Clairvoyant Detectives

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

Clairvoyant Detectives is an article published in the Daily Mail on 1 october 1928, including a part of an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle.


Clairvoyant Detectives

Daily Mail (1 october 1928, p. 11)

SIR A. CONAN DOYLE'S PROPHECY.

ONE AT EVERY POLICE STATION.

Sir A. Conan Doyle, creator of the greatest detective in fiction ever known, speaking yesterday on the eve of his departure for South Africa, visualised the coming of the clairvoyant Sherlock Holmes and a practically crimeless world.

"We shall have a clairvoyant in attendance at every police station, and every offence will be hinted down so that crime will become very difficult, if not impossible," he said. "Clairvoyants will often be able to tell who, actually committed a crime. If you give them a portion of the dress of a murdered person they are frequently able to throw themselves back to the time of a murder and get a kind of intimation of the circumstances of the murder and how it was done.

"Even now the police use clairvoyants surreptitiously in many places — in the intervals of persecuting them.

"Spiritualism is going to revolutionise the world in every possible way. It will revolutionise religion by getting back to actual contact, which I have no doubt once existed but has been completely lost. Then it will revolutionise science and medicine and criminology in many ways. The whole question of lunacy and mania and obsession comes up."