Conan Doyle, Detective by Peter Costello

Author:Peter Costello [Costello, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472103659
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

INTO THE VALLEY OF FEAR:

CRIME IN AMERICA

America for Conan Doyle was something of a second homeland. Just as he admired her people and many of their institutions, so too he was fascinated by American crime, so different from what he knew in Britain and Europe.

From his first novel A Study in Scarlet in 1887 to the last of his stories published in 1930 (‘The Last Resource’), American crime runs through his work, providing new themes and ideas. The visits he paid to America gave him new experiences as well, further stimulating his imagination. The cases which interested him constitute in themselves a minor chronicle of American crime, a black reflection of the American values he admired.

The sensational background to A Study in Scarlet dealt with the Mormon murders in Utah in the early years of that now settled state. Doyle called his ‘Avenging Angels’ Danites, even though that Mormon faction truly belonged to an earlier period in the tangled Mormon history, and never actually existed in Utah. But he accurately reflected contemporary views of the followers of the Prophet Brigham Young. And there were murders – Danite or not. He drew some of his information from John. H. Beadle’s Brigham Young’s Destroying Angel (1872), later bolstered by Polygamy: Life in Utah, or The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormons (1904), a copy of which was in his crimes library at one time.

Visitors to modern Salt Lake City must find it hard to believe that in the nineteenth century this prosperous, vital city was the object of awed wonder for its polygamy, its new-fangled creeds, its prophetic leaders – and its terrible crimes committed in the name of God, such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre when Mormons dressed as Indians attacked a westward-bound wagon train killing men, women and children. The view expressed by Doyle in his novel, of tyrannical elders seizing the prettiest young women for their harems, of opponents being murdered by masked bands, of strange disappearances, was one largely shared by his readers. Nor was it too far from the truth.

When Conan Doyle was on his fourth trip to America in 1923, a trip which took him to the Far West at last, he visited Salt Lake City, where he was favourably impressed by the Mormons. One of the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Bishop Charles W. Nibley, resented the fact that Conan Doyle should be welcomed at all, let alone allowed the use of a hall to speak in, and given money when he was the author of a base book about their ancestors. Conan Doyle referred to the episodes which had inspired him as ‘a passing stain on the early history of Utah’. But he refused to apologize, as the facts were true enough and could not be denied.

The passion and prejudice which had marred the rise of the Mormons was not, as Conan Doyle realized, an exceptional thing. America espoused freedom and liberty of conscience, but again and again these have had to be fought for at a great cost.

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