Mrs. Sherlock Holmes
Brad Ricca
Prologue
May 27, 1914
Pushing through the water, the massive steamship Olympic, sister of the lost Titanic, docked at New York City carrying passengers, thousands of sacks of mail, and the mind of the world’s greatest detective. But that was only part of the truth. As a dark thunderstorm rained down, a burly man in a brown fedora watched from the dock as the four ghostly smokestacks of Olympic seemed to gain more height in the misty air. The man ducked his face and walked with purpose to the tent marked QUARANTINE. As he disappeared past the doors, reporters waited with their cameras, hoping for the opportunity to snap proof of the meeting between this man, William J. Burns, America’s famous detective, and the Olympic’s special passenger that day—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
When Billy Burns and Doyle clapped hands inside, it was only the second time the two had met since Doyle’s first visit to New York in 1884. Burns had a bushy mustache that readers knew from the newspaper illustrations that accompanied the accounts of his sensational encounters. Doyle’s own, more traditional handlebar was bigger, longer, and framed his squinting eyes in a most natural manner. Lady Jean Doyle, Sir Arthur’s younger wife, smiled at the two men, mirrors of each other’s fictions. A former Secret Service agent, Burns had solved major national cases, including the sad murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta. Burns had parlayed his fame into the William J. Burns International Detective Agency, with busy branches all across the country. He was often referred to as the American Sherlock Holmes. “There are no mysteries in crime,” Burns once said. “Mysterious disappearances of men and women … they don’t occur, for the simple reason that for every act, be it great or small, there is a motive, hidden though it may be from general knowledge.”
The Doyles piled into Burns’s auto as he drove them to the Plaza, accompanied by a police escort. As the rain drummed on the roof, Doyle, who was over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, looked out into the rising lights of the city. He saw a bright sign for Morton Salt that featured a man with a top hat—and nearly gasped when the hat actually tipped forward. The streets of separate houses had been replaced by buildings with similar signs advertising Blackstone Cigars and Heinz 57 India Relish that were taller than the churches. Doyle heard very few whips, only the grinding of cars. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark motorcycle. New York unfolded before him, uncaring of his astonishment, but at the same time thriving on it. Doyle tried to take in all the wide streets and tall buildings. Some, like the Woolworth Building, were over fifty stories high. At the top of all those floors was a gilded apex meant to create the illusion of even greater height. Doyle sat back in his seat and said, half to himself, “I am amazed, fairly paralyzed at the sight of New York.”
In the warmly lit Plaza, the party moved past walls of Flemish oak decorated with pictures of Bavarian castles. There, under a chandelier made of iron grapes topped by a barmaid hoisting a foamy stein, reporters asked Doyle for his opinions on a myriad of topics. Doyle, who knew he was much loved here, put his hands in his waistcoat and happily obliged the reporters. He said he was looking forward to his few days in New York, before he and his wife would head off to the Selkirk range in Canada for a wilderness adventure. When the questions turned political, Doyle said he admired Colonel Roosevelt a great deal, calling him a superman. The author also had great praise for the New York police—and, of course, his good friend Billy “Hot Tabasco” Burns. Doyle embraced him with laughter. Finally, someone asked about the real news that day, from Doyle’s home, England, where there had been fifty-eight arrests at Buckingham Palace during a suffragist rally. The radicals were attempting to deliver a petition to the royals when fifteen hundred police broke up the demonstration and arrested the group’s leaders. Doyle listened to the question, anxious to answer.
“Something drastic is sure to happen,” Doyle replied, “and to happen speedily.” Doyle spoke with a sliding, elegant speech that worked its way across the old Scots vowels. “There will be a wholesale lynching bee, I fancy. For the English mob when thoroughly aroused is not a respector of sex, and the woman will have brought down the thunder on their own heads.” The reporters wrote swiftly in their notepads.
The next day, Doyle and his wife were driven up the river to visit the famous Sing Sing prison. Doyle insisted that he be locked in a solitary cell for five full minutes. Everyone else waited outside. Afterward, he walked down the tight corridor where they kept the prisoners waiting to be executed. In the circular room past that hallway, Doyle raised a pudgy leg and lifted himself into the electric chair itself. Doyle closed his eyes and tried to feel something. Afterward, Doyle laughingly proclaimed that the black chair—“Old Sparky”—had a good-bottomed seat despite its “sinister wires.” Doyle said, slyly, that “it was the most restful time I have had since I had arrived in New York.”
When they got back to the Plaza, Doyle took a look at some of New York’s famous newspapers. His face turned red as he read them. He was furious that his previous comments on suffragists had not gone over well with the Americans. To clarify his words, Doyle agreed to an interview with Marguerite Mooers Marshall of the New York Evening World.
“I never said such a thing!” exploded Doyle, once Marshall asked about his quote about a lynch mob supposedly hunting suffragettes. “I am anti-suffrage,” admitted Doyle. “All I meant was that I should not be surprised to hear of a lynching.”
Lady Doyle, pretty and thin and dressed in pink, leaned in to stop her husband from saying one more word.
“Please,” Lady Doyle begged Marshall, “don’t say he thinks it would be a good plan to lynch those women.” Marshall looked at Lady Doyle and wondered if she was his actual Watson. Marshall reworded the question in her head and asked Sir Arthur again. “Surely this is just a manifestation of a widespread feminine restlessness and revolt,” Marshall said. “You are not an opponent of Woman’s Progress?”
“Certainly not,” retorted Doyle. “I would have women enjoy the best educational opportunities. I would have them enter the arts and the professions they choose.” He thought a moment, before putting what he wanted to say into different words.
“I like to see a woman with brains who uses them,” gruffed Doyle. “I love and honor women as wives and mothers. But I cannot approve of a campaign of destruction.”