View source for Review:The Real World of Sherlock Holmes/Richard Lancelyn Green

{{Cargo_Reviews_Articles
 |Date=1991-09-01
 |Book=The Real World of Sherlock Holmes
 |BookAuthor=Peter Costello
 |Reviewer=Richard Lancelyn Green
 |Topics=Criminology
}}
This review of the book ''"The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The true crimes investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle", by Peter Costello'' was written by [[Richard Lancelyn Green]] and published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 2, No. 2) in autumn 1991.

This sharply critical review challenges Peter Costello's claim that [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] functioned as a real-life detective or criminologist, arguing instead that his involvement in cases such as [[George Edalji|Edalji]] and [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] was journalistic, partial, and often flawed. It contends that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s credulity in spiritualism and reliance on hearsay undermine any serious attempt to present him as a rigorous criminal investigator. 


== Review ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1991-09-p179-review-rlg.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (autumn 1991, p. 179)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1991-09-p180-review-rlg.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (autumn 1991, p. 180)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1991-09-p181-review-rlg.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (autumn 1991, p. 181)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1991-09-p182-review-rlg.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (autumn 1991, p. 182)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1991-09-p183-review-rlg.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (autumn 1991, p. 183)]]

: [[File:Carroll-graf-1991-the-real-world-of-sh.jpg|100px]]
: '''The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The true crimes investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle'''
: by Peter Costello 
: Robinson, 1991; 235pp; £14.95 


'''Reviewed by Richard Lancelyn Green'''

It may be that[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was both [[Sherlock Holmes]] and [[Dr. Watson]], but the two taken together would have had difficulty in solving the simplest case in real life. The theoretical basis is good, but it is one thing to create the fictional author of a monograph on tobacco ash and quite another to be able to make use of such information in the serious matter of criminal investigation. The creaking structure of many of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s stories, the poor attention to detail, and the combination of chance and luck are skilfully wielded together to make entertaining tales, but they do not equip the author to undertake detective work. It is highly presumptuous to think otherwise and would imply that all writers of detective stories were crypto-detectives. Until [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] succumbed to a sense of his own infallibility, he knew that he had no accomplishments or training in this field. 

It is also doubtful whether he can be called a criminologist and any claim to this effect requires at least a definition of criminology. It is surely somebody who brings an unbiased mind to the study of crime. With [[George Edalji]] and [[Oscar Slater]], [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] acted as a propagandist. He was not involved in their trials and only took a passing interest after the former had been released and the latter had been imprisoned. He paid one cursory visit to Great Wyrley and met Edalji once in a London hotel. He saw [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] for the first time in 1928. Even William Roughead who valued [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s contribution as a publicist and dedicated the 1929 edition of ''The Trial of Oscar Slater'' to him was hard pressed to find anything original in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s booklet on the case. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s only contribution seemed to be the suggestion that a blunt instrument, other than the hammer produced at the trial, had been used to bludgeon Miss Gilchrist. 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] did not prove [[George Edalji|Edalji]]'s innocence, nor did he name the true culprit. He was, in effect, a journalist. He acted throughout on the assumption of [[George Edalji|Edalji]]'s innocence and thereby ignored strong evidence against him. (A new detailed study of the subject by Michael Harley will, I believe, show that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] manipulated the evidence and was ignorant of many of the true facts of the case). His belief that he had identified the culprits was not shared by others and he was warned that he would be sued for libel if he were to publish the names of those he considered guilty, as his evidence was flawed and would not stand up in court. 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s most direct involvement with the [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] case was as a spectator when he visited Edinburgh in June 1928 for the Appeal which became possible when Parliament gave retrospective effect to the two year old Criminal Appeal Act for Scotland. The Appeal failed on three of four counts. The original verdict was upheld, the new evidence was not accepted, and the Crown was found not guilty of suppressing evidence. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was convinced that the Appeal would be successful on all these points. The only success was on the technical question of a misdirection by the judge. As a result, [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] was offered a small ex gratia payment of £6,000 without costs. Although [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] had basked in a certain reflected glory, the whole thing turned sour when he refused to honour his commitment to meet half (or even a quarter of the costs). [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] pointed out that he had not sanctioned the Appeal and had not been satisfied by the result. He had never given [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] any authority to act on his behalf and had not wanted him or anyone else to underwrite the costs. He also pointed out that Doyle was on record as saying that it would be unfair to expect [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] to pay his own costs. Things went from bad to worse. [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] began to complain that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] had received large sums of money for the articles he had written about the case and [[Jean Elizabeth Leckie|Lady Conan Doyle]] complained that [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] was worse than a dog. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] finally threatened to take [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] to court and was only dissuaded from doing so by the intercession of his friends. 

If the [[George Edalji|Edalji]] and [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] cases are seen in perspective, then everything else falls away like a house of cards. The fact that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was visited by a policeman after [[Louisa Hawkins|Touie]]'s brother died in 1885 and the implied fear that he had in effect murdered the young man does not as Costello says turn a doctor into a writer of detective stories. Nor was he innocence personified or he would not have married [[Louisa Hawkins|Touie]]. There is no evidence that he was aware of the Edinburgh detectives, but it is clear beyond question that [[Sherlock Holmes]] is based on Poe and Gaboriau. Early visits to the theatre or to Madame Tussaud's do not make a man either a criminal or a detective. 

The first 'case' which can be so called is that of Mrs Castle, an American visitor to London in 1896, who was arrested at the Hotel Cecil for shoplifting. It seems that Costello has taken his details from Letters to the Press where there is a note about this case but, in doing so, he has added errors of his own. The woman and her husband arrived in May, not September, and she was given a very short prison sentence without rather than with hard labour. Costello claims that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] came to the aid of the 'oppressed' and of the 'innocent and misunderstood'. This is simply not so. Mrs Castle was not merely guilty of taking a few toast racks, as [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] suggested, but of several counts of shoplifting from London stores. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s short letter to [[The Times]] was intended as a goodwill gesture to America. He was writing as a doctor and his solution was the same as that which he proposed for prominent homosexuals that they should be sent to the Consulting-room rather than to prison. 

What follows in Costello's book is even more insubstantial. The 'Strange Studies from Life', which were Greenhough Smith's attempt to encourage [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] to write about true crimes, were an abject failure. If ever a writer proved that he was not a criminologist, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] did so in these rather fanciful accounts of murders. He had originally intended to do twelve, but gave up after only three. He knew they were poor and he received letters of complaint, because of his errors of fact, from those who had been directly involved. 

Arthur Lambton's Crimes Club, which [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was invited to join because of the fame of [[Sherlock Holmes]], was a dinner club for amateur criminologists. It was the influence of this club and of Churton Collins which induced him to turn his attention to [[George Edalji|Edalji]] as a way of coming to terms with the death of his wife (and as a way of emulating G.R. Sims who had cleared the name of Adolph Beck through his campaigning journalism) but, beyond a walk around Whitechapel and one or two dinners, he rarely attended the club and it made so little impression upon him that he never mentioned it. 

The evidence for his involvement with the famous crimes of the period is, at best, gossamer-thin. Costello talks about the Moat Farm Murder, the Brides in the Bath and the Crippen Case. What is the evidence for [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s involvement? It seems in the first two instances to be nothing more than a fanciful article in an American pulp magazine which produces not one shred of evidence, and in the third it is a claim made by Charles Higham that Marshall Hall invited [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] to attend the Crippen trial for which, again, there is no supporting evidence. 

Higham is also the source for the name of the London hotel from which a man had disappeared. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] claimed that he knew the man would be discovered in Edinburgh or Glasgow as he had left the hotel just before midnight. He never mentioned the name of the hotel and, as Higham has no additional knowledge of the case, it is clear that he picked the Langham merely because Doyle had been invited to dinner there in 1889. It is bad scholarship and Costello is compounding the error by accepting it. 

No less unsupported is Costello's claim (on the second-hand hearsay evidence of Edmund Locard in a conversation with Irving Wallace) that Jules Bonnot, the 'motor bandit' had been [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s chauffeur. When was he [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s chauffeur? The account books show to whom [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] paid wages and there is no evidence in any of them that he had such a person as his chauffeur; and why did he never mention this startling fact if it were true? What is more damning is that Costello appears to have taken an illustration for this chapter from Ashton-Wolfe's ''Outlaws of Modern Days'' which has a chapter on Bonnot, and that book makes it crystal clear that it was Ashton-Wolfe himself who had had Bonnot as his mechanic and chauffeur. There is no reference to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]], even though the book itself is dedicated to him. Either Irving Wallace misunderstood Locard, or Locard confused the two Englishmen or, conceivably, Doyle told Locard that the man resembled his own chauffeur while Locard thought that he had said Bonnot had been his chauffeur. Whatever reasons may be given for the error, it remains an error and the mind boggles at the idea that Jules Bonnot had been in England and was employed at Crowborough! 

As each 'casebook' collapses into nothing more than a few comments in a newspaper or a brief discussion in one of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s travel books, one begins to pity Costello in his struggle against the odds. Especially hard for somebody trying to prove that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was a sophisticated criminologist is the fact that he was an ardent spiritualist. His belief in psychometry, which led to his intervention in the Christie case (where he announced his findings after her re-appearance) causes the author concern and the book eventually trails off into inconsequence. 

It has to be said that a man who could believe in spiritualism, who could give his backing to people who were subsequently exposed as frauds, who was taken in time and time again by the elementary ruses of the spiritualist world, who could believe in fairies, was not a man who could be regarded as looking at evidence in an impartial way. He was blind in a way which was perverse. Even when he was investigating magicians, whom he knew were imitating the methods of spirit photographers, he could not see simple sleights of hand. He was taken in by the 'masked medium' who used a radio receiver to learn of the contents of a 'sealed bag' and he left himself no way out when giving blanket approval to the fraudulent. 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] cannot be separated from spiritualism. One has only to read his [[The History of Spiritualism|History of Spiritualism]] to realise that it is blatant propaganda. Where are the reports of the exposures? And how could he, for example, think that a piece of chalk contained between two slates could be used by a spirit to write? The space between them simply would not permit such a thing. How could he continue to trust a medium who brought forth the breath of his mother when he felt the man's tweed jacket brushing against him while he was supposed to be tied to a chair? It defies belief. A criminologist would have taken one look at the 'phenomena' of spiritualism and would have exposed the lot, root and branch. 

Costello's book adds to the growing body of works about [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] based largely on hearsay the 'it is said' and 'he must have known' school of writing. There is little or no original research, no documentary evidence. He attaches [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s name to some famous murder and then gives lengthy details about that instead of about [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s involvement. It is flattering that Costello should have been so heavily dependent on the introduction to ''The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes'' (even though the debt is unacknowledged), but it would have been preferable if he had cast some new light on the subject. In an ideal world, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] would have studied criminology, he would have read all the books which he purchased late in life and which gloried in the name of his 'crime library', but unfortunately his interests lay elsewhere. He was reading books on spiritualism. He was filling his mind with the bad logic and false reasoning of the apologists for a discredited 'faith'. He was willing to put his trust in an ambiguous message purporting to explain the facts of the [[Oscar Slater|Slater]] case, but never explained why the victims could not themselves be contacted and clear up once and for all the mysteries of their death. 

Unless authors can bring themselves to consider the facts about [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s life in an open way, we will continue to be subjected to books which exist in a vacuum of wishful thinking and, in the end, do [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] a disservice by making him as artificial as [[Sherlock Holmes]].







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