View source for The Real Sherlock Holmes (article december 1930)

''The Real Sherlock Holmes'' is an article written by [[Vincent Starrett]] published in [[The Golden Book Magazine]] in december 1930.


== The Real Sherlock Holmes ==
[[File:the-golden-book-magazine-1930-12-p81-the-real-sherlock-holmes.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Golden Book Magazine]] (december 1930, p. 81)<br /><br />(c) Pirie MacDonald — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]]
[[File:the-golden-book-magazine-1930-12-p82-the-real-sherlock-holmes.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Golden Book Magazine]] (december 1930, p. 82)]]
[[File:the-golden-book-magazine-1930-12-p83-the-real-sherlock-holmes.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Golden Book Magazine]] (december 1930, p. 83)]]
[[File:the-golden-book-magazine-1930-12-p84-the-real-sherlock-holmes.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Golden Book Magazine]] (december 1930, p. 84)]]

By Vincent Starrett 

''The real [[Sherlock Holmes]], says Mr. Starrett, was [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] himself, and here are two of the actual cases he solved.''


The greatest detective of the modern world is dead at last-irrevocably dead. [[Sherlock Holmes]] has gone upon his final quest, the most mysterious of all his strange adventures.

There can be little doubt that the real [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] was [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] himself. In innumerable ways throughout a life of extraordinary service the novelist demonstrated the truth of the assertion. From first to last-as student, physician, writer, spiritualist, and prophet of the war-he was always the private detective, the seeker after hidden truths, the fathomer of obscure mysteries, the hound of justice upon the trail of injustice and official apathy.

To be sure, he has told us, time and again, that the original model for the immortal detective was [[Joseph Bell|Dr. Joseph Bell]] of Edinburgh, his one-time instructor in medicine; but [[Joseph Bell|Bell]] was only the suggestion, the accidental inspiration of the mind that was to create the sleuth of Baker Street. Latent in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]], himself, was all that went to the making of [[Sherlock Holmes]].

In the circumstances, and after the tales had become known, it was inevitable that the author of the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] saga would be called upon to enact the rôle of his fictional character, and not infrequently he accepted the implied challenge. Twice in his career he undertook cases requiring heavy call upon his time and energies, because he believed that justice had not been done. The cases of [[George Edalji]] and [[Oscar Slater]] were notorious in their day. They shook England; and the thunder of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s denunciations crossed the Atlantic.

There is a flavor of the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] tales in both episodes — that touch of the bizarre, bordering on the  fantastic, that marks most of the fictive adventures. Chronologically, the [[George Edalji|Edalji]] case stands first. The facts are as follows: 

[[George Edalji]], a young law student, was the son of a certain Rev. S. Edalji, a Parsee, yet vicar of the Anglican parish of Great Wyrley, whose wife was an English woman. The vicar was a kindly, intelligent man, performing his churchly duties with fidelity. His wife was an excellent wife. Their son, the half-caste [[George Edalji]], was a young man of irreproachable character, and an admirable student who had won the highest honors in his legal studies. Nevertheless, the situation was unfortunate. "How the vicar came to be a Parsee," wrote [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], "or how a Parsee came to be the vicar, I have no idea. Perhaps some catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a colored clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation."

The family became the target for considerable local malice, and was for a time subjected to a veritable broadside of anonymous letters, many of them of "the most monstrous description." Shortly thereafter an epidemic of horse-maiming broke out, and the outrages lasted for a considerable period. The police accomplished next to nothing until popular clamor forced an activity; then a hurried investigation was conducted and [[George Edalji]] was arrested for the crime that is, for the crime of horse-maiming. The principal evidence against him was found in certain of the anonymous letters, in which the writer hinted at a knowledge of the crimes involving the horses. It was thought that [[George Edalji]] had written the letters which for so long had plagued his family. 

This evidence, as later pointed out by [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]], was incredibly weak; yet the police, "all pulling together and twisting all things to their end," secured a conviction, and the prisoner was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. This was in 1903.

It was not until 1906 that [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] heard of the rather obscure case; then a statement of it caught his eye in an unimportant journal. "As I read," he later wrote, "the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right." This included a careful reading of everything he could obtain bearing upon the case, a study of the trial, a visit to the family of the condemned man, and a tour of investigation over the scene of the several crimes. Early in 1907 he began publication of a series of articles analyzing the evidence, and shortly England was ringing with the wrongs of [[George Edalji]]. 

"If the whole land had been raked, I do not think that it would have been possible to find a man who was so unlikely, and indeed so incapable of committing such actions," writes [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] in his autobiography, Memoirs and Adventures. "Nothing in his life had ever been urged against him. His old schoolmaster with years of experience testified to his mild and tractable disposition. He had served his time with a Birmingham solicitor, who gave him the highest references. He had never shown traits of cruelty. He was ... devoted to his work... and he had already at the age of twenty-seven written a book upon Railway Law. Finally, he was a total abstainer, and so blind that he was unable to recognize anyone at the distance of six yards. It was clear that the inherent improbability of such a man committing a long succession of bloody and brutal crimes was so great that it could only be met by the suggestion of insanity. There had never, however, been any indication even of eccentricity in [[George Edalji]]. On the contrary, his statements of defense were measured and rational, and he had come through a series of experiences which might well have unhinged a weaker intellect." 

One hears the familiar voice of [[Sherlock Holmes]] himself in such a statement. 

It had been charged at the trial that Edalji had committed the mutilations for which he was being tried, at some time in the evening. The prisoner was able to prove a certain alibi, however, so the police dexterously shifted ground and advanced a new theory, to wit: that the crimes had been committed in the early hours of the morning. As against this, it was shown that [[George Edalji]] slept in the same room as his father, the Parsee vicar, who was not only a light sleeper but in the habit of locking the door of the chamber each night before he retired. The vicar swore his son had never left the room during the night. "This may not constitute an absolute alibi in the eye of the law," comments [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] dryly, "but it is difficult to imagine anything nearer to one unless a sentinel had been placed outside the door all night."

But the defense of Edalji was weakly conducted. As far as [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was able to discover, no mention ever was made of the fact that the prisoner was virtually blind-save in a good light-while between his home and the scene of the mutilations stretched the breadth of the London and North-Western Railway, a complex expanse of rails and wires and other obstacles, with hedges upon either side, difficult enough for any man to pass in daylight. 

All of and more, was set forth by [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] in his indignant articles, and se great was the storm he stirred up that a government committee was appointed to examine and report. The finding, when at length it came to hand, was a compromise. The committee was severe enough upon the condemnation of Edalji and could find no evidence to associate him with the crime, but it clung to the old theory that he had written the anonymous letters-which were in two handwritings — and had been, therefore, himself contributory to the miscarriage of justice. Edalji was freed but was denied compensation for his long incarceration. "A blot upon the record of English justice," [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] calls it; and adds: "It is to be remembered that the man was never tried for writing the letters — a charge which could not have been sustained-so that as the matter stands he has got no redress for three years of admitted false imprisonment, on the score that he did something else for which he has never been tried." 

But [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] in his Sherlockian explorations at Wyrley had found what seemed to him a direct clew to the writer or writers of the letters, and also to the identity of the mutilator or mutilators. "I became interested," he says, "the more so as the facts were very complex and I had to do with people who were insane as well as criminal. I have several letters threatening my life in the same writing as those which assailed the Edaljis a fact which did not appear to shake in the least the Home Office conviction that [[George Edalji]] had written them all.... The mistake I made was that having got on the track of the miscreant I let the police and the Home Office know my results before they were absolutely completed. There was a strong prima facie case, but it needed the goodwill and cooperation of the authorities to ram it home.... Let me briefly state the case that the public may judge. I will call the suspect 'X.' I was able to show: 

"1. That 'X' had shown a peculiar knife or horse-lancet to someone and had stated that this knife did the crimes. I had this knife in my possession. 

"2. That this knife or a similar knife must have been used in some of the crimes, as shown by the shallow incision. 

"3. That 'X' had been trained in the slaughter-yard and the cattleship, and was accustomed to brutal treatment of animals. 
 
"4. That he had a clear record both of anonymous fore starting for America. New York was warned of letters and of destructive propensities. 

"5. That his writing and that of his brother exactly fitted into the two writings of the anonymous letters. In this I had strong independent evidence. 

"6. That he had shown signs of periodical insanity and that his household and bedroom were such that he could leave unseen at any hour of the night. 

"There were very many corroborative evidences, but those were the main ones, coupled with the fact that when 'X' was away for some years the letters and outrages stopped, but began again when he returned. On the other hand, when Edalji was put in prison the outrages went on the same as before." 

A very workmanlike summary, one thinks, and quite worthy of [[Sherlock Holmes]] at his best. Nothing ever was done for Edalji, however, after his release except by individuals. "He came to my wedding reception," [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] records, "and there was no guest whom I was prouder to see." 

The Slater case, the celebrity of which was greater than that of [[George Edalji]], came to the detective-novelist as a result of the other. The victim was a Miss Marion Gilchrist, an elderly spinster living in Glasgow. She was murdered in her flat, in which she had lived for thirty years, on the 21st of December, 1908. Her servant, Helen Lambie, was out of the place at the time, purchasing a newspaper, and it was during her ten-minute absence that the murder was committed. Returning from her errand, the servant found a young man named Adams at the Gilchrist door, ringing the bell. He was from the flat below. He and his sisters had heard a noise above, in Miss Gilchrist's apartment, and a heavy fall, and he had been sent upstairs to ascertain what had happened. The servant opened the door with her key. Then as they hesitated on the threshold, a man appeared from within, who approached them pleasantly, seemed about to speak, but instead passed them and rushed down the stairs. In the dining room the body of Miss Gilchrist was found, the head brutally beaten in and covered with a rug. 

In spite of the fact that Miss Gilchrist was the possessor of a valuable collection of jewelry, robbery would appear not to have been the motive for the murder, since all that was missing was a crescent diamond brooch worth possibly £50. A box of papers had been broken open and the contents scattered. The description of the man seen by Adams and Helen Lambie was not particularly good, as reported by them; they were in some disagreement; and it was not at all the description of [[Oscar Slater]], a German Jew by extraction, who was ultimately arrested and condemned for the crime. 

The apprehension of Slater came about because he had pawned a diamond brooch just before starting for America. New York was warned of his expected advent on American shores, and he was arrested and returned to Glasgow, where it was discovered beyond a question of doubt that the brooch in question had been in his possession for years and never had belonged to Miss Gilchrist. 

The public had lost its head, however, and the police were in similar state. Slater was poor and without friends. His morals were shown not to have been of the highest, and Scottish virtue was shocked. A card of tools was found in his belongings, and it was seriously asserted that the small hammer of the set had been the instrument of death. The description of the man seen by Adams and Lambie was amended to fit Slater. The two principal witnesses were not sure, but thought the man they had seen in the hallway might have been the prisoner. The frameup may not have been deliberate, but it was a frameup. Slater was in bad case. He proved a clear alibi, but as his witnesses were his mistress and his servant girl, it was not allowed. No attempt ever was made to show a connection between Slater and Miss Gilchrist, or between Slater and anybody in the house occupied by Miss Gilchrist. He was a stranger in Glasgow. At the trial he was not too well defended, and the Crown ultimately won a conviction-under Scottish law-by a vote of nine to six. Slater was condemned to death, the scaffold was erected, and two days before the day set for the execution the sentence was commuted. He was resentenced to life imprisonment, and was serving his sentence when [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] became interested in his plight. 

In [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]]'s brilliant pamphlet, [[The Case of Oscar Slater]], now a rarity, there is all the fascination of a tale from the chronicles of [[Sherlock Holmes]]. Is not this, for instance, the veritable accent of [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] talking to the faithful Watson? [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] is wondering if the murderer was after the jewels at all. 

"When he reached the bedroom and lit the gas, he did not at once seize the watch and rings which were lying openly exposed upon the dressing-table. He did not pick up a half-sovereign from the dining table. His attention was given to a wooden box, the lid of which he wrenched open. The papers in it were strewed on the ground. Were the papers his object, and the final abstraction of one diamond brooch a mere blind?"

But, supposing the murderer to have been indeed after the jewels, "it is very instructive to note his knowledge of their location, and also its limitations. Why did he go straight into the spare bedroom where the jewels were actually kept? The same question may be asked with equal force if we consider that he was after the papers. Why the spare bedroom? Any knowledge gathered from outside (by a watcher in the back-yard, for example) would go to the length of ascertaining which was the old lady's room. One would expect a robber who had gained his information thus to go straight to that chamber. But this man did not do so. He went straight to the unlikely room in which both jewels and papers actually were. Is not this remarkably suggestive? Does it not presuppose a previous acquaintance with the inside of the flat and the ways of its owner? 

"But now note the limitations of the knowledge. If it were the jewels he was after, he knew what room they were in, but not in what part of the room. A fuller knowledge would have told him they were kept in the wardrobe. And yet he searched a box. ... To this we may add that he would seem to have shown ignorance of the habits of the inmates, or he would surely have chosen Lambie's afternoon or evening out for his attempt, and not have done it at a time when the girl was bound to be back within a very few minutes. What men had ever visited the house? The number must have been very limited. What friends? What tradesmen? What plumbers?"

Surely that is all good [[Sherlock Holmes]], as-even more brilliantly — is this: "How did the murderer get in if Lambie is correct in thinking that she shut the doors? I cannot get away from the conclusion that he had duplicate keys. In that case all becomes comprehensible, for the old lady-whose faculties were quite normal-would hear the lock go and would not be alarmed, thinking that Lambie had returned before her time. Thus, she would only know her danger when the murderer rushed into the room, and would hardly have time to rise, receive the first blow, and fall, as she was found, beside the chair upon which she had been sitting. But if he had not the keys, consider the difficulties. If the old lady had opened the flat door her body would have been found in the passage. Therefore, the police were driven to the hypothesis that the old lady heard the ring, opened the lower stair door from above (as can be done in all Scotch flats), opened the flat door, never looked over the lighted stair to see who was coming up, but returned to her chair and her magazine, leaving the door open and a free entrance to the murderer. This is possible, but is it not in the highest degree improbable? Miss Gilchrist was nervous of robbery and would not neglect obvious precautions."

The only alternatives to this reasoning, he sets forth, are "that the murderer was actually concealed in the flat when Lambie came out, and of that there is no evidence whatever, or that the visitor was someone whom the old lady knew, in which case he would naturally have been admitted."

[[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] points out that, although the crime was a singularly bloody one, no marks of blood were found on match or matchbox, and none upon the wooden box opened in the bedroom. "It has never been explained," he says, "why a rug was laid over the murdered woman. ... It is at least possible that he (i. e., the murderer) used the rug as a shield between him and his victim while he battered her with his weapon." In a brilliant examination of the evidence produced at the trial, the novelist questions the qualities of the witnesses, stresses the important fact that a knowledge of Miss Gilchrist's jewel collection was not, at the time of the murder, confined to the inmates of the house. He emphasizes the significant circumstances that a dog belonging to Miss Gilchrist had been poisoned in September of the year 1908 — that is to say, more than a month before Slater arrived in Glasgow, and more than two months before the murder. In his pamphlet he is very severe upon the Scottish Lord-Advocate who conducted the prosecution. 

All in all, it is a masterly document, ringing in every line with the dry inflections of [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] himself, and charged with that detective's hard logic and common-sense. However, it was to no immediate purpose. The novelist's newspaper campaign stirred England and even brought about another government commission to inquire into the affair; but nothing came of it, and Slater was allowed to languish in prison.

There, for years, the unhappy affair rested. From time to time, as Slater's incarceration lengthened, efforts were made to reopen the case, and [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]]'s own labors were unremitting, but in actuality it was nineteen years after the conviction before his efforts were successful. Then, at long last, Slater was released a short two years ago, in July of 1928. According to newspaper reports, he accepted a government offer of $30,000 as compensation for his wrongs; then, with strange ingratitude, refused to repay a sum of money guaranteed by [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] before the retrial at which the prisoner was acquitted.

"I had to guarantee $5,000," asserted [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]], to a press representative. "After his release, I raised $3,500 by subscription and paid the balance myself. When Slater received $30,000 compensation from the government and large sums from the newspapers, I asked him to refund my $1500, but with incredible and monstrous ingratitude he refused."

Slater, smoking a large cigar at a Brighton hotel, after a couple of rounds of golf, merely shrugged. "I can not pay," he said. "All my money is invested in annuities and though I made $10,000 from newspaper articles after my release, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] did nearly as well."

Minor cases were presented frequently for [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]]'s solution, and it was his pleasure, when in a detective mood, to put his wits to work upon the problems. In all, the habits of thought made familiar by Mr. [[Sherlock Holmes]] of Upper Baker Street were copied with entire success.

Not all his detective cases were successful, however. He relates with great gusto, in his autobiography, how, on the occasion of a burglary within a stone's throw of his own home, the village constable — with no theories at all — had seized the culprit, while he ([[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]]) had got no farther than the Holmesian conclusion that the man was left-handed and had nails in his shoes. 

Even in his spiritualistic investigations, which occupied the later years of his life to the exclusion of almost all else, [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] was at all times the detective, applying the methods of his most famous fictive character to the obscure problems of psychic phenomena. To the end he was a remarkable example of the scientific investigator touched with the curiosity and credulity of a child-an admirable blend, it would seem, for the perfect sleuth. 



 





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