In 1922, Arthur put his name on the cover of The Coming of the Fairies. Edward Gardner contributed substantially to the book, but Arthur did not acknowledge him as co-author. The two intended that their book would prove the existence of fairies worldwide, focusing in particular on five photographs taken by young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Three of those photographs are shown below.

“The series of incidents set forth in this little volume,” wrote Arthur, or his ghost writer, “represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character.”

Of the two options offered by Arthur, most ingenious hoax ever or epoch-making event, Arthur of course went for the latter.

The photos, as it turned out, were neither an epoch making event nor the most elaborate and ingenious hoax of all time. For the first photo, for example, the girls simply cut out (or otherwise copied) some dancing girls from a Claude Arthur Shepperson illustration (found in Princess Mary’s Gift Book,1914) and posed with them.

Near the end of her life, Elsie explained: “What we did was a long hat pin that we put down the back like that, and stuck the tape at the back like that, […] and then we wormed that down into the earth,” she said. “The thing was that they said they could see that the fairies were moving when the photographs were taken, but that’s because they were in a breeze.”

“I never even thought of it being a fraud,” said Frances. “It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can’t understand why they were still taken in. They wanted to be taken in. People often say to me, ‘Don’t you feel ashamed that you made all these poor people look fools; they believed in you.’ But I don’t, because they wanted to believe.”

Elsie added, “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet.”

So far, after only four posts, we have Arthur being completely taken by two young girls, an old and excitable fox terrier, and a beautiful young woman with an ectoplasmic phallus. That’s hardly Sherlockian behavior.

Martin Gardner’s argument seems to have merit. The skeptical and observant mind of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t seem to be the offspring Arthur’s uncritical and easily deceived neural network.