Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Baker Street (Oxford Portraits Series)

161 Pages·2000·0.57 MB·English

by  Janet B. Pascal

Arthur Conan Doyle
Beyond Baker Street
Image Not Available
OXFORD
PORTRAITS
Arthur Conan Doyle
Beyond Baker Street
Janet B. Pascal
Oxford University Press
New York • Oxford
For my mother and father
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2000 by Janet B. Pascal
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Web site: www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Oxford University Press.
Design and layout: Greg Wozney
Picture research: Patricia Burns
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pascal, Janet B.
Arthur Conan Doyle: beyond Baker Street / by Janet B, Pascal.
p. cm. — (Oxford portraits series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-512262-3 (alk. paper)
1. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859–1930. 2. Detective and mystery
stories—Authorship. 3. Authors, Scottish—19th century—Biography.
4. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character) 5. Spiritualists—Great
Britain—Biography. 6.Physicians—Great Britain—Biography.
I. Title. II. Series.
PR4623.P34 1999
823' .8—dc21 99-36643
[B] CIP
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
On the cover: A formal portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle from the time of the Boer
War in Africa.
Frontispiece: Arthur Conan Doyle, motor fanatic, on his motorbike at Undershaw
in 1905.
C
ONTENTS
PREFACE 7
1 THE STUDENT ON HIS NARROW BED 11
2 “ONE LONG WEARY GRIND” 20
From A Study in Scarlet 28
3 THE HOPE AND THE MAYUMBA 30
4 “A CAPRICIOUS CREATURE WHO FREQUENTLY GROWLS” 37
From The Stark Munro Letters 41
5 DR. CONAN DOYLE OF BUSH VILLAS 49
6 “FEELING LARGE THOUGHTS RISE WITHIN ME” 57
7 THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 69
From “The Final Problem” 80
8 CONAN DOYLE, SPORTSMAN 82
9 “I RATHER FELT IT WAS MY DUTY” 93
From “His Last Bow” 101
10 THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 104
11 “A GRAND CHANCE OF A WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE” 117
From The Lost World 124
12 “HOMO SAPIENS! HOMO IDIOTICUS!” 131
From The Land of Mist 134
EPILOGUE 145
CHRONOLOGY 147
FURTHER READING 151
INDEX 155
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 158
Image Not Available
This cartoon shows Conan Doyle chained to Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle sometimes felt that
he would never be able to escape from his most famous creation.
P
REFACE
What is your favorite Sherlock Holmes story? Under the cir-
cumstances, this seems an odd question for a reporter to
ask. Amid the chaos of a South African military hospital,
the man from the Illustrated London News had seized a
moment to interview the hospital’s supervising doctor. In
1900, the Boer War was at its height, the hospital was over-
whelmed with a typhoid fever epidemic, and dead and
dying men crowded the floor between the overflowing
cots. The supervisor, desperately busy, could not help being
irritated when the reporter spouted such a frivolous ques-
tion. But, as always, he tried to be courteous. “Perhaps the
one about the serpent,” he replied. “But for the life of me I
can’t remember the name of it.”
With his energy concentrated on saving men’s lives, it
is not surprising that a doctor would not want to waste his
time on popular detective fiction. But even so, he might
have been expected to remember at least the title of the
story. (It’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”) After
all, he was Arthur Conan Doyle, and he had written it
himself.
7
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The pattern of Conan Doyle’s entire life can be seen in
this brief exchange. Wherever there was excitement or dan-
ger, wherever important events were taking place, wherever
he felt he could be useful, Arthur Conan Doyle could be
found near the front lines, enthusiastically doing twice as
much work as anyone else, having a wonderful time, and
helping to lift everyone else’s spirits. Nevertheless, whether
he was harpooning whales in the Arctic, competing with
German officers in a road race, introducing skis to the Alps,
or fighting to save a wrongly condemned man from the gal-
lows, in the eyes of the public, he was always the creator of
Sherlock Holmes, and the public never let him forget it.
Even at his own wedding, he could not escape his fictional
creation. The next day a newspaper in Buenos Aires
announced SHERLOCK HOLMES QUIETLY MARRIED. It is no
wonder that he often longed to kill off the famous detective.
Today most people know Arthur Conan Doyle only as
the man who created Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes stories
were a tiny part of his literary output and something he
never took very seriously, but they are enough to ensure his
lasting fame when his more serious works are almost forgot-
ten. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most familiar figures in
modern culture, readily recognized not only in English-
speaking countries but around the world. His existence is
believed in by more people than any other fictional charac-
ter’s. Over a century after he first appeared in 1887, he still
receives almost 200 letters a month at his legendary address
of 221B Baker Street. He has appeared in advertisements,
picture books, and even on the science fiction television
series Star Trek. People who have never read a Sherlock
Holmes story immediately know that a character who wears
an Inverness cape and a deerstalker cap and smokes a curved
pipe—Holmes’s popular image—must be a detective.
In his own day, although Sherlock Holmes always
attracted more than his fair share of attention, Conan Doyle
was renowned for many other reasons. He wrote several
8
PREFACE
popular best-selling books, including The White Company, a
novel of chivalry set in 1366 and considered at the time one
of the greatest historical novels ever written, and The Lost
World, in which, long before the book and movie Jurassic
Park, he imagined a land where dinosaurs still lived. He
wrote meticulous and accurate histories of the great wars he
experienced, and exerted a tremendous influence on public
opinion with his political writings. He was among the first
to realize the changes submarines and armored tanks would
bring to modern warfare and to try to prepare Great Britain
for what it would face in World War I. And for the last
quarter of his life, he was a fervent spiritualist who aban-
doned everything else to devote himself to speaking with
the dead at seances and spreading the spiritualist message
throughout the world. Arthur Conan Doyle hoped to be
remembered as a prophet of spiritualism, but instead his
name will be linked forever to the most famously literal-
minded character in literature, Sherlock Holmes, who
would never believe in ghosts.
9