The REAL Murders That Inspired Sherlock Holmes

Come back with us to the surgeons hall of 1870s Edinburgh, where a certain Arthur Conan Doyle is watching bodies being dissected. Meet notorious surgeon Joseph Bell, the real life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, whose pioneering forensics methods unlock some of Victorian Britain's darkest murders. Kate is joined by Dr Lindsay Fitzharris for this episode, whose new book Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes https://drlindseyfitzharris.com/sleuth-hound/, is out now. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:28Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets. Now, before we can go any further together, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of subjects you should be an adult to. You feel safer? I feel safer. Right, let's do this.

• 2:52Kate Lister?

  We are in Edinburgh in the late 1870s, and I have just squeezed into a packed lecture hall. There's a dead body on the table in front of me, not ideal company, really. But this is a medical school, and apparently our guest, although lifeless, has quite a lot to teach us. The bruises, the clothes, the hands, the hair. Every tiny mark is a clue to how this person lived and how they died. And nobody reads those clues quite like Professor Joseph Bell. Also in attendance is a young medical student called Arthur Conan Doyle, who'll soon draw on Bell's powers of deduction in his creation of the one, the only and the magnificent Sherlock Holmes.

• 3:36Kate Lister?

  But real life is about to prove rather less tidy than detective fiction, because Bell's clues will lead us into murder and the messy world of the Victorian justice system. Elementary? Well, no, not quite.

• 4:09Kate Lister?

  Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In today's episode, we are taking you away from London's Baker Street and travelling about 400 miles north to Edinburgh, where in the 1880s, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was born. It's a murky world where fact is stranger and far more gruesome than fiction, especially if you're a woman. Joining me today is the amazing historian and author of the new book Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, Dr Lindsay Fitzharris. Magnifying glasses and pipes at the ready, everybody. Let's do this.

• 4:54Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome, finally.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Finally.

• 4:57Kate Lister?

  Finally.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  We have been talking for years, and now we are here. And in fact, I just want to bring up, you and I were trolled

• 5:08Speaker 04

  by the same man. And I got sick with breast cancer. I came through that all okay, but you took the lead and you got that guy thrown into prison.

• 5:17Kate Lister?

  That is the weirdest way that friends have ever met. And that is, that is part of our friendship origin story.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  It is, yeah. We get those men. But, you know, I think it came about sort of haphazardly. I think I said something on Facebook about this guy, and then you were like, I'm also...

• 5:34Kate Lister?

  This, right, just for, just, just to explain.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  For short context, yeah.

• 5:39Kate Lister?

  This guy sent me, and I didn't know he'd sent it to other people, but he sent me over 75 pictures of him putting things up his bottom and masturbating and all of the rest of it. And a lot of weird text. It was weird.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  It was really weird, yeah.

• 5:56Kate Lister?

  And then you mentioned something about you'd received it. I was like, oh my God.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And then I, and then I think

• 6:00Kate Lister?

  I've got that guy.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Other people in the community.

• 6:02Kate Lister?

  It was Yanina.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:04Kate Lister?

  Nina Ramirez.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:05Kate Lister?

  And I think it's Hallie was the other one. The weirdest WhatsApp group ever.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  I know. We're all being trolled by this guy, but who knew? You knew. You reported it. You led the charge.

• 6:16Kate Lister?

  I did report. I was so, you know, it was the dick that broke the camel's back.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  It was the dick that broke...

• 6:20Kate Lister?

  I was just like, I've had, I've had enough of this.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  We can't, we can't deal with that.

• 6:25Kate Lister?

  And he was in Scotland, where they have different laws.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:28Kate Lister?

  He was prosecuted.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Stronger laws, right?

• 6:30Kate Lister?

  Stronger laws.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's good.

• 6:31Kate Lister?

  And he went to jail. And that was how we met.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  That is how we met. And it was funny, because like I said, I was going through treatment and you messaged me, and I was like, I can't believe that you got this guy thrown into prison. I think he's still there. Like, this is, this is amazing. So, men, beware if you send us messages, especially Kate.

• 6:50Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  That could have consequences.

• 6:51Kate Lister?

  That could happen to you.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 6:53Kate Lister?

  But welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. It's so nice to finally meet you in person.

• 6:57Kate Lister?

  It's lovely to meet you too.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  And I have a little bit of an icebreaker.

• 6:59Kate Lister?

  Oh, bigger than that? Bigger than we got a man thrown in jail?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  I know, bigger than talking.

• 7:03Kate Lister?

  It's an epic bag that we have here.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Which I, which I bought in America, believe it or not. Like, you should be able to find the carpet bag here, but I couldn't find one quite like I wanted. So I brought three objects that sort of relate to what I do as a medical historian, and also what you do as a historian of sex.

• 7:18Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  So, and it guesses what that might, like, what it could relate to? Medical history?

• 7:25Kate Lister?

  Medical history, sex history. A speculum?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Maybe. Okay.

• 7:30Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  You open and pull out. Pull out the big blocky object first.

• 7:34Kate Lister?

  It's a very beautiful carpet bag. The big, I'm not even looking. Ah, right, okay, the big blocky object.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:39Kate Lister?

  Right, okay. I've got that.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  All right. I brought you syphilis.

• 7:44Kate Lister?

  It's syphilis.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  It's syphilis. Because of course, everybody had syphilis in the past. And, and those wax mulletages were, were used to teach medical students. And you can see that sort of telltale ulcer that's starting to appear.

• 7:58Kate Lister?

  It's a wax, like, like mold of a face that's infected

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:03Kate Lister?

  with syphilis.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  With syphilis. So, so the thing about syphilis, as you know, I'm not telling you anything new, is that it was very disfiguring in its final stages. And in fact, the nose, the cartilage often got eaten away and the nose would cave in. It was called saddle nose. And there was no nose clubs that popped up in London. People literally gathered together. I mean, this, I feel like if we lived in that time, we would have that sense of humor. Like, we would, we would belong to the no-nose club.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  If you've got no nose, you may as well make a joke on this.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  You've got to lean into it, right? And so, so that's, so yeah, it was so prevalent, syphilis. Of course, there was nothing they could really do. They did try to treat it. And that brings me to the second object, which is a metal object.

• 8:42Kate Lister?

  All right, let's, rooting around in Lindsay's bag.

• 8:48Kate Lister?

  Okay. Oh, okay.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  All right.

• 8:51Kate Lister?

  Okay, this, this looks like the biggest chunkiest injection

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:55Kate Lister?

  that I've ever seen.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  It is a brass syringe.

• 8:57Kate Lister?

  It is a brass syringe, and I don't think that that is going to be used for a delicate injection.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  No, it is not.

• 9:04Kate Lister?

  I'm guessing this is a urethral syringe that you would have used.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  You guessed correctly. So they would stick that up the urethra. They would.

• 9:13Kate Lister?

  Is this, is this a real one?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  That is a real one. Yeah, 19th century.

• 9:16Kate Lister?

  I'm gonna stay away from it.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  It's all been sterilized and cleaned.

• 9:20Kate Lister?

  Okay, fabulous.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  I think. I don't know. I only just bought it off eBay. By the way, you can get anything on eBay. So. But yeah, they, they used to use mercury and they would, they would shove it up the urethra.

• 9:29Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  It was terrible. Mercury poisoning, of course, was, was sometimes worse than the disease itself. So you can imagine you're battling two things, the side effects of mercury and your, and syphilis as well. And they used to have a saying that was one night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury. So, you know, you, you, you could, you could have a lifetime of regrets and of course you, you ultimately died of syphilis. It wasn't curable in the past, but they did start to find ways to protect themselves, which brings me to the third object, which I'm sure

• 9:58Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  that you are familiar with and will not be surprised by. It's very light.

• 10:05Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Yes. The 18th century condom. And it's made to the historically accurate.

• 10:14Kate Lister?

  Yes. Is this made by the lovely lady up in Scotland?

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yes, it is.

• 10:19Kate Lister?

  She is incredible. She spends her time recreating historical condoms out of lamb's gut, isn't it?

• 10:26Speaker 04

  It is. It's, I mean, what a niche thing to do. Like, it's brilliant.

• 10:30Kate Lister?

  That is. So this is a handmade condom. But would this have been any use protecting against syphilis?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  It probably would have to some extent. I mean, it was reusable too. I'm sure you know that. Yeah, right. And it tied on to the penis and it was reusable. It was terrible. It wasn't really seen to be preventing pregnancies. It was really to prevent disease. But, you know, all these things weren't really

• 10:51Kate Lister?

  No, no.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  useful.

• 10:53Kate Lister?

  No, it's like.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  They're terrible. And in fact, at the Hunterian Museum in London, there is a prosthetic of a nose. And I believe the story, it's been a long time since I've, I've, I've read about that, but I believe the story is that it was made for this woman who had syphilis and she had very advanced syphilis and she remarried. And, and it was like a love story between her and her new husband. And he, he made this, he had this object made for her so that she wouldn't be disfigured. And, you know, I guess we have to ignore maybe the aspect where she infected him with syphilis as well. You know, I don't actually know if you're infectious in the final stages. I don't know how that actually works. So I always say doctor, but not a doctor.

• 11:37Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  You know, not endorsing any medical advice on, on podcasts, but, but yes, those are the three icebreakers.

• 11:44Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. That is an absolute bag of horrors. And thank you.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  I love that. Bag of horrors. That's what I'm gonna call it. Yeah.

• 11:50Kate Lister?

  But we're actually here to talk about your new book, Lindsay Fitzharris.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah.

• 11:54Kate Lister?

  Sleuth Hound. Congratulations.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. It's finally out. My dad says that I don't write them fast enough. It's like it's been four or five years since, since the last one, The Face Maker, but I'm excited about it. So.

• 12:07Kate Lister?

  What made you want to tell this history? This is the history of Joseph Bell, who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  That's right. Yeah. I mean, and I was joking to you beforehand, it's, it doesn't get more commercial than this. I peaked. There will never be anything better than this that I produce, but it's, but it's a fascinating story. So I'm a medical historian and I always say, even if you don't like history, you might like medical history because everybody knows what it's like to be sick, right?

• 12:32Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  And so I get to fill in what that experience was like 100, 150, 200 years ago. And I say that my superpower is I can make you feel good about living in 2026. Because I think there's a lot of reasons why maybe we don't feel good about 2026. But I can make you feel good because that experience certainly was worse in the past. So I've always known about Bell because he was a surgeon up in Edinburgh. And I, I knew about him as a medical historian and I knew that he was the inspiration for Holmes, but there had never been a major commercial book about him.

• 13:02Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Sherlockians know about him. And, and this is not a secret, by the way. Conan Doyle talks about this. He outs, he doxes Bell later in life. Like, he literally, yeah, yeah. He literally dedicates, he, after he outs him as the inspiration, he dedicates the, the Holmes tales to Bell, puts in his address too. So like, everybody knows where, where the, I know. So it was, it was quite a thing. So, so he said it in his life. There's one clip of him speaking, which is phenomenal because he was, he was born in 1859. So we have him on, on film. Which is extraordinary. And in it, he talks about the influence that Bell had. But for some reason, you know, a lot of Bell's life wasn't, wasn't well fleshed out.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  And so I decided to kind of tackle that. And one of the things that helped me was that his diary, which had been locked away in the Bell family for over 100 years, suddenly became available.

• 13:53Kate Lister?

  Hello.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  So that was good. So here's the man behind the myth. It's his secrets, his relationships. It's like all of this stuff in the diary. And then I found out that he wasn't just the inspiration for Holmes. He was actually doing what Holmes does in practice. He was acting as a consulting detective. Yeah. And so he worked on some of the highest profile murder cases of the century with a police surgeon named Henry Duncan Littlejohn, who was this pioneer of fingerprinting and courtroom photography. He was fascinating in himself. So, so it's been, you know, it's, it's a medical history. It's historical true crime. It's been a lot of fun to kind of bring that story to life.

• 14:27Kate Lister?

  How did Arthur Conan Doyle even meet Joseph Bell?

• 14:31Speaker 04

  So this is something that a lot of people don't know. He was a doctor.

• 14:34Kate Lister?

  I didn't know that. I mean, I'd done a bit of reading before you came in. I did have that moment of like, what?

• 14:39Speaker 04

  And I have a confession to make, which is always good to do on a, you know. My, my confession is that at the time I had sold this book, I had never read the original Sherlock Holmes. And then I was like, oh no, I sold this book. But when I sold it, I decided I'm not going to read them right away because I knew that the comparisons to Holmes became reductive. Like, he got very, Bell got very annoyed by this. So I decided I didn't want to be colored by that. So I really kind of put off engaging with that. And like I said, I wanted to write a story about this complex character, this, this man who is really in the eye of so much medical change. This is, I always tell big, small stories and big stories. The small story is, it's a story of Arthur Conan Doyle and Joe Bell and their relationship.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  But the bigger story is that it's about the history of forensics. It's about the moment that Madison enters the courtroom for the first time. And, and Bell and Littlejohn are really at the forefront of that. And it's about the development of the expert witness. And I always think of the OJ Simpson trial. Because, I mean, you're the age too where that was like, it just dominated, right? And do you remember all of the testimony around DNA?

• 15:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  It was like, it was too much. And in the, in the jury got bogged down and they were just, it was just too much. It really backfired. And I think about Littlejohn and Bell because at this point, nobody has any base knowledge really in forensic science. So to be able to stand up there or sit up there on, in, in, go before the juries and to explain this complicated new technology and these advances must have been a real skill.

• 16:12Kate Lister?

  That must have been difficult. Yeah. How did they meet then? So you've got, did you say Joe Bell? I love that.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Joe Bell. Yeah, actually, that's what people call him. Somebody said on, on Blue Sky, they're like, that can't possibly, like, that sounds too modern. Like, that's what they called him. They called him Joe Bell.

• 16:25Kate Lister?

  Joe Bell. I like that.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  And he looks kind of modern too in some of the pictures. It's, it's funny because like you, you, obviously you picture people in the 19th century as, you know, quite stiff. But like, I feel like if you looked at his photo, he could just walk into the room and you wouldn't feel like he's too out of place. Like, he didn't have those heavy mutton chops or anything like that. He looked quite modern in that sense. But, um, yeah, it was 1878. Joe Bell's up in Edinburgh. He's teaching medical students how to read a human body like a crime scene.

• 16:53Kate Lister?

  What do you mean by that?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  He had this incredible knack at being able to tell everything about a patient before they ever opened their mouth.

• 17:00Kate Lister?

  See, that's, you can see the, I know that you said, so you didn't want to read the Sherlock novels and now that kind of makes sense.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  There it is, right?

• 17:06Kate Lister?

  It would prejudice it entirely.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's so Sherlockian, right? And so I opened the book with the story of Bell walking, he, he comes into the operating theater, a patient is ushered in. He does his thing where he says, you're an army man. And the patient denies this. He says, no, I was never in the army. And this kind of confuses Bell because he was always right. And Bell has him stripped to the waist and low and behold, there is a D for deserter. I know, it's 19th century, like the consent, you know, was like, yeah, just strip that man to the waist. He has him stripped to the waist and there's a D on his chest. Low and behold, he's a deserter. And Joe Bell was going to be bested by no one. So he had this Sherlockian way of seeing and like cutting through the petty deceits of his patients. And Arthur Conan Doyle became his outpatient clerk and he's, he's got a front row seat. He's taking notes.

• 17:53Kate Lister?

  So he's, he's a clerk to, to.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, an outpatient clerk. So he's, he's a medical student at the time. He comes into Bell's orbit.

• 18:01Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  And he's just mesmerized by this character. And, and they, he, he just has a front row seat to all of these, I call them performances, obviously. This was the way he diagnosed patients. But there was just story after story. There was a woman who came in and he said to her, show me your cuddy pipe. And she looked very embarrassed, you know, maybe smoking wasn't such a feminine habit. And he says, show me the pipe. She finally shows him the pipe and then he has her ushered out of the room and he says, well, how did I know this? And everybody just stood, you know, sat there, you know, how students are. And he said, well, it was because she had a superficial burn on her cheek and she has a cancerous sore on her lip, which you only get from a lifetime of smoking.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  So he just knew right away before anybody said anything. And it just story after story. And so when you're reading Sleuth Hound, you're going to think you're reading Sherlock Holmes at first. But I hope that as the story progresses, you get a sense of a more complex man behind that.

• 19:06Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Lindsay after this short break.

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• 22:07Kate Lister?

  So was he a big deal in his own time? I mean, he's clearly impressed a very young Art Conan Doyle, who's doing medicine.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he became very famous for this. I mean, they called him the demon of diagnosis. I love like a good nickname, right? I wish I had a good nickname. Do you have a nickname?

• 22:22Kate Lister?

  I've never had a nickname.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  I once was at the pharmacy, and the pharmacist said, "Dr. Tits Harris?"

• 22:30Speaker 04

  I didn't even correct him. I was like...

• 22:32Kate Lister?

  Or just don't do anything. Just sit there and just go...

• 22:34Speaker 04

  That's it. I'm Dr. Tits Harris. Yeah. So I was like, that's a great porno name.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  Everybody kind of like looked and was like, who's this?

• 22:44Kate Lister?

  Just own it.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  I know. And I was like, I was like wearing like a low-cut top. I was like, yeah, it's me. Come on. So that's about as good as it gets. But he was the demon of diagnosis.

• 22:54Kate Lister?

  That's a good thing.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  And so he was very famous for that kind of trait. And actually, the people who knew him recognized this instantly in Sherlock Holmes. In fact, Robert Louis Stevenson reads Sherlock Holmes. He writes Conan Doyle. And he says, at the end of the letter, he says, "But one thing bothers me. Can this be our old friend, Joe Bell?" So people who knew him saw it immediately in that character.

• 23:16Kate Lister?

  When did he start writing about Sherlock? I mean, is he sat in this guy's theater, like penning short stories?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  He started, yeah. He is, I mean, Conan Doyle, he's so interesting because he's born into poverty. And I think he went to medical school. It seemed like an obvious way to get financial security. He's in Edinburgh, which is this amazing medical school in the 19th century. But he is a born storyteller. And you know, it's like, it's like what you do, too. Like, you are who you are. It's not what you do. And so even as a medical student, he was writing short stories and selling them. But he goes to write Holmes later. Like, he's graduated. He's a practicing doctor in London at the time. And the funny thing that I learned, if you're listening and you don't know anything about Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, which I didn't either going into this, is that he hated the character. He absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes. Like, he couldn't stand it.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  He couldn't understand why everybody liked it.

• 24:08Kate Lister?

  Tried to kill him off, didn't he?

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was just like, and he thought, he wanted to be a more serious writer. He thought this was kind of fluff and, you know, it was just a means to an end. And so he couldn't stand it. And that was the thing that really sort of made his name. And there is a caricature that I include in the book where he's like looming big Conan Doyle, and then there's this tiny little Sherlock Holmes shackled to his ankle. And I said to my husband, who's a caricaturist for Spitting Images, you know, I said, "You should redo that, but it should be Bell." Because I very much think that once Bell's outed, this also becomes really sort of, he's imprisoned by these comparisons. And remember with Bell, he didn't have any say in this character being created as well.

• 24:50Kate Lister?

  Today, that might be a lawsuit.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  It might be, yeah. I know, like the baby reindeer. What was that? Yeah, right? Like, this is like the 19th century equivalent. I think Bell, though, was originally flattered by the comparisons because Holmes was so...

• 25:06Kate Lister?

  Holmes is a great character.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Famous. Yeah, he became so famous so quickly. But right around the time, well, let's go back to sort of the earlier periods. So Conan Doyle becomes his medical student. And like I said, I started to learn that Bell was actually working unofficially with the police surgeon, Henry Duncan Littlejohn.

• 25:24Kate Lister?

  That's wild, isn't it?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Which is amazing, yeah. And really, Littlejohn helped me flesh this story out.

• 25:31Kate Lister?

  Is Littlejohn a police officer?

• 25:32Speaker 04

  He's a police surgeon.

• 25:33Kate Lister?

  A police surgeon.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  So he's a doctor. He takes care of like the police's health, like the recruits and stuff. But he also then investigates all the crimes. So he's kind of got all of these different roles. And he also teaches at Edinburgh. He teaches Conan Doyle. So I believe that Bell gave Conan Doyle the method, and Littlejohn gave him the world of forensics. And he collected everything, by the way. Like, I mean, the murder weapons, like pieces of the body. Like, he would just kept it. It's all up at Surgeons Hall. I mean, you've had, you know, Kat Erving. Like, they have all that stuff up there, right? It's just incredible collection. And I sent my research assistant, Dr. Kate So, up there because I was going through breast cancer treatment. I said, "Go get some photographs of some of these documents."

• 26:17Speaker 04

  And she accidentally called up some human remains. And there was a bit of panic about whether she, you know, had the qualifications. And I said, "I don't need the human remains. I just need the documents, at least at the moment." So he collected everything. He even kept the nooses that hanged the people that he got helped get convicted. And so he helps me, in a way, flesh this character out, because I know that they were working together. But one of the tales that I tell in the book is about this man, Eugene Chantrell. And I want to tell you about him because he's respectable and charming. You know this guy, Kate, right? But he's not like that at home. And he beats his wife.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  So first of all, he comes in as a French tutor, and he seduces his 15-year-old student, Lizzie. And her family say, "You have to marry her," which they came to regret. Okay? So she marries him. She spends 10 years. She bears him multiple children. And he beats her regularly. And I had to read a lot of the letters where she's saying to her mother, "You know, he broke my jaw. I think I'm going to end up dead." Very, I mean, you could get divorced, but it wasn't...

• 27:24Kate Lister?

  It's difficult.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was difficult. It wasn't a very respectable option for certain women of a certain class. And so she's kind of told by her mother not to go in that direction. And one day, she ends up in her flat, and she's very sick. And the maid comes in. She sees a glass of liquid there by her bedside, some fruit. And Eugene Chantrell is standing by the window. And he says, "Oh, the baby is crying." Sends the maid away. And when he comes back, all of that stuff is gone. And then he says, "Do you smell the gas in the air?" And this seems suspicious because she doesn't smell anything. But then suddenly, she smells overwhelming smell of gas.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  And so at this point, he's trying to pass it off as a gas leak, which was a common thing that happened in the Victorian period. Littlejohn is called to the scene, and he has his suspicions right away because he knows the history of this couple. And so he has Lizzie removed. She ends up dying at the hospital. And in a final act of control over her body, he ends up burying her in her wedding gown, which is also horrible, right? And he invites Littlejohn to the funeral, like the guy investigating this. I mean, he was such a narcissist. Well, Littlejohn ends up discovering that he poisoned his wife. And he goes, yeah, with opium. I mean, and the other thing about Chantrell is he did train as a doctor. So he goes to the pharmacist. You know those Victorian pharmacists?

• 28:54Speaker 04

  They'll sell you anything, right?

• 28:55Kate Lister?

  Giving it out, giving it away.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Heroin, opium, like, it's all there. And he buys a tremendous amount of it. They thought, well, he's got medical training, so he must have a good reason.

• 29:04Kate Lister?

  This makes perfect sense.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, this makes perfect sense. Like, give it to him. And so he is brought up on these murder charges, and he is thankfully convicted of this. Now, the intriguing part for me was, did Bell work on it? Now, because he worked like Sherlock Holmes in the shadows, I didn't, I could not find any documents to say that he worked on this case, but there is an intriguing clue. Because when Chantrell went up to his execution, he stood on the scaffold, he scanned the audience, he locked eyes with Little John, and he said, "Give my regards to Joe Bell. He did a good job putting the noose around my neck." And you could just hear the drop, the snap of the neck, it's the opening to the TV show, or the movie, or whatever. It felt so Sherlockian, like, here is this guy, how does he know that Bell worked on it?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  But the other part is that Chantrell was a drinking buddy of Robert Louis Stevenson.

• 29:52Kate Lister?

  No.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Of cour- they were all like, you know, all dudes, right? Yeah, they're all buddies.

• 29:56Kate Lister?

  Dudes together.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  And Robert Louis Stevenson is told by the prosecutor that this was not the first time that Chantrell killed. He becomes the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So you have the real Sherlock Holmes, you have the real Dr. J- I mean, it's just this incredible period, and so much going on in Edinburgh in the 19th century.

• 30:12Kate Lister?

  There are some cases that we know Joe Bell worked on with Little John. Tell me about the case of, is it Jane Kelly?

• 30:20Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah. So, one of the, you know, obviously, when I started writing this book, I mean, I spent, with the Butchering Art, I spent all those years in the, in the operating theaters, and then I spent six years in the trenches of World War I, and then I thought, you know, I need to write something lighter. I'm gonna write a book about murder.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  And so I turned to this subject. And, you know, in some ways, it's a delightful sort of romp through, through 19th century Edinburgh and Sherlock Holmes and all that, but there is a really dark theme, I think, that needs to be acknowledged, which is that a lot of early forensics is built on the brutalized bodies of women who received no justice. But the advances outlast their bodies. And one of them is Jane Kelly. She's this woman, she is in Cowgate, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods of Edinburgh. It's 1888. She, one day, her neighbor finds her cowering under the bed, she's covered in blood, and her husband says she fell, which, that's not a very believable, yeah. And, and people

• 31:20Speaker 04

  knew, I mean, the neighbors knew that he beat her regularly, but again, that wasn't necessarily illegal.

• 31:24Kate Lister?

  Alarmingly common.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Socially acceptable, even. And so, she dies, and Bell and Little John perform the postmortem. They find over 50 wounds. They find evidence of a sexual assault, but at this time, it's not illegal to rape your wife. So that gets noted in the autopsy, but not necessarily makes it into the court case. But she was brutalized, and she dies from those wounds. And the judge says something to the effect of, "There was so much overwhelming medical evidence that it would warrant a murder conviction, but the jury find him guilty of culpable homicide, a lesser, a lesser offense, because she was drunk at the time of the murder."

• 32:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, fuck off.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Right, right? Yeah, and so I'm gonna tell you something horrible. Between 1872-

• 32:12Kate Lister?

  I'm not mad.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  I know, no, you're gonna get even more mad, because between 1872 and 1892, no man in Scotland, no man was convicted of killing his wife if she was seen to be drunk or nagging him at the time.

• 32:27Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, which, by the way, that could be a broad, that could be a very broad definition, like, what constitutes as nagging, right? So, so this is a real problem. And, you know, as I was kind of doing my research, there was a story, for instance, of a man who, who kills his wife. He kicks her in the stomach, she's pregnant, and then he's brought up for murder, and then his defense lawyer says, "Well, he didn't intend to murder her because he wasn't wearing his boots at the time." Which, he kicked her with his bare, like, socked feet, or whatever, and so therefore, he didn't have the intent. And he also is found guilty of culpable homicide. I know, it's, it's, it's very depressing.

• 33:06Kate Lister?

  So what did Bell and Little John do to help in the case of Jane Kelly?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  I mean, they testified, clearly Bell and Little John felt that this man was guilty of murder. I mean, they testified for the prosecution, they were putting him up for murder. But, you know, their, their hands are tied to some extent, and a jury of 15 men in Scotland, a lot-

• 33:25Kate Lister?

  Maybe that was as good as it was gonna get.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Sometimes that was as good. He gets 10 years, that's it. But there's, I mean, there's just so many stories like this, and of course, we know the Ripper victims, they never get any justice.

• 33:37Kate Lister?

  Didn't he have, didn't he collaborate on that resume?

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, yeah. So that's also, I mean, you have to have Ripper in a book about, about 19th century crime. And he's, he's important, because there's, there's a, a part that has nothing really to do with the, the actual case, which is, Ripper starts killing in 1888, and at this point, there's higher literacy rates, and people are consuming true crime. I mean, we think, I mean, I have a problem, like Netflix knows it.

• 34:05Kate Lister?

  They went nuts.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:07Kate Lister?

  Like, the Victorians, I always, like, I used to teach this to students, I'd be like, "Look, you have to imagine, like, the true crime genre drops, but nobody has any context for it."

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 34:14Kate Lister?

  And we haven't had these conversations yet about, maybe that was too far.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, they're just, they're in it. And, I know, and that's the thing, it's like, I mean, Netflix does know I have a problem. Like, every time they drop something, they're like, "Lindsay, what do you think?" And I, like, watch it within an hour, and don't tell Hallie. But I do consume way too much true crime, I do enjoy, but, you know, Hallie has really changed the conversation about how we consume it, and I do actually think a lot about that. Like, what am I, you know, I mean, we were talking about the Ryan Murphy, the Lizzie Bor- you know, like, how do we consume some of those shows, and how do we feel about that? And I think that that's a really important part of the discussion, but as you say, in the 19th century, this isn't happening, right?

• 34:53Kate Lister?

  They weren't having those conversations, they just wanted to know.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  And it was very sensational. And so, you have rising literacy rates, you have the fact that Ripper is not caught, and so you have this idea of the bumbling Bobby that emerges, and the police are in app, and at the same time, you have Sherlock Holmes stepping into the literary scene. And so, I think it explains a lot about why Sherlock Holmes became this attractive figure. Like, suddenly, somebody knows how to do something, right? And you have to also keep in mind that although Sherlock Holmes now seems to us kind of like what the police do, not at the time. Like, in the 19th century, the police were still professionalizing, they didn't have the techniques, they were still kind of gaining their feet, they had a lot of, of challenges to overcome. So you have Sherlock

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Holmes, and he is bringing this analytical method that nobody had done before in policing and detection of crime. So Ripper is important to kind of, giving the context of why Holmes becomes such a, a popular figure, I think, at that moment. And then, of course, you have Joe Bell, who is reading the reports with professional interest. And Bell later gives an interview where he claims that he did an investigation with his good friend, almost certainly Little John, he doesn't name him in the interview. He says they went their separate ways, as they often did, and at the end, they exchanged envelopes, and they had written down the same name. I know. And we're never gonna know, because there's no documents.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  But he said it, yeah, exactly. So I have that, that in there, but, but then also, Little John works on a case. Now, if you're listening, and you're, you know everything about Jack the Ripper, I want to preface this, I don't, I am not a Ripper expert, I'm not even an expert on Conan Doyle. They only appear in the book in as much as they, their stories intersect with, with Bell. But one of the stories was a man named William Henry Berry, who was in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. He was married to a brothel madam, I believe. He would disappear at various times at night, and then, right after the murders, he goes up to Dundee with his wife in Scotland. And that's where he comes into sleuth hound, because one morning, he claims that he wakes up, and his wife is dead on the floor.

• 37:02Kate Lister?

  Well, that happens a lot.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  And it gets even crazier, because he says he had this compulsion to cut her up and put her in a box. We've all been there. Like, you wake up, your partner's dead, you're like, "I really wanna chop up that body."

• 37:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  And, but the weird thing is, he goes in-

• 37:17Kate Lister?

  It's so annoying when that happens.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  It's so annoying. I mean, how many bodies do you have in your, in trunks in your flat, Kate? Like, there's, there's like a whole wall of them, and you're like, oh-

• 37:27Kate Lister?

  Quite frankly, you know, they all, they all were dead when I cut their bodies up, at the, at the point that their, you know, their bodies got chopped up. And also, chopping up a body is not an easy thing to do, like- I've learned, I saw a whole thing with Professor Sue Black explaining that, of just that, it's, that we think of it as just the chop of a body, but the actual process of it takes hours.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  It's horrific. I mean, and, and if you think about the instruments that this man would have had, like, I mean, what, like, a, a table knife? Like, I mean, the whole thing is just, it doesn't even bear thinking about. But he puts her in the box, he goes to the police, and he confesses, and they think he's, like, intoxicated, and he says something along the lines of, "I'm afraid people will think I'm Jack the Ripper." So of course, people think he's Jack the Ripper, right? Like, why would you even say that? Why would you? And so, the police at first think, this guy is, like, delu- like, he's drunk, or there's something weird going on. They go, and lo and behold, there's the woman in the box and everything. And because he said this, and then, when they get to his, his flat, on the ba- in the basement, it says, like, on the outside of the building, "Ripper lives here," it was in graffiti, it was old. So obviously, people thought he

• 38:31Speaker 04

  was a creep, and there was something off about this guy. So he gets pulled up on murder, and Little John is brought into the investigation. And what's so intriguing is that when he was executed, there was a lot of media around it, because everybody thought, well, maybe he is Ripper. Yeah, they thought, maybe he'll confess. And so, when he, when he's hanged, his executioner claims that he did confess, I mean, whether you, I mean, executioners must have had great pub stories, right? Like, so I feel like that could have been something. But he does say that, he, he felt that he had executed Jack the Ripper, but he doesn't ever re-confess to that. Like, he has this sort of initial, he either says something along the lines of, "I, people will think I am," or "I am." There's different conflicting

• 39:12Speaker 04

  reports, I mean, with these crime reports, too, it's always hard to get a sense of what's really going on, as you know. But yeah, so Ripper is definitely in sleuth hound.

• 39:30Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Lindsay after this short break.

• 40:09Speaker 05

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• 41:01Kate Lister?

  And they worked on a case of an Edinburgh baby farmer, Jesse King.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 41:07Kate Lister?

  That's a crazy story.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  I know. You know about baby farming, right?

• 41:10Kate Lister?

  But there'll be people watching and listening if you don't.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 41:12Kate Lister?

  So let's tell them what a baby farmer is.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  So we will, we will share the horrors. So, so the story begins with these little boys and they see this bundle of rags and they, they, they use it as a football and they start kicking this thing around. And after an hour, their little boys, they get curious and they open it up and there's a dead infant in there, decomposing remains. And the, and the baby's been dead for a long time. And so little John is brought in and then he brings Belle in. They end up going to, they, they link it to this woman named Jesse King. They go to her flat and they find another infant at that point. And then the investigation really heats up.

• 41:48Kate Lister?

  A dead infant?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  Another dead infant, yeah. And so Jesse King is a baby farmer. So for people who don't know, there was no birth control in the 19th century. Women were poor. They, they get to their 10th baby and they could not afford to feed it. So, so what you would do is you would bring the baby to the baby farmer, you would pay the, the baby farmer a fee with the hopes that the baby farmer would farm the child out to be fed and cared for by another family. Jesse King cuts the middleman out and just kills, she takes the fee, she kills the infants. And so she is brought up on these charges and Belle and little John work on the case. What was fascinating, there was a couple of really fascinating things. Number one, little John took pictures of the autopsies.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Again, very, very early example of using the, the camera in the postmortem room, which just wasn't being done. I mean, you and I off camera were talking about Lizzie Borden because the thing about Lizzie Borden that fast, I, you know, everybody's fascinated with the hacking, but I am fascinated with the courtroom photography because nobody seems to talk about this, but there were photos that were used in the court case and they're fascinating. And, you know, so that, that's a new development. That was 1892, Lizzie Borden. So this is a little bit before that. So he's using photography. He's, he's always interested in technology and how that could help advance forensic science. And of course, at the time as well, I think, you know, a lot of Victorians felt like the camera can't lie, but we know it can lie.

• 43:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, we know it can.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  I mean, it lies all the time, like with the double, the angles even like, I mean, come on guys, like just depending on how you put that camera, like you could look bad or terrible. Like at this point, they should just take the filter off us and like, we just have like a full beard.

• 43:30Kate Lister?

  Witch face.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh my God, HD camera, you know? But yeah, but I mean, the camera, yeah, you can, you can create bias and stuff, but at the time it was new technology.

• 43:40Kate Lister?

  It's revolutionary, right? It's like, it's, it's in a picture, it must be true.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  It must be true. And it was, it was an interesting, I mean, little John would take the postmortem photos. It was a great technique because of course, the other thing that happens in the 19th century, in the early part of the century, if you were brought up to testify, you had to have direct knowledge of the case. So you were brought in as a doctor and you, you perform. Now, that changes in the mid 19th century. So you can be an expert, a witness for hire, essentially, an expert for hire. You could be brought in, you could, you didn't perform the postmortem, but you are qualified to look at the documents and to, to bring a judgment. So that's a new thing. And I think little John felt that if he was taking photos of the postmortem, this would also help because if other experts are brought in at a later point, then that's preserved

• 44:26Speaker 04

  and they wouldn't have to perform necessarily a second or third autopsy. So it's, so it's interesting. So Jesse King, there are photos, they're terrible photos. And also I think it really speaks to, you know, going back to forensics being built on the brutalized bodies of women. Jesse King is the perpetrator here, but women are still like the victim of the system, right? Like they, they're poor, they don't have birth control, they are, find themselves in these desperate.

• 44:55Kate Lister?

  They're going to be ashamed.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Jesse King as well is put up for trial, but I am convinced her lover was involved, but he testifies against her and he is not convicted or executed.

• 45:04Kate Lister?

  So I never noticed there were dead babies in my house.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  And they were up on high shelf, there was one that was up on a very high shelf that only he could have really reached and it was, and it was wrapped in his jacket. There's a lot of evidence and I won't spoil it, but there is a little bit of justice with him later, but it's not, it's not judicial justice, I will say. So I think Jesse King also tells us a lot about the experiences of women in the 19th century in the sense that, you know, there was a lot of interest in her because she was a woman and there was a lot of anger because she's doing something that is so sort of anti-woman, right? Like killing children. And, and then of course you have the, the mothers of these victims who, who didn't know until the point that these bodies were discovered.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  You know, we can think whatever we want about their decision to farm out the baby, but let's give them a little bit benefit that they were probably in a very desperate situation and they had hoped for the best, then find out that these children were just murdered outright would have been a terrible thing as well.

• 46:02Kate Lister?

  So what happens to Joe Bell then? I mean, it must've like, obviously, you know, I'm sure he was very pleased he was successful in his career and he was a consulting detective, but it must've blindsided him. Suddenly there's a best seller based on him. I'm not quite sure how he'd feel about that.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  I know. It's, it's, it's an unusual situation he found himself in. So in 1892, Conan Doyle does an interview about Sherlock Holmes and somebody says, well, this all came from your imagination. And Conan Doyle says, yes, but also I had this professor. And Belle was reading that interview and he writes to, to Conan Doyle and he says, am I the professor? And Conan Doyle writes him this extraordinary letter, which I've read and held, and it says, yes, it's to you, I surely owe Sherlock Holmes, which is amazing. And they start to correspond and I will give Conan Doyle some credit. He does ask permission. He says, can I give your name to a journalist, but I must warn you that your life is going to get crazy and that people will ask you to solve crimes and it will get, and I don't

• 47:01Speaker 04

  think Belle knew how crazy it was going to get. And so what happens is he's outed as Sherlock Holmes and right around the same time, Conan Doyle, who hates Sherlock Holmes, kills the character off. So it's Sherlock Holmes is dead, long live Sherlock Holmes. And so the media turns its attention to Joe Bell. And at that moment, this huge murder case falls into his lap. It involves a country mansion, a murder dressed up like an accident and honest to God, a ballistics expert named Dr. Watson. I have held a letter that says, my dear Watson, by Joe Bell. And, you know, as a nonfiction writer, it doesn't get any better than that, right? So, so that, you know, you, when you say like, how do you decide on books? It just, there was just so much wonderful material here.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  And I write narrative nonfiction and so that means like, I like to move the characters around almost like in a novelistic way. And there was just so much, I mean, the great thing about true crime in the 19th century is it gives you court records. So you get dialogue and things like that, you know, because I don't, I don't create dialogue, I use only historical records for that. So, so that was a real joy to be able to do that with sleuth hounds.

• 48:08Kate Lister?

  It must have been very strange. I mean, you were saying when you were going to write the book, you didn't want to read Sherlock Holmes because it was prejudice, what you knew about this man. But he was living that.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:17Kate Lister?

  Like, it must have been the case that well, now, everybody who approaches him engages with him, talks to him, is thinking Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  People were obsessed with that. I mean, when, when Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, people, you know, they really felt like he was a real person. They mourned him. There were obituaries. People were mourning bands on their arms. There was a, the, the original artist based the illustrations off his own brother. And his brother went to the opera at one point, and somebody goes, Sherlock Holmes, you know, so like, people just couldn't escape this. It was, it was really a thing. And, um, but you're right that, you know, at one point, Belle writes to his friend, Jesse Saxby, which this is a really interesting side note, that he, he's different from Holmes in many ways. His, his wife dies when he's in his 30s, and he really holds the torch for her for his entire life. He raises his three children alone. He would have been a very annoying father, though. I mean, can

• 49:08Speaker 04

  you imagine? Like, you couldn't hide anything from Joe Bell. Like, that would be-

• 49:12Kate Lister?

  Oh, God, no, you'd be busted immediately, wouldn't you?

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, immediately. Um, but he, he, and he's very empathetic, and he, and there's a, there's a lot to be said. He also was an advocate of women in medicine, which was unusual for the time.

• 49:21Kate Lister?

  Go, Joe.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, he reforms nursing. So there's, there's a lot of differences between him. Um, but, but yeah, he, uh, he writes to this, he, he's very good friends with this woman, Jesse Saxby. I think that they were in love. I mean, they wrote all the time, but it was like this Victorian, you know, will they, won't they, kind of moment, and, and it's never acted upon. But he, he confesses to her a lot. And he says something to the extent of, well, my old student must not have thought very highly of me to have put this heap of rubbish on my head. I think he was having a particularly bad day.

• 49:55Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  But, but I think-

• 49:56Kate Lister?

  It's been very annoying for that day.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Yes, it was very annoying. And, and also, like, we can say that, I mean, some people might get annoyed by this, but Holmes is kind of sociopathic, right? Like, he's very emotionally detached. And Belle wasn't. He wasn't that. And so, my theory about this is, my husband can't do caricatures of people he knows too well, because caricature is about first impression.

• 50:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  And I think Conan Doyle knew Belle in the capacity of a professor, but not really beyond that.

• 50:23Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  And so, he kind of, it's a caricature of Belle. It's, he took the flashiest, most recognizable trait, and he transposed it onto this character. But I think Belle was very different. I will say that at the end of the book, Conan Doyle and Belle partner up to overturn a murder case of a man who was on death row in Sing Sing. He's going to be electrocuted.

• 50:44Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  It's such a strange case. I'll tell you just very quickly. Um, it's a man named William Rice, who they believed was murdered. If people, if Americans are listening, Rice University in Texas was founded off Rice's money. He was a multimillionaire. He was an old man when he died. And all of the money, when he died, was suspiciously left to his lawyer. And it was, yeah.

• 51:03Kate Lister?

  What a completely normal thing to do.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  What a, what a normal thing to do, right? And so, he gets put up for murder because this is very suspicious, and, um, and he's convicted of it, and he's, he's sitting on death row. Now Belle and Conan Doyle go to the mattresses to get this overturned. And there was a moment where my editor was like, I don't get it. Like, he seems guilty. Why would Belle do this? And I, again, not to like, have too many OJ Simpson referrals here, but it is if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit moment. So what happened was, Rice was embalmed immediately after he died. And Belle and Conan Doyle argued, you couldn't gain any forensic evidence off the body. You could not convict on the basis of any medical evidence because it had been spoiled by the embalming. We watch these true crime trials,

• 51:49Speaker 04

  and we think, that person's guilty. But I will say-

• 51:51Kate Lister?

  They can't prove it.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  I can't prove it. I wouldn't, if I was sitting in that jury, I don't think I could. I, I, I feel like I'm pretty good at that. I mean, sometimes I get mad, and I'd be like, I'd be a terrible juror. Have you ever been on a, on a jury?

• 52:02Kate Lister?

  No, God, I'd love to, though. But they'd take one look at my history and go, right, you cannot be on a jury. You're far too excited about this.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also, like, I just think, um, yeah, there's just, there's just two, I, I've never been called up, but I feel like, you know, having the PhD, like, there's like so many reasons.

• 52:19Kate Lister?

  You'd be sat there with your Sherlock Holmes pipe.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, you're a sleuth hound. And I'd be like, I know that they're guilty. But, and my mom, she's, she's a terrible, like, she'll watch this stuff, and she just like, instantly makes, you know, a judgment. I'm like, Mom!

• 52:32Kate Lister?

  That's what terrifies me. I mean, I know the jury system's the best one that we've come up with, but like, really? Really?

• 52:36Speaker 04

  It's terrifying.

• 52:37Kate Lister?

  We just get 12 random people-

• 52:39Speaker 04

  I know.

• 52:39Kate Lister?

  And go, do you think they committed the murder?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  In this country, do you have, I know in America, you have an option, I think you have an option, and this might be like a federal state thing, but I, you do have an option to, um, to be, have a trial by judge, sometimes.

• 52:53Kate Lister?

  Actually, I, I think, right, people will correct me on this immediately. I think that it's the case that if you've committed a big crime-

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:01Kate Lister?

  Like murder or something, like, that's a jury case.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  It's gotta be jury, okay.

• 53:03Kate Lister?

  Unless you plead guilty, I think.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  I think in America, there are some situations, and again, like, I also don't know, but, but if I had that option, I would go, you know, if I was truly innocent, I would go judge. If I was guilty, I'd go jury.

• 53:16Kate Lister?

  That's interesting.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Because I feel like a good defense lawyer could manipulate that, right?

• 53:21Kate Lister?

  You're playing the jury. Or I think how quickly we judge people and decide on them, right?

• 53:26Speaker 04

  We do it all the time. I mean, I, I was watching A Killer Story. Have you watched that yet?

• 53:30Kate Lister?

  Of course, I've watched it.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, immediately, right? Like, get in your PJs, get on that. And for the first two episodes, I, I don't know what you think, but I thought she was innocent. And then the third episode, I was like, mm, don't know. But I still couldn't convict her. I don't think she should be in, in jail.

• 53:46Kate Lister?

  That's true. We'll, we'll get you back on for that.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, we won't, we won't spoil, but like, I, but, but it's a great, if you're, if you're listening, you liked your crime, it's a great documentary, because it does do one of those things where you're like, you follow it, and you keep kind of chain, you're like, mm, you know?

• 53:57Kate Lister?

  And you're not sure.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  You're not sure. And that, that's a worry with a jury, right? Like, you know?

• 54:02Kate Lister?

  What happens to Joe Bell, then? How does his story end?

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Well, um, he, him and Conan Doyle do have a relation, like, they have a good relationship for, for his whole life.

• 54:13Kate Lister?

  Well, that's, that's good. He's not too pissed, then.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, they don't like fall out. There's no, there's no beef between them or anything that, that kind of happens. Um, but Belle, when, when he dies, I think he knew that every obituary was gonna, was gonna be this, was gonna leave with that, yeah. And so, he does kind of get overshadowed. And then weirdly, he gets forgotten as the inspiration. Like I said, most people don't know that Conan Doyle was a doctor. They don't know that, that, uh, you know, it was based off a real person. I'm going on a lot of medical podcasts, and I always say to doctors, are you surprised that the original Sherlock Holmes was a doctor? Because doctors are detectives. Like, they have to-

• 54:46Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  You know, and today, we have better diagnostic methods, but in the 19th century, you really did have to be very observant.

• 54:52Kate Lister?

  House is based on Sherlock Holmes.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  House is Sherlock Holmes. Everything is Sherlock Holmes, actually. When you start to like, break things down, you're like, this is just redone-

• 54:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  -in so many different ways. And it's, it's fascinating in, in that sense. But, um, but yeah, he, he dies, that's of course, um-

• 55:08Kate Lister?

  To live a long life.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  He lived a long life, yeah, he did. And he died on his wife's birthday, which, you know, he held the torch, and that was, that was very poetic. And late, a couple years later, Conan Doyle, you know, I went on to This Guy Sucked. I think you-

• 55:21Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so funny, right? And I almost said Conan Doyle sucks, because he's, he's, he's, um, taught by the, the best meth, you know, best analytical mind in Europe, and then he goes on to believe in fairies and spiritualism later in life. It becomes weird. But as a historian of science, I always kind of pull back a little bit, because I do think, to his credit, he was trying to bring that Belle method to the supernatural, and he felt like he'd be able to explain it. But Conan Doyle later says that he has a seance, and he, he raises Belle from the dead, which I think Belle would have hated. He would have hated that. And, um, and his daughter, Belle's daughter, says something to the effect of, well, that's ridiculous. Like, if he ever appeared to anybody, it would be me. It would not be Conan Doyle. And, you know, this, this student that kind of made his life a

• 56:05Speaker 04

  little bit of a hassle at the end. So, so, but he, yeah, he goes on to, to live a long and, and happy life. He makes a huge impact on his patients, of course, gets a little bit overshadowed and then sort of forgotten. And that was my hope with Sleuth Hound, that I can bring this to the forefront. And I will say that there's a very weird little postscript in Sleuth Hound that I, I just had to include, because, um, in the 1940s, Irving Wallace, the writer, wrote an essay saying that Belle was the original Sherlock Holmes. And Adrian Conan Doyle, who was the son of Conan Doyle, took great offense to this. Now, this was weird, because Conan Doyle had said it in interviews. He, he said it on, I mean, it's, it's not a secret. This is not a secret. But he took great offense,

• 56:47Speaker 04

  and there was this kind of like war that broke out in the newspapers over this. And Irving Wallace also took offense, because he's like, well, there's documents, like, I'm not making this up. And the reason why I included it was because it is a very funny little thing. And I think that ultimately, we are going to argue, how much is Belle Sherlock Holmes? And how much is, you know, there's always going to be that. And of course, Sherlock Holmes has this addiction, and, and Conan Doyle's father was an alcoholic, and he dies. So there's, there's, it's not just Belle. But, um, the reason why I wanted to include it was, in 1993, Conan Doyle's daughter is still alive. He is born in 19, in 1859. Only men can do this, Kate. We know that, right? Only men could have a child. Like,

• 57:29Speaker 04

  so, so 1859, he's born, his daughter is alive in 1993. She gives an interview to The Mail on Sunday, and she says, they ask her about Joe Bell, and she says, of course, Joe Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. It's right there in black and white. What further proof do you need? And I thought, that is the end of Sleuth Hound.

• 57:48Kate Lister?

  That is, isn't it?

• 57:49Speaker 04

  So-

• 57:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, Lindsay, you have been wonderful. Thank you so much.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 57:53Kate Lister?

  If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 57:56Speaker 04

  I'm, unfortunately, you can't, you can't avoid it. I'm, I'm out there talking about syphilis and terrible things, and making you feel good about living in 2026. But I'm on Instagram. Um, I just rebooted my, my YouTube channel called Under the Knife, which is a ridiculous show where I have a magical bucket, and things pop out of it, and I talk about it. It's, it's very childish. Um, I, I just feel like my PhD is going to be revoked at some point. Like, they're going to be like, that's not what we were-

• 58:21Kate Lister?

  I feel like that every day.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're, we'll be, we'll, we'll toast it like the No Knows Club. We'll, we'll, yeah, it will be like a badge of honor, and we will laugh about it. But, um-

• 58:30Kate Lister?

  We were in a club for a while called The So-Called Historians. Remember that?

• 58:34Speaker 04

  That's right. Oh, yeah, The So-Called Historians.

• 58:36Kate Lister?

  Because there were nasty people online saying, saying that we were So-Called Historians. Remember that?

• 58:41Speaker 04

  I know. When do we, when do we get to just own our titles? Like, it's just ridiculous.

• 58:45Kate Lister?

  I quite like that. I can be a So-Called Historian.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  I think we should just bring that back, and we should all put that in our bios. The So-Called Historians, like, fuck it, you know?

• 58:52Kate Lister?

  But you have been amazing.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's so nice to finally meet you in person.

• 58:56Kate Lister?

  In person, right?

• 58:57Speaker 04

  In person, yeah. And we could talk forever. So, thank you.

• 59:04Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much to Lindsay for joining us. And if you like what you heard and what you saw, we are on YouTube after all, then please don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, maybe you've solved a case you'd like us to know about, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov, produced by Stuart Beckwith and Georgie Turner. The engineer was Hanif Hussain, and the senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 1:00:16Speaker 06

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