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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Dr. Joseph Bell and Dr. Henry Littlejohn
Casebook Message Boards: General Discussion: Research Issues / Philosophy:
Dr. Joseph Bell and Dr. Henry Littlejohn
Author: Jeff Bloomfield
Monday, 12 February 2001 - 11:21 pm |        | About thirty years ago, I read a book by Irving
Wallace called THE SUNDAY GENTLEMAN. It was
about ten or more essays on subjects that were
unusual, like the French Detective, Edmond Locard,
the Nazi prisoners in Spandau Prison, and the
famed bordello, the Everleigh Club in Chicago.
Wallace had written one essay for an earlier
book called THE FABULOUS ORIGINALS. It was an
essay on Dr. Joseph Bell, the teacher of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle who Wallace said was the
original for Sherlock Holmes. More correctly,
Bell had some of Holmes's remarkable abilities
to glance at people or items and make deductions
about them that most people could never guess.
According to Wallace, Bell was approached by the
authorities to help on several murder cases, usually with the assistance of the forensic
expert Dr. Henry Littlejohn. Both supposedly
helped in the investigation of Eugene Chantrelle,
who poisoned his wife in 1878 in Glasgow. But
both were also supposed to have helped in looking
for Jack the Ripper. If Wallace is to be believed, both men followed their own set of clues, and compared their findings - supposedly
both had written the same name of the same suspect
on different pieces of paper that they exchanged.
Has anybody thought of looking into Bell or
Littlejohn to see if this story could be true?
I must add, Wallace got considerable flack from
Adrian Conan Doyle when the essay was published,
and actually had to defend his research. So I
can't say if this is true or not...but it might
be worth looking into.
Jeff |
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