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| The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator or Sherlock Holmes by Charles Higham A review by David Pietrusza |
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To posit that Sherlock Holmes is going through the greatest era of his popularity is to overstate the case a trifle. After all, despite the reissued volumes and the new Nicholas Meyer novels and the movies and television specials, young men did wear black mourning bands following Reichenback Falls, and booksellers’ stalls were literally mobbed for the return of Holmes—phenomena I hadn’t noticed at the debut of The Seven Percent Solution. Nevertheless, a Holmes boomlet is undeniably in full swing. Part and parcel of this resurgence is a good biography of the detective’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Charles Higham, a Briton whose father worked with Sir Arthur. The book reveals little new about either Holmes or Doyle, but still it is an admirable piece of work, drawing together all the loose strands of others. As the subtitle implies, the volume dwells heavily on the nexus between the gaunt detective and the corpulent novelist. This isn’t the first subtitle to promise this; John Dickson Carr’s The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes, the standard work on Doyle, did the same, but like Doyle, Carr seemed intent on downgrading the Baker Street detective stories and emphasizing the author’s historical novels and contemporary historical non-fiction works. Higham builds his whole biography around the popular. Holmes, the result being that the two volumes complement each other. Where Carr treads, Higham tiptoes around; where Carr is reticent, Higham plunges ahead. Doyle, while not always a Sir, was from birth aware of a distinguished lineage, Irish gentry on his mother’s side, famed artists and caricaturists on his father’s. Yet his youth was one of the lower middle class. Put through English public schools he lapsed from Catholicism to atheism. Then he went to medical school and for a time pursued a middling career as a general practitioner. Also he failed as an ophthalmologist. All at The Strand In all his years as a physician, he wrote. The results were not overwhelming—after two rejections he sold all rights to A Study In Scarlet for a mere £25—yet they rivaled proceeds from his medical practice. But after the publication of that first Holmes epic, it was all downhill. Two historical novels, Micah Clark and The White Company followed, and then the Sign Of The Four was produced at the urging of the American publisher J.P. Lippincott. It was with the advent of a new type of journal, the lavishly illustrated Strand magazine with a circulation of a half million, that Doyle’s fame was assured. Aside from its elegant etchings and photographs, the Strand also developed a format of short stories with a continuing central character—and Sherlock Holmes was just perfect for such a concept. Deadlines Hampered Conan Doyle was not altogether thrilled by this success. He felt it overshadowed his more important works, but he bore his creation none of the raving hostility that some observers have claimed. It was just that he hated ‘writing under the deadline that the Holmes stories imposed on him, particularly when his first wife was under the initial strains of a tuberculosis which eventually would claim her. During the Boer War, Doyle’s jingoistic championing of British policy in South Africa, including Lord Kitchener’s concentration camps, won his knighthood from a grateful Edward VII. Tuned In, Yet Naive Like the dichotomy between the logical and maddeningly insightful Holmes and the rash and unthinking Watson—which were in fact two facets of his own personality—Conan Doyle, particularly in his later years was remarkably attuned to the shape the world was taking and yet absolutely naive about some really elemental matters. He could see World War I coming and argued for reforms of English military tactics which would have saved thousands of casualties. His very real powers of detection successfully served the innocent victims of the famed Edjali and Slater cases. Almost alone he warned of the dangers of submarine warfare and when those warnings became so frighteningly true he was pilloried for having put ideas in the. Kaiser’s head; fought for improved protective helmets for the British Tommy and lifejackets and rafts for English seamen; and foresaw the future of television. Death, The Occult Yet the instabilities of his feelings about an after life which had led him from Catholicism to atheism continued and led him eventually down the most bizarre paths. Atheism softened into agnosticism and then in 1916 Doyle turned into a devoted and evangelical believer in spiritualism. He advocated seances and spirit writing, ectoplasm and ghosts. He even developed a faith in leprechauns and elves, writing a bizarre volume entitled The Coming of the Faeries. His writing had always been intimately concerned with death and often with the occult, and for 30 years he had skeptically investigated physic phenomena,’ but suddenly he went hog wild over the idea, writing book after book concerning communication with the dead, lecturing on four continents, granting interviews and pouring thousands of pounds from his own pockets into the cause of mediums and ghosts. His lectures drew enthusiastic crowds in that era of Coeue and Aimee Semple McPherson, an era following a great war when millions of widows and gold star mothers longed to reach out to their dead. However, among the less emotional and gullible he was a laughing stock, a pathetic figure that tossed away a peerage and the respect of the literary world to chase ghosts. Unlike John Dickson Carr, Higham has not papered over the less admirable features of Conan Doyle’s personality, his rabid British nationalism, the necrophilia of many of his tales, his coldness to the wronged Slater after he had obtained his freedom, the absurdity of his spiritualist quest. It is a readable, balanced informative and often fascinating life story of a man of many paradoxes and mysteries. |