Slater’s solicitor Ewing Speirs, whose memorial had helped avert his client’s judicial murder, died in December 1909, at thirty-seven, after an apoplectic fit. He was succeeded on the case by a colleague, Alexander Shaughnessy, and it was almost certainly Shaughnessy who persuaded Conan Doyle to take up Slater’s cause.
Shaughnessy could not have enlisted a better advocate. By 1912, when he began looking deeply into Slater’s conviction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most famous men in Britain. He had built steadily, and increasingly publicly, on his earlier exploits, in 1896 covering the war between the British and the Dervishes in Egypt for the Westminster Gazette, and in 1900 volunteering as a military doctor in a pestilence-ridden South African field hospital amid the Boer War. (“For them the bullets, for us the microbes, and both for the honour of the flag,” he would write, with characteristic patriotic grandeur.) He published an account of the conflict, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in 1902, and that year was knighted for his services in connection with the war. He lectured throughout Europe and America on a variety of subjects.
He also continued publishing Sherlock Holmes tales, which had already made him one of the highest-paid writers of the day. “At a time in history when a middle-class British professional might make £150 a year, Conan Doyle earned £100 per thousand words,” the American mystery writer Steven Womack has observed. “The American magazine Collier’s Weekly would eventually offer $25,000 for six Sherlock Holmes short stories, roughly a decade’s income or more for most Americans of the time. To describe it in today’s terms, Conan Doyle was the Stephen King of his time.”
Though Conan Doyle personified late Victorian sensibilities as much as any other public figure, he seemed refreshingly, if not entirely, free of the period’s endemic anti-Semitism. His account of touring World War I battlefronts, for instance, reveals an attitude of commendable liberalism, though for present-day readers it is marred by more than a dash of stereotype:
I lunched that day at the Head-quarters of Sir John Monash, an excellent soldier who had done really splendid work, especially since the advance began….He showed that the long line of fighting Jews which began with Joshua still carries on. One of the Australian Divisional Generals, Rosenthal, was also a Jew, and the Head-quarters Staff was full of eagle-nosed, black-haired warriors. It spoke well for them and well also for the perfect equality of the Australian system, which would have the best man at the top, be he who he might.
To the extent that he embodied the ethos of his age, Conan Doyle sought to impose that ethos wherever he could: in his ceaseless flow of letters to newspapers on issues he held dear; in his public campaign to make British divorce laws more favorable to women who sought to escape, he wrote, “from the embraces of drunkards, from bondage to cruel men, from the iron which fetter locks them to the felon or the hopeless maniac”; and in his role as a parent.
In a letter to Conan Doyle’s biographer Pierre Nordon in 1959, nearly thirty years after his father’s death, Adrian Conan Doyle recounted a telling anecdote:
When I shot a crocodile in East Africa—an actual man-eater which had taken a negro the night before—a lad plunged into the water to see if he could reach with a pole the body which had submerged. We did not know if the monster was dead or not or whether it had a mate. The lad went in against my father’s shouted orders, but once in, I had to go in too: Terrified, of course, but I knew that my father would take it as a natural necessity that I should disobey his orders rather than permit someone of lower status than his son to take a hideous risk from which I shrank. It was a code as clear as a flame before an altar and just about as comfortable as the periodic application of that flame to one’s living flesh.
For Conan Doyle, the Victorian code of personal deportment was ironclad. “Two white lies are permitted to a gentleman,” he wrote in 1924: “to screen a woman, or to get into a fight when the fight is a rightful one.” As to what defined a gentleman, Nordon wrote, “Mr. Adrian Conan Doyle and Miss Mary Conan Doyle both recall hearing their father declare: ‘There are three tests, and three tests only, of a gentleman and they have nothing to do with wealth, position or show. What alone counts is: Firstly, a man’s chivalry towards women; Secondly: his rectitude in matters of finance; Thirdly, his courtesy towards those born in a lower social position, and therefore dependent.’ ”
At once benevolent progressive and paternalistic traditionalist, Conan Doyle fully encapsulated the dual sensibility of his age. In The True Conan Doyle, his monograph about his father, Adrian recalled the contrast:
There was a breadth of mind in the man who could convey to a son’s consciousness that in the case of sexual illness he could rely absolutely upon the parental comprehension and assistance. Au contraire, there was narrow-mindedness in the man who revolted violently to the mildest of risqué observations….The same may be said about his reaction to the most harmless liberty taken by any well-meaning stranger. Indeed, there were few things that could stir Conan Doyle more swiftly to a roar of Celtic rage than a clap on the back, the uninvited use of his Christian name, or the presumptuous observation….We meet him in the hands that violently broke his son’s pipe into matchwood in a public place because the writer of this article insisted on smoking it despite the presence of women….With this hard and sometimes threatening figure before us, the reader will not find it difficult to believe that even at the age of 70, my father sallied out in a capital city of the Empire with the express purpose of thrashing with his favourite umbrella the rascal who had publicly stated that he was making psychic propaganda from the death of his eldest son.
At the same time, Adrian continued: “This is the very individual who would drive thirty miles out of his route in order that he might have the honour to be of assistance to some old gypsy woman; the man who…would sit all night by the bedside of a sick servant to read aloud to him or soothe his pain. One can understand why, when Conan Doyle went to the Boer War, his butler went with him as a devoted squire.”
Conan Doyle’s sense of honor extended to matters of the heart. In 1893, his first wife, Louise, fell ill with tuberculosis. There was evidently little grand passion between them, but Conan Doyle was fond of her and did everything in his power to restore her to health. Though doctors had given Louise only months to live, he managed, by seeking the finest medical care and traveling with her to the clear air of Switzerland, to prolong her life for thirteen years. Yet for the last nine of those years he was deeply in love with another woman.
In 1897, Conan Doyle had met Jean Leckie, a wealthy, golden-haired Englishwoman of Scottish ancestry some fifteen years his junior. In the years that followed, until Louise’s death in 1906, Conan Doyle and Jean maintained an ardent, but by all accounts chaste, courtship. Ever the Victorian man of honor, he told Jean that he would not leave his wife; nor would he divorce her or be unfaithful. “Even among writers who were English gentlemen, this was astonishing behavior,” Womack has written. “H. G. Wells and Charles Dickens, two other acclaimed English gentlemen of letters, had both mistresses and illegitimate children.” In 1907, the year after Louise’s death, Conan Doyle married Jean.
But there was something else—something even more than Conan Doyle’s wealth, probity, and acclaim—that made his recruitment to Slater’s cause especially valuable: when it came to solving real-life mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had done this sort of thing before.
LONG AN AVID READER of detective fiction, Conan Doyle was also deeply interested in true crime. He amassed a library of nonfiction crime books and clippings that, while doubtless not as sprawlingly untidy as the one Holmes maintained at Baker Street, was probably almost as comprehensive. Among the titles in his collection were The Tryal of Mary Blandy, Spinster, for the Murder of Her Father Francis Blandy, Gent.; Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders; The Great Forgeries of William Roupell, Late M.P. for Lambeth; and Alexandre Dumas’s eight-volume Celebrated Crimes. Though Conan Doyle acquired most of this library between 1911 and 1929, after two-thirds of the Holmes tales had already appeared in print, it doubtless provided grist for later stories in the canon and, more generally, for his diagnostic imagination.*
In the early twentieth century, Conan Doyle wrote several magazine articles recounting actual murder cases; three were published posthumously in book form as Strange Studies from Life. In 1904, he became an inaugural member of the Crimes Club, a secret London dining society devoted to the discussion of contemporary and historical cases. Other members included the mystery novelist Max Pemberton; Harry Irving, son of the celebrated stage actor Sir Henry Irving; and the journalist Fletcher Robinson, who in regaling Conan Doyle with a ghost story from the brooding Dartmoor countryside had inspired The Hound of the Baskervilles. The cases they analyzed are not known with certainty, but are believed to include that of Thomas Neill Cream, the Victorian physician and serial poisoner; the Adolf Beck mistaken-identity debacle of 1895; and the theft in 1907 of the Irish crown jewels.
As his renown grew, Conan Doyle was inundated with letters from ordinary men and women, beseeching him to look into disappearances and other unexplained events. “We have the epitome of Holmes at work,” Adrian Conan Doyle recalled:
My memories as a youth are mottled with sudden, silent periods when, following upon some agitated stranger or missive, my father would disappear into his study for two or three days on end. It was not a question of affectation but complete mental absorption that checked and counter-checked, pondered, dissected and sought the clue to some mystery that had been hurried to him as the last court of appeal. The hushed footfalls of the whole household, the tray of untasted food standing on the threshold, the subconscious feeling of tension that would settle on family and staff alike, were no less than the reflected essence of the brain, the lamp, and the letter that wrought their unpublicized drama on the inner side of that curtained door.
Of these cases, Conan Doyle solved more than his share. Once, with a single question, he unraveled a mystery that had vexed the police for years. The case concerned a woman, Camille Cecile Holland, who in 1899 had disappeared from Moat House Farm, the isolated home in the English countryside she had shared with her common-law husband, Samuel Herbert Dougal. Nothing was heard from Holland for years, though Dougal continued to cash a stream of checks in her name. She was rumored to have been murdered, but a police search of the farm, where Dougal was living with his new lover, turned up nothing.
In 1904, when Holland had been missing nearly five years, a group of London journalists solicited Conan Doyle’s opinion of the case. Yes, he agreed, she had almost certainly been murdered, but the question remained: Where was the body?
No one knew, the journalists told him. Even Scotland Yard, brought in to assist the local police, had scoured every room of the house, along with the outbuildings and grounds of Moat House Farm, but had found nothing.
“What about the moat?” Conan Doyle said simply.
And there, in a former drainage trench, cut into the moat but later filled in with earth, police found the body of Camille Cecile Holland, dead from a gunshot wound. Dougal was arrested, tried, and convicted. He confessed his guilt on the scaffold, moments before he dropped to eternity.
Another case Conan Doyle tackled involved a man who had vanished from the Langham Hotel in London. His solution is a model of abductive logic worthy of Holmes. “A few of the problems which have come my way have been very similar to some which I had invented for the exhibition of the reasoning of Mr. Holmes,” he wrote in 1924. “I might perhaps quote one in which that gentleman’s method of thought was copied with complete success.” The case was this:
A gentleman had disappeared. He had drawn a bank balance of £40 which was known to be on him. It was feared that he had been murdered for the sake of the money. He had last been heard of stopping at a large hotel in London, having come from the country that day. In the evening he went to a music-hall performance, came out of it about ten o’clock, returned to his hotel, changed his evening clothes, which were found in his room next day, and disappeared utterly. No one saw him leave the hotel, but a man occupying a neighbouring room declared that he had heard him moving during the night. A week had elapsed at the time that I was consulted, but the police had discovered nothing. Where was the man?
These were the whole of the facts as communicated to me by his relatives in the country. Endeavouring to see the matter through the eyes of Mr. Holmes, I answered by return mail that he was evidently either in Glasgow or Edinburgh. It proved later that he had, as a fact, gone to Edinburgh, though in the week that had passed he had moved to another part of Scotland.
There I should leave the matter, for, as Dr. Watson has often shown, a solution explained is a mystery spoiled. At this stage the reader can lay down the book and show how simple it all is by working out the problem for himself. He has all the data which were ever given to me. For the sake of those, however, who have no turn for such conundrums, I will try to indicate the links which make the chain. The one advantage which I possessed was that I was familiar with the routine of London hotels—though I fancy it differs little from that of hotels elsewhere.
The first thing was to look at the facts and separate what was certain from what was conjecture. It was all certain except the statement of the person who heard the missing man in the night. How could he tell such a sound from any other sound in a large hotel? That point could be disregarded, if it traversed the general conclusions.
The first clear deduction was that the man had meant to disappear. Why else should he draw all his money? He had got out of the hotel during the night. But there is a night porter in all hotels, and it is impossible to get out without his knowledge when the door is once shut. The door is shut after the theatre-goers return—say at twelve o’clock. Therefore, the man left the hotel before twelve o’clock. He had come from the music-hall at ten, had changed his clothes, and had departed with his bag. No one had seen him do so. The inference is that he had done it at the moment when the hall was full of the returning guests, which is from eleven to eleven-thirty. After that hour, even if the door were still open, there are few people coming and going so that he with his bag would certainly have been seen.
Having got so far upon firm ground, we now ask ourselves why a man who desires to hide himself should go out at such an hour. If he intended to conceal himself in London he need never have gone to the hotel at all. Clearly then he was going to catch a train which would carry him away. But a man who is deposited by a train in any provincial station during the night is likely to be noticed, and he might be sure that when the alarm was raised and his description given, some guard or porter would remember him. Therefore, his destination would be some large town which he would reach as a terminus where all his fellow passengers would disembark and where he would lose himself in the crowd. When one turns up the time table and sees that the great Scotch expresses bound for Edinburgh and Glasgow start about midnight, the goal is reached. As for his dress-suit, the fact that he abandoned it proved that he intended to adopt a line of life where there were no social amenities. This deduction also proved to be correct.
I quote such a case in order to show that the general lines of reasoning advocated by Holmes have a real practical application to life.
Conan Doyle would take up his first major real-life case, the wrongful conviction of George Edalji, in 1906. It was a saga that in its miscarriage of justice, high public drama, undiluted xenophobia, and vindication brought about chiefly through Conan Doyle’s efforts acutely prefigured the Slater case.
* In 1911, Conan Doyle purchased fifty-one true-crime volumes from the estate of the lyricist W. S. Gilbert, the “Gilbert” of Gilbert and Sullivan.