Who Was Sherlock Holmes?

His analytical skills in solving crime is legendary, but who was the elusive Sherlock Holmes?

Step forward Joseph Bell, JP, DL, FRCS (2 December 1837 – 4 October 1911.)

He was a famous Scottish lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He was a great-grandson of Benjamin Bell, a forensic surgeon. In his instruction, Bell emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. To illustrate this, he would often pick a stranger and, by observing him, deduce his occupation and recent activities. These skills caused him to be considered a pioneer in forensic science (forensic pathology in particular) at a time when science was not yet widely used in criminal investigations.

Arthur Conan Doyle

met Bell in 1877, and served as his clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Doyle later went on to write a series of popular stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, whom Doyle stated was loosely based on Bell and his observant ways. Bell was aware of this inspiration and took some pride in it. According to Irving Wallace (in an essay originally in his book The Fabulous Originals but later republished and updated in his collection The Sunday Gentleman) Bell was involved in several police investigations, mostly in Scotland, such as the Ardlamont Mystery of 1893, usually with forensic expert Professor Henry Littlejohn.

Bell served as personal surgeon to Queen Victoria whenever she visited Scotland. He also published several medical textbooks. Bell was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, a Justice of the Peace, and a Deputy Lieutenant.

Joseph Bell died on 4 October 1911. He was buried at the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh alongside his wife, Edith Katherine Erskine Murray, and their son Benjamin, and next to his father’s and brother’s plots.

Whisky For Nothing And Your Hangovers For Free

One more recent Scottish legend is atually based on fact. It concerns the sinking of a ship laden with whisky.

The SS Politician left Liverpool on 3rd February, 1941, bound for Kingston, Jamaica and New Orleans. But gale force winds forced her to run aground off the Island of Eriskay,in the Outer Hebrides. Near the islet of Calvay, the ship broke in two. The crew were all unharmed and were looked after by the locals for a while.

Eriskay

When the locals learned from the crew of the “Polly” what the ship was carrying, a series of illegal, and later well-organised salvage operations took place at night, before the customs and excise officials arrived. The island’s supplies of whisky had dried up due to war-time rationing, so the islanders periodically helped themselves to some of the 28,000 cases (264,000 bottles) of Scotch malt before winter weather broke up the ship.

The men wore their womenfolk’s dresses on their “fishing trips”, to keep their own clothes from being covered in incriminating oil from the ship’s holds. Boats came from as far away as Lewis as news of the whisky spread across the Hebrides. No islander regarded it as stealing; for them the rules of salvage meant that once the bounty was in the sea, it was theirs to rescue.

However, this was not the view of the local customs officer. Charles McColl. He was incensed at the outright thievery that he saw going on. None of the whisky had paid a penny of duty, and he railed against this loss to the public purse. McColl whipped up a furore and made the police act.

Villages were raided and crofts turned upside down. Bottles were hidden, secreted, or simply drunk in order to hide the evidence.

McColl and the police caught plenty of locals red-handed, and they were sent to trial. On 26 April at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court. A group of men from Barra pleaded guilty to theft and were charged between three and five pounds. McColl was beside himself at the leniency of the sentence.

McColl continued on his crusade, and more men appeared in court, some of whom were sentenced to up to six weeks imprisonment in Inverness and Peterhead.

At sea, salvage attempts did not go well, and it was eventually decided to let the Politician remain where she was. McColl, who had already estimated that the islanders had purloined 24,000 bottles of whisky, ensured that there would be no more temptation. He applied for, and was granted, permission to explode her hull.

^{Recently, the Public Records Office released files which showed that the SS Politician was also carrying nearly 290,000 ten-shilling notes (145,000 pounds), which would be worth the equivalent of several million pounds at current exchange rates.}

^{To give an idea of how much that was worth, a corporal on full pay in the British Army received 35 shillings a week. The British government hoped that they would not get into circulation, but they started turning up at banks all around the world. Some sources suggest that these supplies were being sent to the colonies in case there was need of evacuation in the war.}

Suspicions only began to rise when an empty cash case was found abandoned in the hold of the ship. By June, the banknotes from the SS Politician were turning up in branches as far away as Liverpool. By mid July, a hundred or so had been tendered in Jamaica and almost two hundred in Britain.

By 1958, the Crown Agents reported that 211,267 notes had been recovered by the salvage company and the police and had been destroyed. A further 2,329 had been presented in banks in England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, Malta, Canada, the US and Jamaica. Only 1,509 were thought to have been presented in good faith. That still leaves 76,404 banknotes which have never been accounted for. Their fate remains a mystery.

The legend inspired a novel by Compton McKenzie and an Ealing Comedy.

Poster for Whisky Galore!

Characters Are Stubborn Little Critters

Characters are stubborn little critters, aren’t they?

The main character complains that she’s not a woman, but an Alpha male, despite his feminine side. In fact, he’s gay and doesn’t care who knows it. Another character refuses to play the role of wimp as she prefers to put her Tae kwon do skills to the test. And she doesn’t wilt under the strong gaze of Mr: Macho. She throws him down on the bed and has her way with him. Then she showers, dresses and says something cool like, “I knew I should have stayed in and washed my hair.”

You discover that the politician has morals, despite his past wrongdoings. The angelic-faced churchgoer kills animals, then the next door neighbour. A wife is killed and her lawyer husband seeks vengeance. Then he becomes as ruthless as the people he hunts down.

The time machine looks out-of-place in the story. The main character, an old professor, has told you a million times, he’s a scientist, not a time traveller. So let’s delete this and return to page five.

Finally, a mutual agreement is reached. All the characters are happy with their roles. But will the readers be?

This goes through your mind as you hit the send button to Amazon and wait.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Voyage To Lilliput

Do you ever stare blankly at the computer screen, stuck for something to write?

If so, then you’ll understand my predicament one Saturday morning. Normally, words tumbled out of my head, but for some reason my mind ran on empty. What had caused this sudden affliction, this power cut of the brain? Perhaps Google, the God of the internet, would know.

I said: ‘I don’t know what to write.’ It replied with over four million suggestions. Talk about a know-it-all! I put the same question to Wikipedia. It identified the problem as a condition called Writer’s Block. Here’s what if said.

Writer’s block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession , in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some “blocked” writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.It can manifest as the affected writer viewing their work as inferior or unsuitable, when in fact it could be the opposite.

Now all I needed was a cure. Physician, heal thyself. Perhaps I should change my writing style. Google said, ‘Don’t begin with a prologue and don’t write in present tense.’ Aha, I usually did that so I was a step closer to finding a cure. I asked Amazon for a second opinion. It showed me books with ‘look inside’ on the covers and what did I see? Well obviously I saw words, but what else? You guessed right, prologues and stories written in first person.

What about starting with an outline? A strong debate raged among the writer fraternity. One familiar name cropped up – Stephen King. He said that outlines stunted creativity. Should I listen to an ex teacher from Maine?

An hour passed and still no cure? Maybe there was none. Dan Perez said that anybody thinking about a fiction writing career should take two aspirin, lie down and wait until the feeling passes.

I decided to go for a walk instead.

It was a crisp morning and strips of white clouds stretched across the blue sky. Oh, Google told me to be careful with purple prose. And don’t start a story with the weather. The latter advice will come as a shock to many crime writers at Amazon.

The walk into town took me past the library. Perhaps the cure lay not in the digital world but ink on paper. I entered the library. A musty smell hung in the air. Eyes rose above spectacles and narrowed. Somewhere a clock ticked loudly. When the eyes lowered I scanned the shelves. Here, you could look inside all the books. And what’s more, they were free. Wasn’t that something?

To the untrained eye, soiled, dog-eared pages meant destruction. But to a bookworm it was a sign they were worth reading. I visited all the sections, even perused the encyclopedia section. No inspiration came.

With a heavy heart I decided to leave. Passing the librarian, I spied a book on the counter – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I’d never read it despite having seen so many films, tv series and cartoons about it. Curious, I asked the librarian if I could look inside. She said yes.

On the first page the blurb stated that the book was first published in 1726. Wow! Talk about longevity. Any story that had been around that long and was still famous had to be worth reading. I took it out.

The book never left my sight all day, not even during meal times and toilet breaks. I finished it at ten o´clock that night. Now my head was buzzing with ideas. I sat at the computer, my fingers tapping across the keyboard like Fred Astaire. By the wee small hours of morning I had written two thousand words of a fantasy novel. Oh, nothing like Gulliver’s Travels.

So the moral of this little tale is twofold. Don’t listen to what other writers say. Find your own style and stick to it. As for inspiration, you’ll find it where you least expect it. I certainly did. Just a pity Mr Swift is not around to help me with the edits – he died in 1745.

Good luck!