Death at Dartmoor (39 page)

“And Lady Duncan?”

“That,” Kate said, “is a different story. She will be tried as an accessory to manslaughter, for her attempts, with Mr. Westcott, to cover up the crime.”

Patsy shook her head. “And poor Mrs. Bernard? Did you ever learn how it was that she knew the details of Sir Edgar's death?”

“We're still in the dark there,” Kate said ruefully. “I suppose that we shall just have to account it one of the mysteries of the universe.” She smiled. “Oh, by the way, Dr. Doyle and his friend Jean Leckie were our guests at a small dinner party last month in London. Both of them seemed to be getting on quite well. Miss Leckie was planning a short trip abroad. Dr. Doyle was pleased at the reception of his new story, and an American magazine is about to make him an enormous offer to resurrect Sherlock Holmes.”

“Bribe
is the word I believe Doyle used,” Charles put in dryly. “And Greenhough Smith, at
The Strand,
has sweetened the inducement by bidding for the British rights.”

Kate nodded. “I think the only thing that troubles him is that Sherlock might not live up to his own reputation.”

Patsy laughed. “Is there any other news? Have you heard from that nice constable, or the vicar?”

“Constable Chapman was offered a promotion as a reward for his fine work on the Duncan case.” Charles picked up his pipe and began to pack it with tobacco. “But it meant that he should have to leave the moor, so he turned it down. And Major Cranford writes that the fingerprint identification project is finished. It is to be expanded to other prisons, and the Home Office has agreed to a special dactyloscopy department at the Yard.”

“Well done, Charles,” Patsy said with a small smile. “I do hope, however, that you have destroyed Sam's fingerprints.”

“Of course,” Charles replied. He lit his pipe and leaned back comfortably. “It wouldn't do to have those available in the event he was apprehended.”

“And I've heard from the vicar at Saint Michaels,” Kate said. “Mr. Garrett wrote to say that he is leaving Princetown for a village near Ely. Now that the Duncans are gone and Thornworthy is in the hands of Jack Delany, he has given up all hope of any real society on the moor.”

Patsy gave a little shake of her head. “If you were to ask me, I should say that the moor is better off without any society at all. Just the ponies and the sheep, wild and free in the wind and the heather.” She wore a reminiscent look. “I shall always treasure the days we spent there.”

Kate smiled at her friend, understanding. “The moor is a beautiful place,” she said, “and Thornworthy a delightfully Gothic castle—although not, I am bound to say, as ghostly as Glamis Castle, in Scotland. Charles and I were there last month and—But the story is a long one, I'm afraid. Perhaps you should hear it over tea. You will join us, won't you?”

“Of course,” Patsy said with a smile. “As long as Mrs. Pratt sends up some of her marmalade cake.”

“I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography, and it is quite true. In 1886, this not-very-successful provincial doctor and aspiring writer needed a little extra money, so he sat down to put his hand to a detective story. The result was
A Study in Scarlet,
the birth of the immortal Holmes and Watson, and the launch of a writing career that Doyle himself could scarcely have dreamed of. During his most productive years, he regularly turned out a daily three thousand words (and once claimed to have produced an incredible ten thousand words in a day). A complete catalog of his works comprises nearly a hundred pages, and millions of people have enjoyed his writing over the past century.

But Doyle's career did not entirely satisfy him, and there were periods of time when he seemed to be torn by a number of internal conflicts. The year 1901, the time of this book, was one of those periods. He had recently returned from a short stint as a field doctor in the Boer War, which he had chronicled in a controversial book that set him at odds with the military establishment he admired. He had been narrowly defeated in his bid for a seat in Parliament and had decided against making another run for political office. He was facing the fact that since the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes, he had enjoyed no comparable literary successes, and he was experiencing some financial difficulties. A married man with an invalid wife, he was also involved with the young, beautiful Jean Leckie in an intense but sexually unconsummated relationship. Their deep attachment was an oddity in this Edwardian time of easy liaisons, but consistent with what one biographer has called the “chivalrous mysticism” that kept Doyle from violating his dying wife's dignity or Jean Leckie's reputation.

The writing of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
did not set Doyle free from any of these conflicts. Much of what troubled him was beyond his ability to remedy: his wife's prolonged ill health (she did not die until 1906); the literary climate of the day; the stubborn resistance to his proposals for military reform; the decay of the Empire; and above all, the fact that he lived in the twentieth century, not the fourteenth, and that chivalry was long dead. But
The Hound
did two important things for him: It reminded him that he had once written Sherlock tales because they were fun and because his readers loved them; and it brought him back into the literary spotlight. The book was a huge best-seller, resulting in an offer of over $4,000 a story for the American rights to more Holmes-and-Watson tales. In addition,
The Strand
agreed to pay a hundred pounds per thousand words for the English rights to the same material. The time that Conan Doyle spent on Dartmoor was a good investment, and, truth be told, he owed an enormous debt to the man who took him there, Bertram Fletcher Robinson.

Robinson, a journalist whom Doyle had met as the two returned from South Africa, was the man who came up with the central plot idea and the setting for
The Hound.
In early March 1901, Doyle wrote to the editor of
The Strand,
offering the magazine a “real creeper” of a story, with one stipulation: “I must do it with my friend Fletcher Robinson [who] gave me the central idea and the local colour.” Doyle wanted fifty pounds per thousand words for this joint effort, and when
The Strand
said yes, he and Robinson went off to Dartmoor together to tour the moors, soak up some of that “local colour,” and write the story. But at some point during these few days, the collaboration was apparently broken off, Robinson dropped out of the picture, and Doyle wrote the book himself, receiving twice as much money for the work because he had decided to use Sherlock Holmes. Although Robinson's byline in later years occasionally identified him as
The Hound'
s “joint author” and he is quoted as claiming authorship of the first two chapters, all he received was a footnote in the serial publication, a brief thank-you in the book publication, and (or so he told a friend) one-quarter of the initial profits. Scholars debate the reasons for the failure of the collaboration; we've come to our own conclusions, as you can see in this mystery.

There is yet another interesting facet to Doyle's life, and that is his persistent interest in spiritualism, an interest that began in the late '80s and grew into what amounted to an obsession around 1915. At that time, he and his wife Jean (they married in 1907) had been experimenting with automatic writing, and she went on to become a trance medium, channeling the entity Pheneas, who announced himself as a “very, very high soul,” a “leader of men” who had died centuries before in the East, near Arabia. (We have cheated a bit by anticipating Pheneas's appearance in our story.) Doyle, whose Sherlock had insisted so strongly on “scientific” detection, seemed to take a great deal on faith when it came to psychic phenomena, and he was badly fooled by a set of phony fairy photographs taken by a pair of schoolgirls in Cottingley, “altogether beyond the possibility of fake,” he wrote. In defense of the photos, he even published a book entitled
The Coming of the Fairies.
Fans of Sherlock Holmes were not amused, and even his spiritualist allies deserted him. But he and Jean continued their psychic work until his death on July 7, 1930. “I have had many adventures,” he wrote a few days before he died. “The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.”

REFERENCES

Here are a few books that we found helpful in creating
Death at Dartmoor.
Other background works may be found in the references to earlier books in this series. If you have comments or questions, you may write to Bill and Susan Albert, PO Box 1616, Bertram TX 78605, or E-mail us at [email protected]. You might also wish to visit our web site,
http://www.mysterypartners.com
, where you will find additional information about the life and times of Conan Doyle.

 

Crossing, William.
Guide
to
Dartmoor.
Peninsula Press, Newton Abbot, Devon, England, 1990 (reprint of 1912 edition).

 

Crossing, William.
Folklore and Legends of Dartmoor.
Wood-stock, Devon: Forest Publishing, 1997.

 

Davis, W. G. Val.
Gentlemen of the Broad Arrow.
London: Selwyn & Blount.

 

Carr, John Dickson.
The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle: The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes.
New York: Vantage Books, 1949.

 

Chase, Beatrice.
The Heart of the Moor.
Pembury, Kent, England: John Pegg Publishing, 1988 (facsimile edition, first published 1914).

 

Coren, Michael.
Conan Doyle.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995.

 

Dartmoor: Ordnance Survey
1:25000
Leisure Map
28. Southampton: Ordnance Survey, 1995.

 

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan.
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
London:
The Strand,
1901.

 

Grew, Major B. D., O.B.E. Prison Governor. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1958.

 

James, Trevor.
“There's One Away”: Escapes from Dartmoor Prison.
Newton Abbot, Devon: Orchard Publications, 1999.

 

Jock of Dartmoor.
Dartmoor from Within.
London: The Readers Library Publishing Co. Ltd.

 

Nordon, Pierre.
Conan Doyle: A Biography. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

 

Stashower, Daniel.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Conan Doyle.
New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999.

 

Tracy, Jack.
The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana.
New York: Avenel Books, 1987.