Read The Devil and Sherlock Holmes for Free Online Page B

that he was unable to see properlyeven with glasses. Conan Doyle then trekked to the scene of the crime, traversing a maze of railroad tracks and hedges. “I, a strong and active man, in broad daylight, found it a hard matter to pass,” he later wrote. Indeed, he contended, it would have been impossible for a nearly blind person to make the journey and then slaughter an animal in the pitch black of night. A tribunal soon concurred, and
The New York Times
declared, “ CONAN DOYLE SOLVES A NEW DREYFUS CASE. ”
    Conan Doyle even helped in solving the case of a serial killer, after he spotted newspaper accounts in which two women had died in the same bizarre manner: the victims were recent brides, who had “accidentally” drowned in their bathtubs. Conan Doyle informed Scotland Yard of his theory, telling the inspector, in an echo of Holmes, “No time is to be lost”; the killer, dubbed “the Bluebeard of the Bath,” was subsequently caught and convicted in a sensational trial.
    Around 1914, Conan Doyle tried to apply his rational powers to the most important matter of his day—the logic of launching the First World War. He was convinced that the war was not simply about entangling alliances and a dead archduke; it was a sensible way to restore the codes of honor and moral purpose that he had celebrated in his historical novels. That year, he unleashed a spate of propaganda, declaring, “Fear not, for our sword will not be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands.” In the Holmes story “His Last Bow,” which is set in 1914, the detective tells Watson that after the “storm has cleared” a “cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine.”
    Though Conan Doyle was too old to fight, many of his relatives heeded his call “to arms,” including his son Kingsley. The glorious battle Conan Doyle envisioned, however, became a cataclysm. The products of scientific reason—machines and engineering and electronics—were transformed into agents of destruction. Conan Doyle visited the battlefield by the Somme, where tens of thousands of British soldiers died, and where he later reportedseeing a soldier “drenched crimson from head to foot, with two great glazed eyes looking upwards through a mask of blood.” In 1918, a chastened Conan Doyle realized that the conflict was “evidently preventable.” By that time, ten million people had perished, including Kingsley, who died from battle wounds and influenza.
    After the war, Conan Doyle wrote a handful of Holmes stories, yet the field of detective fiction was changing. The all-knowing detective gradually gave way to the hardboiled dick, who acted more on instinct and gin than on reason. In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler, while admiring Conan Doyle, dismissed the tradition of the “grim logician” and his “exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues,” which now seemed like an absurdity.
    Meanwhile, in his own life, Conan Doyle seemed to abandon reason altogether. As one of Green’s colleagues in the Baker Street Irregulars, Daniel Stashower, relates in a 1999 book, “Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle,” the creator of Holmes began to believe in ghosts. He attended séances and received messages from the dead through “the power of automatic writing,” a method akin to that of the Ouija board. During one session, Conan Doyle, who had once considered the belief in life after death as “a delusion,” claimed that his dead younger brother said, “It is so grand to be in touch like this.”
    One day, Conan Doyle heard a voice in the séance room. As he later described the scene in a letter to a friend:
    I said, “Is that you, boy?”
    He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, “Father!” and then after a pause, “Forgive me!”
    I said, “There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had.” A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly pressed forward, and I