The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Readers of Sherlock Holmes stories may recall that the detective clipped stories from newspapers related to crimes, or unusual stories in which Holmes detected the hint of a crime. Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, did the same thing, and he had a collection of books related to crime. This is just one aspect of himself that Doyle put into the fictional detective.

Doyle’s interest in crime, and particularly in defending those he felt were unjustly prosecuted, sometimes led him into investigating crimes. Peter Costello describes some of these crimes and investigations in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes.

Perhaps the most celebrated case, and the case in which Doyle conducted himself as a Holmes-like detective, was the case of George Edalji. Edalji, a solicitor born to an Indian father and English mother, was convicted of a series of animal mutilations. Doyle believed the case against him was week, based mainly on poison-pen letters accusing the young man. As he began to investigate, he found sloppy investigative techniques, openly racist police leadership, an incompetent counsel contributed to the wrongful conviction. Doyle investigated further and even collected evidence indicating that someone else was the culprit. Through his investigation, along with pressure he brought through the media and influential acquaintances, he won a pardon for Edalji.

When Doyle became so deeply involved in a case, he was usually motivated to correct what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. He was not so active in his investigation of other crimes. Doyle studied crimes he found interesting. More often than not, these were inquiries at a distance as he read books and newspaper accounts, and discussed crimes with other interested people. He was even a member of “Our Society,” a secretive crime club that discussed the details of crime and developments in criminology in its after-dinner meetings. Some of the members were lawyers and forensic scientists (still a new profession) who were actively involved in investigating or prosecuting crimes.

Costello suggests that some of these crimes inspired Doyle’s stories. It makes sense that they would. Doyle always made significant changes when he adapted a true crime to a fictional story, so no Sherlock Holmes story could be described as a close, though fictionalized, recreation of a true crime.

Doyle remained interested in crime throughout his life, but by the 1920s he was focused on promoting spiritualism. Even when he investigated a crime in this era, it was usually because of an element of spiritualism touching the case. He encouraged the use of clairvoyants and mediums by the police. When Agatha Christie disappeared, his investigation consisted of a consultation with medium Horace Leaf. (Journalists, passing on clairvoyance to use more Holmes-like detection, found Christie staying at a resort under an assumed name.)

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Costello, Peter. The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Carrol & Graf, 1991.

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

I won’t say much about Gabrielle Bernstein’s Super Attractor. There is something about it that turns me off. I suspect my biases are usually clear, though I don’t often state them as explicitly as I do here.

Much of what you’ll find in term of advice is in Super Attractor is similar to what you might find in other self-help books. It has the New Age perspective that is common among many books of this genre, especially in the wake of Oprah’s popularizing of books such as The Secret.

Bernstein goes a step farther in reviving Spiritualism. She essentially claims to be a medium (though she doesn’t use the word) who is in touch with a spirit guide—and you can be, too. I do not know if she is a sham or if she is playing with fire, but it is a path I cannot take or recommend on either scientific of religious grounds.

“Fear is a gentle reminder of what you don’t want, and therefore it helps you clarify what you do want,” Gabriell Bernstein, Super Attractor

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Night of the Ghouls (film)

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Bernstein, Gabrielle. Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2019.

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

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Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. 2001. New York: Norton, 2002.

The stories are horrific. Sick people, men, women and children alike, are mistakenly declared dead by ignorant officials, careless medics and, worst of all, their own families, and confined to the grave while still alive. They wake in their coffins, nailed in, sometimes in time to be saved by a watchful attendant, sometimes to have their feeble cries ignored by the uncaring or hushed by the superstitious, sometimes too suffer a second, more terrifying, death. In these last cases, belated exhumations reveal bodies broken and twisted by impossible efforts to escape. Most of these stories are false.

That is the fortunate conclusion of Dr. Bondeson. His exploration of fear of premature burial spans history, society, literature and medicine over the course of centuries.

Fear of live interment peaked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time when medical professionals lost faith in the signs of death and common people lost faith in the medical profession. Such a fear now, in the west where modern medical practice is well established, would be considered irrational, but in those days, it was more reasonable, even if it was unlikely to occur.

In Germany, the view prevailed that only putrefaction was a sure sign of death, and it sparked the building of hospitals for the uncertainly dead, where attendants closely watched corpses for signs of life until sufficient decay confirmed its absence. Similar views later prevailed in France, though it did not build similar mortuaries. Anti-premature-burial was always a minority movement in English speaking nations, but adherents held out the longest in the United States and United Kingdom through ties to spiritualism, fringe medicine and other groups.


Bondeson shows the folly of the sensationalists who stirred live burial fears, but shows some sympathy for the true philanthropists who took up the cause. He doesn’t even rule it out today in undeveloped areas where modern methods for diagnosing death don’t prevail.

Buried Alive contains more than a few page-long paragraphs, but it is very readable. The tone is not academic and Bondeson’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. He handles some of the more lurid and sensational aspects of the history and literature with tongue-in-cheek humor.