Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • December 11, 2013 Maybe we need Sherlock Holmes Trying to enjoy some early slumber one night, I was alerted by the patter -- actually more like the thunder -- of two pairs of little feet on the staircase. “Dad! Dad! We just discovered a detective show where the detective solves cases by using his brains instead of beating people up!” “What is the name of this newly discovered detective?” I asked suspiciously. “Sherlock Holmes!” “I think I may have heard of him.” Despite my torpor, I was elated that the kids had discov- ered the “new” Sherlock Holmes -- Jeremy Brett, in this case -- because I knew they would watch his adventures voluntarily. If Holmes had been forced on them, they would have done anything in their power, including times tables drills or piano lessons, to resist watching the shows. My logic worked. They became Sherlock Holmes buffs. Holmes seldom made mistakes, but people make mis- takes about Holmes. As portrayed on the screen by every- one from the classic Basil Rathbone with Nigel Bruce, to the Hammer Productions Peter Cushing, aided and abetted by his best friend Christopher Lee, to Jeremy Brett with David Burke as Watson -- they each sent my kids an auto- graphed photograph in response to a fan letter. Some think Holmes is the archetypal stiff-upper-lip Englishman, representing a class-conscious society. That is wrong. Arthur Conan Doyle was Irish, and the real-life characters who inspired Holmes was a Scot, Dr. Joseph Bell, who had been Doyle’s professor in medical school, and taught him how to analyze appearances while making medical deductions. While Holmes is generally shown as imperturbable, Doyle was subject to enormous inner turbulence. Raised as a devout Catholic, Doyle lapsed into disbelief, then into a sort of eclecticism, and finally into spiritualism, which he famously championed in ways that were more emotional than logical. Yet improved research into the paranormal indicates that Doyle was not on ground as shaky as some of his critics asserted. Doyle, above all, was a humanitarian and, in a racist era, he believed, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote three times in “The Song of Hiawatha,” that “Every human heart is human.” One of his least-read books today is “The Crime of the Congo,” in which Doyle documented Belgian atroci- ties against the Bantu and Pygmy peoples of sub-Saharan Africa with photographs that can still raise a shudder after a century. Holmes wrote the 45,000-word book in eight days and it influenced dignitaries including Winston Churchill, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Theodore Roosevelt -- all of whom were good friends and mutual admirers at the time -- to protest against the grisly Belgian inhumanity toward the Africans. Doyle got most of his information from Sir Roger Case- ment, later sentenced to death for his role in Irish indepen- dence, and Doyle, respecting Casement’s humanitarian work in the Congo and in South America, headed the move- ment to spare Casement the death penalty for “treason,” by which the British meant support for Irish independence in wartime. The British hanged Casement in spite of the appeals led by Doyle. Doyle had no patience with either male chauvinism or class snobbery. The only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, in Doyle’s first magazine story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is Irene Adler. Adler trumps Holmes’ trickery and mastery of disguise, knocks his metaphorical block off, and comes out the winner in the case, sending Holmes a condescending farewell note. In a subsequent story, the mystery revolves around a white American woman’s attempt to hide the fact that her child by a first marriage, living with her in England, is of mixed African ancestry. “(A) nobler man never walked the earth,” the widow says of her first husband, a black man since deceased. In the end, the woman’s second husband kisses and accepts the child as his own. In another story, the presumed villains in the strange behavior of a white man presumed to be an opium addict are a “lascar” -- a lower-caste Hindu -- and a Chinese man. Neither is a bad guy when the case is cleared up. I will not ruin it for the reader. The white guy finds out he can make more money as a street beggar than as a journalist. That ruined it for me. I chose to forget the title. Doyle was not an expert on the British Empire as Rud- yard Kipling, the other most popular British officer of the era was, since Kipling grew up there and returned as a young man. In “The Sign of the Four,” Doyle offers a sinis- ter but reliable Sikh with the name “Mahomet Singh.” The last name “Singh” is given to every Sikh man. “Mahomet” -- Muhammad -- is an impossible name for a Sikh. The Sikhs organized to keep the Muslims out of central India about 500 years ago and most definitely did not name their sons after Muhammad. I once knew a Jewish man whom everybody called by a rather cute first name. I asked his wife about it. The man’s given name was Adolf. He never used it. The same prin- ciple applies. Two of Doyle’s private cases -- not as the author of Sherlock Holmes but as an expert witness -- also revolved around opposition to prejudice. A mixed-blood Indian man named George Edalji had been sentenced to seven years in prison due to maiming horses -- a particularly disgust- ing crime in which the perpetrators harmed animals to take some sort of revenge on the owners. Edalji was convicted against circumstantial evidence. He had alibis and one of the incidents took place while he was in jail. While inter- viewing Edalji, Doyle learned that the accused night stalker was virtually blind and could not have located, let alone mutilated, the livestock on moonless nights. He also found other flaws in the evidence. Edjali was released from jail, but was not formally cleared for 20 years. In another case, a gambler and pawnbroker named Oscar Slater was accused of bludgeoning and robbing an elderly widow. He was caught after he attempted to pawn a dia- mond brooch. The culprit, being both Jewish and an immi- grant from Germany, was convicted despite the fact that the brooch he tried to pawn had never belonged to the victim and that the police in the case had reportedly prompted the housemaid who said she had seen him near the scene of the crime. Slater’s common-law wife had an alibi for him but was not allowed to testify because they were not legally married. Slater spent 17 years in jail. Doyle got into the case and Slater was released with 6,000 pounds compensa- tion for time spent in prison. He thanked Doyle profusely, but later stiffed Doyle for legal costs. Toward the end of his life, Doyle was taken in by “Margery the Medium,” Minna Crandon of Boston, who bamboozled a number of Harvard professors with séance phenomena that were simple tricks. A “spirit” thumbprint she produced in dental wax in a blacked-out room turned out to be -- the thumbprint of her own dentist. Doyle took out a full-page newspaper ad attacking Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, who had realized after one sitting that Margery was a fake and the elderly professors were romantic dupes. Dr. Rhine later went on to show, after 40 years of exacting research at Duke University, that mind-to-mind communication between the living was a statistically dem- onstrated reality. Doyle had the wrong perpetrator, but his defense of people who were unjustly accused of crimes due to race or religion was definitely on the right track. Perhaps we can convince the schools to make some of his stories required reading. Team to compete at state level The second-year robotics team, Robrostorms, competed against 24 other teams at the regional First Lego League competi- tion. They won second place in the research project category. Children researched how towns deal with natural disasters, found existing solutions to some challenges, and suggested an air vortex device to keep leaves from clogging storm drains and causing floods. Many thanks to the team’s sponsors, Mathnasium of Glen Rock and Ridgewood, The Glen Rock Inn, Glen Rock Savings Bank, Tofu House, Kim’s Martial Art and Fitness, Bamboo House, and individual sponsors for supporting the team this year. Team members Ansel Chang, Michael Yin, Joshua Shi, Gregory Pylypovych, and Patrick Mcginley are fourth and fifth graders from Glen Rock, Ridgewood, and River Edge. The team’s research posters are on display at the children’s department of Glen Rock Library until Dec. 10. Robrostorms will advance to the New Jersey FLL State Championship com- petition on Dec. 14.