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Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) |
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British writer, the creator of
Sherlock
Holmes, who is the best-known detective in literature and the
embodiment of sharp reasoning. Arthur Conan Doyle himself was not a
good example of
rational personality: he believed in fairies and was interested in
occultism. By the 1920s, Doyle was one of the most highly paid writers
in the world. 'I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.' (from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Penguin Books, 1996, p. 9) Arthur Conan Doyle was born at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, the son of Charles Altamont Doyle, a civil servant in the Edinburgh Office of Works, and Mary (Foley) Doyle. Both of Doyle's parents were Roman Catholics. To increase his income, Charles Altamont painted, made book illustrations, and also worked as a sketch artist on criminal trials. Not long after arriving Edinburgh he began to drink and suffered at the same time from epilepsy, he was eventually institutionalized. Richard Doyle (1824-83), the uncle of A.C. Doyle and the son of the caricaturist John Doyle, was also an illustrator. He worked for Punch and illustrated chiefly fairy stories, including Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, W. Allingham's In Fairyland and some of Dickens's Christmas Books. Doyle's mother, Mary, whom he called "the Ma'am," was interested in literature, and she encouraged his son to explore the world of books. Doyle's second wife, Jean, said: "My husband's mother was a very remarkable and highly cultured woman. She had a dominant personality, wrapped up in the most charming womanly exterior." (The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Martin Booth, Thomas Dunne Books, 2000, p. 13) At the age of fourteen Doyle had learned French so that he could read Jules Verne in the author's original language. Charles Altamot died in an asylum in 1893; in the same year Doyle decided to finish permanently the adventures of his master detective. Because of financial problems, Doyle's mother kept a boarding house. Dr. Tsukasa Kobayashi has alluded in an article, that she had a long affair with Bryan Charles Waller, a lodger and a student of pathology, who had a deep impact to Conan Doyle. He also supported young Arthur financially. Mary's last child was named Bryan Julia Doyle – perhaps referring to Waller's mother, who also was Julia. Doyle was educated in Jesuit schools. During this period Doyle lost his belief in the Roman Catholic faith, but the training of the Jesuits influenced deeply his thought. Later he used his friends and teachers from Stonyhurst College as models for his characters in the Holmes stories, among them two boys named Moriarty. Doyle studied at Edinburgh University and in 1884 he married Louise Hawkins. Doyle qualified as doctor in 1885. After graduation Doyle
practiced medicine as an eye specialist at Southsea near Porsmouth in
Hampshire until 1891 when he became a full
time writer. His first story, an illustrated tale of a man and a tiger,
Doyle had produced at the age of six. ". . . It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." (from 'The Adventures of a Scandal in Bohemia,' in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle, George Newnes, Limited, 1892, p. 5) A Study in Scarlet, Doyle's first novel about Holmes, was published in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual. The story was written in three weeks in 1886. It introduced the detective and his Sancho Panza and Boswell, Dr. Watson, the narrator. Their major opponent, the evil genius Dr. Moriarty, became a kind of doppelgänger of the detective. Also the intrigues of the beautiful opera singer Irene Adler caused much trouble to Holmes. The second Sherlock Holmes story, 'The Sign of the Four,' was written for the Lippincott's Magazine. Doyle collected a colorful group of people together, among them Jonathan Small, who has a wooden leg and a dwarf from Tonga islands. The Strand Magazine started to publish 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' from July 1891. Holmes's address at Mrs. Hudson's house, 221B Baker Street, London, is perhaps the most famous London street in literature. According to Doyle, Oscar Wilde praised his historical adventure novel Micah Clarke (1888), when the two writers sat down to dinner at the Langham Hotel, but Wilde said nothing about 'The Sign of the Four' and Sherlock Holmes. Beginning with 'A Scandal in Bohemia' Doyle contributed
countles stories to The Strand
Magazine for nearly 40 years. Already at the end of 1891, Doyle planned to
abandon Holmes tales, but the Strand
begged for more. "I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for
years, for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards
him as I do toward pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too
much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day", he
said to a friend. (Conan
Doyle: His Life and Art by Hesketh Pearson, Taplinger Publishing
Company, 1977, p. 96) Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation. ('The Final Problem,' in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, George Newnes, Limited, 1894, p. 279) Doyle devised
his hero's death in "The Final Problem' (1893), first published in the Strand in
the December issue. Holmes encounters Professor James Moriarty at the
fall of the
Reichenbach in Switzerland and disappears; they both fall into the
abyss. Watson finds a letter from
Homes, stating: "I have already explained to you, however, that my
career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible
conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this." (Ibid., p. 277) In December 1893
Doyle wrote in his diary: "Killed Holmes." (However, the body was never found.) It turned out that Doyle's creation was
indestructible in the minds of the readers, who expressed their
disappointment by wearing
mourning bands and the Strand lost 20,000 subscriptions. In The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902) Doyle narrated an early case of the dead detective. The
ingenious murder weapon in the story is an animal. "A hound it was, an
enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have
ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a
smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in
flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain
could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived
than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall
of fog." (Ibid., p. 156) Because of public demand Doyle resurrected his popular character in 'The Adventure of the Empty House' (1903). "I moved my head to look at the cabinet behind me. When I turned again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a grey mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling aftertaste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand." (The Return of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle. McClure, Phillips & Co, 1905, p. 9) In these following stories Holmes stopped using cocaine. Although Doyle's later works have been criticized, several of them, including 'The Three Garridebs,' 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,' and 'The Veiled Lodger,' are highly enjoyable. Sherlock Holmes short stories were collected in five books. The first appeared in 1892 under the title The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was followed by The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). During the South African war (1899-1902), Doyle served for a
few months as senior physician at a field hospital, and wrote The War in South Africa, in which
he defended England's policy. The same uncritical attitude toward the
British empire marked his history of World War I, The British Campaign in France and Flanders
(6 vols.). Doyle was knighted in 1902 and in 1900 and 1906 he also ran
unsuccessfully for Parliament. Fourteen months after his long-invalided
wife Louisa died, Conan Doyle married in 1907 his second wife, Jean
Leckie. Following the death of his son Kingsley from wounds incurred in World War I, Doyle immersed himself in Spiritualism. He became president of several important spiritualist organizations. Jean was a self-proclaimed medium, who practiced automatic writing. An example of Doyle's esoteric studies is The Coming of the Fairies (1922). He was convinced that photograps of fairies taken by two schoolgirls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, were real, "these people are destined to become just as solid and real as the Eskimos." (Ibid., George H. Doran Company, 1922, p. 55) Doyle he had already shown interest in occult fantasy before publishing Holmes stories. In his early novel, The Mystery of Cloomber (1888), a retired general finds himself under assault by Indian magic. Believing in the existence of "little people" Doyle spent more than a million
dollars on their cause. The Star newspaper reported
that the fairies were from a poster, but the hoax was not uncovered
until the early 1980s, when the English photographic scientist Geoffrey
Crawley tested the Cottingley fairies and revealed the secret
behind the two poetic pictures: the artistically gifted cousins had
copied fairy illustrations from a book. In 1925, Doyle opened with his wife the Psychic Bookshop in Victoria Street SW London. Among his friends was the legendary American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Doyle believed that Houdini possessed supernatural powers, which the magician himself denied. Another friend was D. D. Home. According to Doyle, Home could levitate in a state of trance. Once he "floated out of the bedroom and into the sitting-room window, passing seventy feet above the street. After his arrival in the sitting-room he went back into the bedroom with Lord Adare, and upon the latter remarking that he could not understand how Home could have fitted through the window which was only partially raised". (The History of Spiritualism: Volume I by Arthur Conan Doyle, Cassell and Company, 1926, p. 200) His own psychic experiences Doyle recorded in The Edge of Unknown (1930), in his last book. Doyle died from heart disease on July 7, 1930, at his home, Windlesham, Sussex. My contention is that Sherlock Holmes is literature on a humble but not ignoble level, whereas the mystery writers most in vogue now are not. The old stories are literature, not because of the conjuring tricks and the puzzles, not because of the lively melodrama, which they have in common with many other detective stories, but by virtue of imagination and style. They are fairy-tales, as Conan Doyle intimated in his preface to his last collection, and they are among the most amusing of fairy-tales and not among the least distinguished. (Edmund Wilson in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950, p. 267) Doyle's practice, and other experiences, expeditions as ship's
surgeon
to the Arctic and West Coast of Africa, service in the Boer War,
defenses of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, two men wrongly imprisoned,
provided much material for his writings. George Edalji was among the guests at Doyle's reception, when he remarried. The stories of Professor George Edward Challenger (". . . the famous zoologist! Wasn't he the man who broke the skull of Blundell, of the Telegraph?"), introduced in The Lost World (1912), blended science fact with fantastic romance. One of the models for Challenger was William Rutherford, Doyle's teacher from Edinburgh. Harry O. Hoyt's film adaptation of the novel from 1925 is noted for Willis O'Brien's stop motion special effects; he went to produce the special effects for Merian C. Cooper's and Ernest B. Schoedsack's monster film King Kong (1933). Sherlock Holmes's literary forefather was Edgar
Allan Poe's
detective C. Auguste Dupin and on the other hand
a real life person, Conan Doyle's teacher in the University of
Edinburgh,
Joseph Bell. A master of observation and deduction, he was a legend at
the medical school. "Bell was a very remarkable man in body and mind.
He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey
eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high
and discordant. He was a very skilful surgeon, but his strong point was
diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character. For
some reason which I have never understood he singled me out from the
drove of students who frequented his wards and made me his out-patient
clerk". (Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Little, Brown, and Company, 1924, p. 20) Another model was Eugène Francois Vidoq, a former criminal, who became the first chief of the Sûreté on the principle of "set a thief to catch a thief". The characters of Holmes and Watson have inspired many later writers to continue their advetures. Among them are Anthony Horowitz, O. Henry, Robert L. Fish, Nicholas Meyer with his novels The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1975) and The West End Horror (1976), and Laurie R. King. Philip José Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1974) pastiched the Sherlock Holmes saga in the context of his World Newton Family series. Robert Lee Hall portrays in Exit Sherlock Holmes (1977) Moriarty as Holmes's evil alter ego. In Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novel Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984) the Evil Doctor fights Sherlock Holmes. Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) features Holmes in a bit part. Perhaps the best actor who ever played Sherlock Holmes was not Basil Rathbone but Jeremy Brett (1935-1995). Brett devoted himself entirely to the role in a television series produced by Granada TV from 1984 to 1994. The tv scripts were very faithful to original stories. For further reading: Memories and Adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle (1924); The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett (1933); Conan Doyle: His Life and Art by Hesketh Pearson (1943); The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by J. D. Carr (1949); Classics and Commercials by Edmund Wilson (1950); Conan Doyle by Pierre Weil Nordon (1966); The London Sherlock Holmes by Michael Harrison (1972); A Sherlock Holmes Commentary by D. Martin Dakin (1972); The Adventures of Conan Doyle by Charles Higham (1976); Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle by Julian Symons (1979); A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle by Richard Lancelyn Green & John Michael Gibson (1983); The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana; or, A Universal Dictionary of the State of Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and His Biographer, John H. Watson, M.D., by Jack Tracy (1987); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections, edited by Harold Orel (1991); Baker Street Studies, editecd by H.W. Bell (1995); Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower (1999); The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Martin Booth (2000); On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling by Michael Dirda (2011); Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini by Christopher Sandford (2011); Adventures in the Strand: Arthur Conan Doyle & The Strand Magazine by Mike Ashley (2016); Sherlock Holmes: A Secret History by John V. Hennessy (2017); The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes, edited by Janice M. Allan & Christopher Pittard (2019); The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes by Jeremy Black (2022) - ACD: The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, published annually. - In Finnish: Suomeksi on julkaistu vuodesta 1894 lähtien käännöksiä Holmes-tarinoista, mm. kuvitettu Sherlock Holmesin seikkailuja 1, 2 ja 4 (1904-05) sekä Sherlock Holmesin seikkailut I-II (1957). Hämärätarinoita (Kustannusosakeyhtiö Kirja, 1926; Tiberius kirja, 2019) Selected works:
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