UBC: Bates, The Poisoner
Apr. 16th, 2016 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession."
--Sherlock Holmes, "The Speckled Band," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(The Annotated Sherlock Holmes I.257 [the accompanying illustration, btw, has them reversed: Pritchard is the one with the beard; Palmer is clean-shaven])
I'm starting with this quote because (a) it is likely the only time most people in the twenty-first century will have heard of William Palmer and Edward Pritchard, and (b) it's so freaking odd because it's 100% wrong. Neither Palmer nor Pritchard were "among the heads of their profession." Palmer (executed 1856), a surgeon (which wasn't quite the same thing as a doctor in Victorian England), had never been more than a small town GP and wasn't even practicing when John Parsons Cook died, and Pritchard (executed 1865) bought his diploma as a Medicinae Doctor from the University of Erlangen without ever having studied there. And even with the diploma, he, too, was nothing more than a family doctor and nothing to write home about. [ETA in answer to a couple of comments: Even if you read it the other way, with Holmes considering their profession to be crime, it doesn't help. Neither of them was a professional criminal, and they did a kind of terrible job with the murders they committed.] So, given that Watson notes Holmes' encyclopedic knowledge of crime more than once and thus we cannot believe that Doyle wants us to believe that Holmes is wrong, we have two choices: (1) Doyle, an infamously sloppy writer, didn't bother to check his facts, or (2) Holmes is wrong on purpose, because he's trying to point Watson at a clue. Both Palmer and Pritchard were poisoners, and they both poisoned (or were strongly suspected of poisoning) their friends and loved ones, just as the dreadful Dr. Roylott has poisoned one step-daughter and is trying to poison another. I also find it odd that the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is usually all over this kind of thing, doesn't even have a note trying to reconcile what Holmes says with the historical data. My suggestion #2 is pretty much the party-line the A.S.H. would have preached.
I don't have an answer, but that line is certainly where I first heard of Palmer and Pritchard--certainly the reason I was curious about both of them--so I thought I should at least observe that it leaves a notably misleading impression.
There's an account of Pritchard in Classic Crimes. The Poisoner is about Palmer. Bates is trying very hard to be fair and impartial. The case against Palmer was mostly circumstantial, bolstered by some somewhat suspect pieces of witness testimony and the appalling performance of Alfred Swaine Taylor. It's not that Palmer wasn't guilty (his own behavior is the most damning evidence available), but like Luetgert (Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897), he did not get a fair trial.
Even trying his damnedest, Bates can't reach any conclusion other than that Palmer murdered John Parsons Cook. For money. Most of which he couldn't commit fraud fast enough to get his hands on. Palmer may not have murdered his own brother (Walter), but as Bates points out, he didn't need to. He just needed to give Walter access to enough alcohol that he could drink himself to death at the age of 32. And then collect on the staggering amount of money he'd managed to insure Walter's life for--which he promptly applied to his even more staggering debts and did not even come close to paying them off. Bates does an excellent job of explaining just how deeply Palmer was in debt (his crimes, which are mostly fraud with some murder thrown in, are all aimed at paying off the money-lenders) and just how futile all his efforts were to extract himself, since he never once tried to give up horse-racing, which was the root cause of all his financial troubles.
This is a very good book, clearly written and easy to follow through the thickets of Palmer's lethal folly.
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