Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fraudulent Færies

Subject: A Conan Doyle, circa 1920.
Genuine, for certain real, not fake,
Lumière KinemaColour fauxtograf™
on loan to SleuthSayers, courtesy
British Museum archive collection.

Doyle and Houdini and science and such,
Séance and fairies concern overmuch.

The words physics and psychics come to us from Greek via Latin. The spellings might seem similar, but physics in Greek related to physical things, especially nature, whereas psychics suggested soul. Forgive me, but I'm in the former camp.

My classmate Lela with kindness told me I was a ‘rational bigot’. She’s not wrong and I cherish her evaluation. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I side with the Amazing Randi: provide evidence, unambiguous proof. Unlike, well, the most highly regarded icon in our profession.

Embarrassingly, when it came to spiritualism and the supernatural, the wonderful and prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was dismayingly gullible. He was so unlike Sherlock Holmes that it hardly seems credible he could so superlatively depict his coldly rational protagonist.

I mentioned the magician Randi, but Doyle was, you might be surprised to learn, once a close friend of Harry Houdini. The famed magician went to lengths to dissuade the author from his utter belief in the occult, efforts that eventually broke their friendship.

From the Mouths of Babes

Thus we set the stage for a pair of Yorkshire cousins who, aided by flitting fairies, fooled much of the adult world, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For proof, they proffered photographs of petite figures hovering in the air.

1^st Cottingley photo

To be sure, young girls have fooled adults before. The Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie, and Kate, introduced the world to séances in 1848. After a hundred eighty years and an eventual admission of fakery by one of the sisters, séances still have believers. Simply visit Cassadaga, Florida, a town of soothseekers.

Much earlier in 1692, the Salem witch trials began with antics and accusations by three pre-teen girls, 9yo Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, her cousin 11yo Abigail Williams, and Ann Putman, age 12. The latter child became a prolific inculpater who, along with a number of teenagers, over time denounced nearly half the village of practicing witchcraft. And adults believed them.

Back in England

5^th Cottingley photo

The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand carried photographs of fairies photographed by two young cousins in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. There were doubters, but skeptics were few and believers were many.

A few months later, the same magazine published a followup by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was couched as a reasonable exploration of the subject, but it’s clear Doyle not only accepted the evidence of fairies, but also supernatural phenomena in general. (As a side note, Doyle was also taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax.)

Without further ado, here’s the original article and here’s Doyle’s defence.

No fairies were harmed in the making of this article.

Even though I don’t believe in fairies, I’m setting out a dish of cookies. Just sayin’.

Entering Modern Publishing with Madame Selina

I entered the modern age of publishing this week when I pushed the publish button and committed ten Madame Selina short mystery stories and her only novella to Amazon Kindle. It was not a terribly difficult process but it would have been easier if I had not decided to simultaneously make an ebook on Apple's Pages, lured by the thought that the Pages file could be easily converted to an ePub file. Not exactly easy was my experience, although I did wind up making the ebook cover for Kindle on Pages.

That was an interesting experience, too. A number of years ago, I sketched Madame Selina, New York City's premier spirit medium in the years after the Civil War. While the many fine illustrators who depicted her have stressed youth or eccentricity – flying hair being a favorite device –  I drew her as she usually saw herself, as Mrs. Hiram Bingham, respectable widow and business woman. However, even someone as poor at promotion as I am realized that this image would be a selling point. 

I tried making her younger and Nip a tad weirder but that didn't suit either, although he does frequently get to carry her baggage. Finally, thanks to my new iPad and Procreate, a fine paint program, I reworked the original sketch, making Madame younger, darker, and more exotic and giving her an elaborate hat and an inky backdrop. I hope she'll do!

Madame Selina is a favorite character of mine, although she was not the focus of the original story which is narrated by Nip Thompkins, formerly resident in upstate New York orphanage. He is sprung from this sad and unhealthy institution when she comes looking for a likely boy, small, smart, and agile. Nip, underfed but otherwise healthy, is declared suitable. Whisked away to the city, he assists in creating Madame's theatrical illusions and narrates what became her many adventures.

It is popular now to have unreliable narrators. I've tried that and it can be fun, but in writing the Madame Selina stories I realized that my real preference is for the innocent eye that, lacking adult preconceptions, appreciates wonders and spots pretension. Nip, clever, practical, and definitely lacking any mystical bent, proved to be ideal for describing Madame, who, as Nip tells us, is 'willing to lie in small things' such as special effects to enhance a seance, but who absolutely and completely believes in Aurelius, late emperor of the Romans, her spirit contact in the other world.

All this was not pure invention on my part. Victoria Woodhull, pioneering feminist, candidate for president, advocate of both free love and votes for women, conducted conversations with Demosthenes, the great orator of Ancient Greece, and, like Madame Selina, advised the bulls and bears of Wall Street. In Woodhull's case, the clientele included Commodore Vanderbilt. Apparently gentlemen who gamble are not averse to spiritual guidance.

The period immediately after the Civil War with its staggering death toll, ghastly injuries, and traumas of all sorts for troops and civilians alike, was the great era of spiritualism and of mediums, as the desperate bereaved sought to know their loved ones' fates. That was the setting for "Madame Selina" and there she would have stayed if Rob Lopresti had not suggested she would make a good series character.

I was skeptical – or maybe Nip was – but I came around to the idea and made use of many years of teaching romantic and Victorian literature to find plots for Madame in inheritance tangles and vulnerable child heirs, the politics of the Irish immigration, the difficulties of Freedmen post war, the new Italian arrivals, and the suffrage movement. 

Madame proved fit for all until changing times and the vulgarity and avarice of the high Gilded Age weakened the public's appetite for spirit communication and led to the final entry in my little book, " A Fine Nest of Rascals", where Nip, grownup and a cub reporter on a paper aiming "not to instruct but to startle," proves to have learned a lot about investigations from assisting Madame Selina. 

Madame Selina, The Complete Stories is available as an ebook on Amazon.