic expert in the land by the 1890s because he was the personification of this Edinburgh ethos. He merged a sharp brain and expert eye with a willingness to adopt the most cutting-edge methods, all presented to the courts with unstinting professionalism. While many expert witnesses carried with them dubious reputations, Littlejohn elevated the role. Sherlock Holmes, at the same time, was bringing forensic science to the public at large in a way no academic could ever hope to emulate. That the fictional detective was employing methods often far in advance of those being used in the real world only serves to prove that his creator had been learning from the best.
Take, for instance, the emerging science of fingerprinting – a method that Littlejohn championed early in his lecture theatre. A British colonial administrator in India, William James Herschel, is widely regarded as the first to have used fingerprints as a method of identification – a practice he wanted to use in the criminal courts of Calcutta as early as 1877. Meanwhile, in 1880, a Scotsman, Henry Faulds, suggested they could be used to identify (or, indeed, exonerate) a suspect by recording prints left behind at crime scenes and comparing them against those of known criminals. Then, in 1892 an English polymath, Francis Galton, undertook a systematic classification of the different patterns evident in fingerprints, calculating the odds of two people having identical prints at one in 64 billion. In the same year, the first fingerprint bureau specifically for law enforcement opened in Argentina. But it was only in 1901 that Scotland Yard adopted fingerprint identification, and it would be 1905 before it was first used to catch a killer (in fact, two killers, brothers named Stratton who were convicted of killing a shopkeeper and his wife in Deptford, London, on the basis of a smudged print found on a cashbox). Yet Doyle had Sherlock Holmes routinely using the method to ensnare criminals from the beginning of the 1890s – fingerprint evidence is referenced in no less than seven of his cases, and was key to apprehending the wrongdoer in ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’.
Holmes was also a pioneer in terms of blood testing. It had long been a problem accurately to identify bloodstains, especially when there was some age to them. It was difficult, for example, to tell a rust spot from a genuine bloodstain, and then there was the question of how to distinguish between human and animal blood. (The idea of distinguishing different types of human blood was still far off.) The first reliable test for the presence of blood was developed in the early 1860s using hydrogen peroxide as an agent. Yet we see Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) proclaiming: ‘I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else.’ It was, he said, ‘the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains.’ By his reckoning, his test could identify blood in a solution where the proportion of blood was not more than one in a million. It is difficult to imagine that Doyle would have been sufficiently on top of the current state of forensics to write such passages were it not for his intimate interaction with Bell, and Littlejohn, too.
There is other corroborating evidence for their influence on Doyle. Littlejohn, for example, wrote and lectured extensively on poisons and toxicology. Holmes, meanwhile, told Watson: ‘I dabble with poisons a good deal’, while Stamford (the man who introduced Watson and Holmes) observed that Holmes would not think twice about administering a ‘vegetable alkaloid’ to a friend for the purpose of gauging its effects.
Littlejohn was also at the forefront of those who saw the potential of photographic evidence and especially the use of crime-scene photography. Spurred on by technical improvements in cameras and printing, photographic evidence was first used in Europe’s courts in the late 1860s but the British judicial system remained sceptical for many more decades. Scotland Yard tellingly only bothered to employ its own trained photographers, rather than commercial photographers who might otherwise be snapping family portraits and the like, in 1901. Indeed, in this respect Littlejohn was so far ahead of the game that even Doyle was slow to catch up. It was only in the 1926 story ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’ (set around 1907) that Holmes produces an enlarged print of the wounds suffered by the victim of an attack, noting, ‘This is my method in such cases.’ ‘You certainly do things thoroughly, Mr Holmes,’ his companion says. ‘I should hardly be what I am if I did not,’ he retorts.
The second half of the nineteenth century also saw a blossoming in the field of forensic ballistics – the study of firearms, their ammunition and functioning. This is the subject upon which Bell and Littlejohn would spend so much of their time in the final few months of 1893 in relation to the events at Ardlamont. Holmes used his own ballistics expertise, particularly his knowledge of gunshot residues, to great effect in stories including ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squires’, ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ and ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’. ‘There is a test before us,’ he said in the last of these stories. ‘If the test comes off, all will be clear. And the test will depend upon the conduct of this little weapon.’ His words surely echoed the sentiments of Littlejohn and Bell as they confronted the mystery at Ardlamont.
Underpinning the forensic practice of Littlejohn, Bell and Holmes was a shared passion for close observation. Examine the minutiae with scientific rigour, and the truth will be exposed. As Bell put it in his review of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the Bookman in 1892:
Dr Conan Doyle has made a well-deserved success for his detective stories and made the name of his hero beloved by the boys of this country by the marvellous cleverness of his method. He shows how easy it is, if only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends and by an extension of the same method to baffle the criminal and lay bare the manner of his crime.
Bell’s own skills extended beyond the party-piece diagnoses with which he astounded his students. It was said, for example, that he could identify any species of bird on the wing. But he was first and foremost an observer of people. For him, forensic detection was essentially a process of logic applied to observation. ‘The student must be taught to observe,’ he once wrote in a letter published in Tit-Bits newspaper.
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 the patient. The whole trick is much easier than it appears at first. For instance, physiognomy helps you to nationality, accent to district, and, to an educated ear, almost to county. Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands. The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason. The shoemaker and the tailor are quite different.
How Bell must have revelled in Doyle’s own abilities in this direction, which the author then passed on to Holmes. On meeting Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, Watson was astonished by how much this stranger seemed to know of his recent history in Afghanistan. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Holmes said.
I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second.
Like Bell, Holmes was also an expert in dialectology (attempting to place a person by their accent and other distinguishing vocal traits), an attribute he also made use of when assuming one of his many disguises – a roll call that included Italians, Frenchmen and Irish-Americans, not to mention Englishmen of all classes from ‘common loafers’ to booksellers, seamen and clergymen. In addition, Bell put great faith in handwriting analysis, believing it possible to conclude much about an author simply by studying the nature of their handwriting. So, too, the great man of Baker Street, who in ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squires’ asserted: ‘You may not be aware that the deduction of a man’s age from his writing is one which has been brought to considerable accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man in his true decade with tolerable confidence. I say normal cases, because ill health and physical weakness reproduce the signs of old age, even when the invalid is a youth.’
Littlejohn was no less eager than Bell to inculcate his students with a sense that the devil is in the detail. To this end, he extolled footprints as a vital source of identification, particularly in the rural setting, since there ‘people who commit crimes never go bare-foot’ so that the question becomes ‘one of comparing the foot mark with the boots of suspected persons’. Holmes was clearly on the same page, using footprint evidence in no less than twenty-six of Doyle’s stories, and even writing a monograph on the subject and their use in criminal identification.
In his 1892 introduction to a new edition of A Study in Scarlet, Bell said of Doyle that he ‘created a shrewd, quick-sighted, inquisitive man, half doctor, half virtuoso, with plenty of spare time, a retentive memory, and perhaps with the best gift of all – the power of unloading the mind of all burden of trying to remember unnecessary details’. Aside from the spare time, of which they assuredly had little, this might equally have served as a description of Bell or Littlejohn.
Notes of Littlejohn’s lectures on medical jurisprudence emphasise the clear-sighted approach that he brought to his subject. He taught, for instance, a simple checklist that the forensic examiner should keep in mind when attempting to establish whether a death is the result of accident, suicide or murder. The investigator, he said, should consider:
1. The position of the body.
2. The nature of the injuries.
3. The direction of the wound.
4. The position of the instrument.
5. The marks of blood.
6. The evidence of a struggle.
Typically, he was able to bring to life such potentially abstract tools by plundering practical examples from real-life cases – his encyclopaedic knowledge of criminality and suspicious deaths surely rivalled even that of Sherlock Holmes. He would fill his lectures with such stories as the demise in 1868 of Theodore II, Emperor of Ethiopia, who was found dead from a gunshot wound received as British troops overcame his forces at the citadel of Magdala. Littlejohn reminded his audience of the need to establish the distance from which a shot is fired in such deaths. In this particular case, the pattern of singeing on the Emperor’s moustache and eyebrows seemed to prove beyond doubt that he had died by his own hand. Another story of more local vintage served to warn against the instinct to jump to conclusions after a preliminary survey of the evidence. Littlejohn told of an unnamed gentleman who was suffering from delusions so that he thought he was being tried in Edinburgh’s criminal courts even as he resided in Glasgow. Fancying he had received news of his conviction, he went to his private room, battered his head against his safe, drove several nails through his forehead (resulting in the complete laceration of the left frontal lobe) and then repeatedly stabbed himself with a fork. It just so happened that he had left a large sum of money to his housekeeper in his will and she would surely have found herself on trial for his murder, Littlejohn surmised, had not the man’s extraordinary bout of self-inflicted violence been seen by several other witnesses.
As both professor of forensic jurisprudence and police surgeon, Littlejohn disseminated a coolly analytical approach to criminal investigation that set the benchmark for the future. Policing as we understand it today was then still in its relative infancy so that the likes of Littlejohn (with the able assistance of Bell) were vital in defining best practice. He was not merely rewriting the rulebook but virtually authoring it from scratch, encouraging a sophistication in approach where it had hitherto been all but absent.
Robert Peel famously oversaw the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829 (really a successor to the smaller-scale Bow Street Runners who had been operating since the middle of the previous century), but again Scotland had been ahead of the game. Back in 1800 the City of Glasgow Police was established, becoming the first publicly funded professional police force in the world. Then, in 1805, Edinburgh got its own version, taking over from the Town Guard, which, since 1682, had comprised, as one writer of the time noted, ‘old Highlanders, of uncouth aspect and speech, dressed in a dingy red uniform and cocked hats’. Prone to drinking and quick to resort to violence, especially when required to enforce curfews, the Guard earned the nickname of the ‘Town Rats’ and by the start of the 1800s they were reviled and mocked in almost equal measure. The introduction of professional police forces was certainly a step forward but, as the nineteenth century approached its end, practical policing still struggled to rise above the rudimentary. Cases were often solved only if a suspect was caught red-handed or if a confession could be extracted, or else if there was sufficient hearsay evidence to be able to convince a jury.
In a discussion with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1893, Bell touched upon his frustrations with the police – feelings, it is fair to assume, Littlejohn shared with him though perhaps could not comfortably voice. Bell said:
It would be a great thing if the police generally could be trained to observe more closely. The lines upon which it might be done would be to make the prize bigger for the educated man. At present the incentive to special training is not too great, I believe. The fatal mistake which the ordinary policeman makes is this, that he gets his theory first and then makes the facts fit it, instead of getting his facts first and making all his little observations and deductions until he is driven irresistibly by them into an elucidation in a direction he may never have originally contemplated … You cannot expect the ordinary bobby, splendid fellow as he is so far as pluck and honesty go, to stand eight hours on his legs and then develop great mental strength. He doesn’t get enough blood to his brain to permit of it. The only feasible scheme which strikes me would be to get a good man and give him carte blanche about the choosing of his assistants and the special education of them.
Again, a glance at Holmes’s own utterances on the professional policeman reveals that he, Doyle, Bell and Littlejohn were cut from the same cloth. Even the bobbies Holmes quite likes are damned with faint praise. Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard is thus described as ‘competent’ but not ‘gifted with imagination’. Moreover, Holmes says of Gregory, Athelney Jones and the most famous Holmesian policeman of them all, Inspector Lestrade, that their ‘normal state’ is to be ‘out of their depth’. What infuriated him most was to arrive at a crime scene after the police had already got to work. ‘Oh, how simple it would all have been,’ he once muttered to Watson, ‘had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it.’ While Holmes was helping to change public perceptions as to what the detective was capable of, Bell and, especially, Littlejohn were spearheading improvements in real-life practice.
Bell and Littlejohn first started working together on real-time criminal investigations sometime around the early 1870s – several years into their acquaintanceship. In 1878, they cooperated on a case that brought Edinburgh to a standstill for a while – an affair that would cement their reputation among the select few who knew of their joint involvement. On 2 January 1878, a young mother, Elizabeth Chantrelle, was discovered in her bed, seriously ill from apparent coal-gas poisoning. Littlejohn was called to the scene by the woman’s GP – whether in his capacity as police surgeon or as an old friend and trusted colleague is not clear – but despite their best efforts and those of the infirmary, by the end of the day she was dead. Littlejohn expressed disquiet about the assumed cause of death and, after consultation with Bell and extensive post-mortem testing, it was discovered that Elizabeth had died not from gas inhalation but from opium poisoning. Suspicion quickly fell upon her dissolute husband, a teacher of French origin called Eugene Chantrelle – in fact, a former teacher of Doyle’s when the author was a seven-year-old at Edinburgh’s Newington Academy – who had met the victim when she was a fifteen-year-old pupil of his. The trial, although relatively open-and-shut, caused a sensation and filled countless column inches in the newspapers, although word of Bell’s involvement was kept quiet. A long while after, a former student of Bell’s, one Z. M. Hamilton, recalled the morning that Chantrelle was hanged, with Littlejohn in attendance in his role of police surgeon. Hamilton reported how Chantrelle removed his hat and took a final puff on his cigar before turning to the doctor. ‘Bye-bye, Littlejohn,’ Hamilton reported Chantrelle as saying. ‘Don’t forget to give my compliments to Joe Bell. You both did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold.’
There were plenty more high-profile cases to follow. Among them was that of Jack the Ripper, who notoriously unleashed a reign of terror in London during 1888 when he murdered and dismembered at least five women. Although the case remains officially unsolved, years later Bell would allude to the fact that he and a colleague (surely it could only have been Littlejohn) had undertaken a review of the evidence for Scotland Yard. After a close study of all the available information, each then independently wrote the name of the person they considered the chief suspect. The two hit upon the same man – whose identity has infuriatingly been lost in the annals of time – and duly passed on their thoughts to the police in London. Within weeks, it is said, the murderous spree had come to an end.
The year 1889 proved another notable one for the Littlejohn–Bell partnership. In March was the trial of William Bury, accused of killing and mutilating his wife in Dundee. After initially confessing to the murder, he entered a plea of not guilty and it was a post-mortem (the third carried out on the victim) conducted by Littlejohn that was instrumental in securing a conviction. The Burys had only moved to Scotland at the beginning of the year. They had previously lived in Bow, East London, close to Jack the Ripper’s hunting ground, prompting speculation that Bury might actually have been the Ripper.
In November came another trial for which the public literally queued around the block. On this occasion, it centred on the death of an Englishman, Edwin Rose, on the picturesque Isle of Arran. His body was discovered in a howff – a sort of hut hewn from rock – a little below the summit of Arran’s highest peak, Goatfell. He had been missing for some three weeks when his decomposing corpse was found with calamitous injuries to the head and back. The police soon alighted on a travelling companion he had recently met, a Scot called John Laurie, as his murderer. Laurie was in many ways an unappealing character and admitted robbing Rose but vehemently denied killing him. The defence suggested death had been caused by an accidental fall. Littlejohn was again pivotal to proceedings, arguing that such a fall could not possibly have resulted in the violent injuries Rose had suffered. Laurie was subsequently found guilty by majority verdict. Again, Bell’s name was absent from coverage of proceedings but his behind-the-scenes involvement as Littlejohn’s ‘second man’ is highly likely. His anonymity would not last much longer, though – the Ardlamont mystery was just four years away and it would thrust him and Littlejohn together into the public spotlight, whether they liked it or not.