Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  When Conan Doyle took up his pen to write A Study in Scarlet, Poe had not yet achieved his current renown, and would not have been an obvious model. Conan Doyle understood Poe’s achievement as few others did, and saw a clear line between Poe’s innovations and his own ambitions. That said, A Study in Scarlet is far less derivative than any of Conan Doyle’s work to this point. Sherlock Holmes owed much to Dupin’s fascination with “the infinity of mental excitement,” but Poe’s stories served as a catalyst rather than a template. At twenty-six, Conan Doyle was ready to work without a net.

  Sherlock Holmes often chided Dr. Watson for attempting to inject color and life into what should have been, he felt, a dry and factual “course of lectures.” In a sense, Conan Doyle did the same to Poe. “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe’s first detective story, begins in a dry, clinical fashion:

  The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.

  The contrast to “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, could hardly be more pronounced:

  To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind.… Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

  Sherlock Holmes would undoubtedly have derided Conan Doyle for “pandering to popular taste,” but the young author shrewdly recognized that he must make his character accessible to his contemporaries. The early readers of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for whom Sherlock Holmes was not yet a household name, would have recognized the comfortable conventions of romantic fiction, rather than the clinical chill of the unfamiliar detective genre.

  Though Conan Doyle regarded Poe as the “master of all,” a second, largely forgotten detective writer also exerted a strong influence on A Study in Scarlet. The French novelist Emile Gaboriau, whose sensationalist novels were hugely popular at the time, appealed to Conan Doyle for the “neat dovetailing of his plots.” Gaboriau’s detective, Monsieur Lecoq, possessed many of the traits and skills that came to be associated with Sherlock Holmes. Lecoq was not only a master of disguise but also employed scientific techniques, such as the use of a plaster cast to take impressions of footprints. Lecoq’s disdain for Gevrol, the head of the Sureté, clearly anticipates the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, and the good-hearted but slow-witted Father Absinthe, Lecoq’s admiring companion, suggests a prototype of Dr. Watson.

  Conan Doyle finished A Study in Scarlet toward the end of April 1886. He had no way of knowing, as he rolled the manuscript into a tube and sent it to Cornhill Magazine, that he had created one of the most indelible characters of modern fiction. Today, a statue of Sherlock Holmes stands near Conan Doyle’s birthplace in Edinburgh. The detective’s likeness has adorned a series of British postage stamps. The Baker Street stop of the London Underground, near the famous lodgings at 221B, features scenes from his adventures. Few who read the manuscript in 1886 could have imagined such tributes. Though the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are fully drawn, the young novelist had not quite found his stroke. After a strong investigative sequence, in which Holmes examines the corpse of Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, the story deteriorates with an extended flashback centered on the Mormons of Utah. Though such expository techniques were a familiar convention of the day, the lengthy digression kept Sherlock Holmes offstage for much of the narrative and exposed Conan Doyle’s poor grasp of American idiom and geography. Later stories were distinguished by Conan Doyle’s plotting skills and originality of thought. The Study in Scarlet flashback, by contrast, finds him drawing heavily on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter, published the previous year.

  Conan Doyle’s decision to wedge a Mormon subplot into the middle of a Sherlock Holmes tale might strike the modern reader as curious. At the time, strange to say, this was Conan Doyle’s hook. The Mormons’ “life of immorality”—and especially the practice of polygamy—had been very much in the news as Conan Doyle sat down to write. Even the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society had addressed the subject, in a lecture given the previous year. Conan Doyle seems to have done extensive background reading, but he might also have done well to consult an atlas, as Utah and the Rio Grande appear to have wandered off from their usual positions in A Study in Scarlet. This was to be a recurring problem. Earlier, in a story set in New Zealand, he took great care in placing a thriving farm twenty miles out to sea. “These little things will happen,” Conan Doyle admitted.

  Even so, Conan Doyle held out great hope for A Study in Scarlet and considered it a better piece of work than The Firm of Girdlestone. “We rather fancy,” Louisa confided in a letter, “that A Study in Scarlet may find its way into print before its elder brother.” Soon, however, the first Sherlock Holmes story began to make the familiar “circular tour,” with three publishers issuing prompt rejections. “Verily,” Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, “literature is a difficult oyster to open.”

  In September, Conan Doyle rolled the manuscript into another tube and sent it to a fourth publisher—Ward, Lock and Company of London. At the end of October, a letter arrived to say that the editors were pleased with the story. “We could not publish it this year,” they added, “as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction.” If Conan Doyle would not object to waiting until the following year, the publishers would offer £25 to purchase the copyright.

  “It was not a very tempting offer,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and even I, poor as I was, hesitated to accept it.” He had good reason to hesitate. The money was rotten—he had earned better for “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” a far shorter piece—and he did not want to wait twelve months for publication. He wrote asking if a small royalty might be granted, but the publisher turned him down on the grounds that “it might give rise to some confusion.” Reluctantly, Conan Doyle agreed to the terms. “I never at any time received another penny for it,” he declared in his autobiography.

  Conan Doyle hoped that Ward, Lock would bring out A Study in Scarlet as a separate volume, so that he would at last fulfill his ambition of seeing his name on the spine of a book. Instead, the story appeared in November of 1887 as the main feature of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a collection of fiction and short occasionals founded twenty years earlier by Samuel Orchart Beeton—whose wife had been the renowned Mrs. Beeton of cookbook and household management fame.

  Priced at one shilling, the annual had a red, white, and yellow cover that featured Conan Doyle’s villain apparently warming a syringe by the flame of a hanging lamp. Two “original drawing room plays” gave ballast to the volume, along with several pages of advertising for such items as a “lung invigorator,” recommended for cases of incipient consumption, and “Steiner’s Vermin Paste,” said to be “A Sure and Certain Destroyer of Rats, Cockroaches, Mice and Black Beetles.”

  The annual sold out within two weeks, although this owed more to the Beeton reputation than to A Study in Scarlet. The story itself caused no great stir, but received enough favorable notice to justify a separate edition the following year. Touted as “a story of thrilling interest,” the new edition featured six pen-and-ink drawings by Conan Doyle’s father. It is not known whether Conan Doyle himself put his father’s name forward as a possible illustrator, or whether the publisher sought an interesting novelty in the father-and-son collaboration. Charles Doyle fulfilled the commission from Edinburgh, whe
re he remained in an institution. His illustrations are strangely tranquil and uninteresting, but the bearded figure of Holmes—who strongly resembles the artist—suggests that the elder Doyle recognized some of his own characteristics in his son’s creation.

  By the time A Study in Scarlet finally appeared in book form, Conan Doyle’s attention had moved elsewhere. During the long waiting period he took up several other projects, hoping to find a smoother path to publication. Not all of these efforts were pitched at literary immortality. When the Gas and Water Gazette asked him to translate a German submission, Conan Doyle drew on his shaky schoolboy German to produce an article entitled “Testing Gas Pipes for Leakage.” Years later, in a speech to the Author’s Club, he would claim that this had been the great breakthrough of his career—rather than A Study in Scarlet, as one might have supposed. For the first time, he noted dryly, a publisher had asked for his services, rather than the other way around.

  Having exhausted the potential of leaky gas pipes, Conan Doyle launched into a new novel in July of 1887. “I now determined to test my powers to the full,” he wrote, “and I chose a historical novel for this end, because it seemed to me the one way of combining a certain amount of literary dignity with those scenes of action and adventure which were natural to my young and ardent mind.”

  Set in the late seventeenth century, Micah Clarke told the story of a group of English Puritans against the backdrop of the Monmouth Rebellion, James Scott’s doomed campaign to usurp King James II. Conan Doyle established the habit of a lifetime with this novel, researching his background for several months so that every full-bottomed periwig and white berdash cravat could be rendered with loving detail. Though the novel occasionally bogs down in aimless window dressing, Micah Clarke displays all of the strengths that distinguished Conan Doyle’s later historical fiction—a strong narrative voice, powerful battle scenes, and a lively period flavor.

  “When it was finished early in 1888 my hopes ran high,” the author wrote, “and out it went on its travels.” Once again, Conan Doyle found the publishers to be strangely resistant to his charms. The editor of Cornhill Magazine wanted to know why he would waste his time and talent on historical novels. Bentley and Company advised him that the novel lacked “the one great necessary point for fiction, i.e. interest.” Several other publishers returned equally depressing verdicts. “I remember smoking over my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air after one of its descents upon town,” Conan Doyle recalled, “and wondering what I should do if some sporting, reckless kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot.”

  Before it could come to that, Conan Doyle sent the manuscript to Longmans publishers, where it caught the attention of Andrew Lang, an influential Scottish editor and historian. Lang advised the firm to accept Conan Doyle’s manuscript, and the following February Micah Clarke appeared in book form. Conan Doyle would always consider Micah Clarke his “first real opening,” rather than A Study in Scarlet, which had appeared more than a year earlier. The novel received extremely good reviews, mixed with a few cavils about the author’s historical liberties, and went through three printings in the first year. “Micah Clarke is a noticeable book,” wrote one reviewer, comparing it favorably with R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, “because it carries the reader out of the beaten track; it makes him now and then hold his breath with excitement; it presents a series of vivid pictures … and it leaves upon the mind the impression of well-rounded symmetry and completeness.”

  Coming so soon on the heels of A Study in Scarlet, Micah Clarke established a conflict that would prove to be the central dilemma of Conan Doyle’s career. On the one side was Sherlock Holmes, who belonged to that “different and humbler plane” of literature that Conan Doyle visited now and then while making his way in the world. On the other side were the historical novels, plays, poems, and other works through which he hoped to gain a place in the literary pantheon. Only a few years later, when asked to write a preface for a new edition of A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle declared that “so elementary a form of fiction as the detective story hardly deserves the dignity of a Preface.” With Micah Clarke, on the other hand, he had taken the high road. “I thought,” he declared a short time later, “I had a tool in my hands that would cut a path for me.”

  For the moment, Conan Doyle had no further plans for Sherlock Holmes. He was enjoying what Dr. Watson was to call the “complete happiness, and the home-centered interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself the master of his own establishment.” His medical practice had reached a comfortable level, his literary career was finally beginning to flourish, and he enjoyed an active social life in Southsea—throwing himself into local sporting events with such energy that he frequently came away with bruised ribs or a broken finger. As he did not own a horse and buggy, the young doctor could often be seen peddling around town on a sturdy-looking cycle, which resembled a reversed tricycle with oversized wheels. Occasionally Louisa rode along with him, awkwardly perched on a seat and footrest at the front.

  When Louisa gave birth to their first child, Mary, on January 28, 1889, Conan Doyle had every reason to feel satisfied with life in Southsea. “She is fat and plump, blue eyes, bandy legs and a fat body,” Conan Doyle told the Ma’am. “Any other points will be answered on inquiry. I have had no great practice in describing babies.” Though happy at home, Conan Doyle continued to feel adrift spiritually in the wake of his break from the Catholic Church. His daughter would not be baptized for another eighteen months, and only then at the insistence of the Ma’am. This was no casual omission on Conan Doyle’s part. Three of his nine siblings had died in childhood, so his initial refusal to baptize his daughter must be taken as a sign that his agnosticism had reached a fairly advanced state. “I had ceased to butt my head incessantly against what seemed to be an impenetrable wall,” he wrote. “I had laid aside the old charts as useless, and had quite despaired of ever finding a new one which would enable me to steer an intelligible course.” Yet he was already moving toward a new, unorthodox system of belief. “A dim light of dawn was to come to me soon in an uncertain way which was destined in time to spread and grow brighter.”

  In those early days, this dawning light took some peculiar forms. Up to this point, Conan Doyle’s attitude toward the spirit world had been lighthearted. In a story called “Selecting a Ghost,” published in 1883, a wealthy grocer hires a medium to audition prospective ghosts for his mansion. “I am the great ethereal sigh-heaver,” intones one. “I kill dogs. Mortal, wilt thou choose me?”

  Soon, however, the tone grew more serious. When discussing his early writing career, Conan Doyle generally neglected to mention a short novel called The Mystery of Cloomber, which appeared a few months before Micah Clarke and then sank into profound obscurity. This strange, confusing tale features a trio of Buddhist monks, apparently returned from the dead, who seek revenge against an English army officer for a crime committed forty years previously. Nearly every chapter introduces some weird new manifestation of the paranormal: astral projection, precognition, extrasensory perception, and even matter transmission—described as the “power of resolving an object into its chemical atoms” and then “compelling them to retake their original form.”

  Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of it. One newspaper, noting the novel’s Scottish setting, expressed relief that the author had not ventured to write in dialect. Clearly the reviewer had bailed out before reaching chapter eight, which begins, “Maister Fothergill West and the meenister say that I maun tell all I can aboot General Heatherstone and his hoose, but that I maunna say muckle aboot mysel’ because the readers wouldna care to hear.”

  Years later, when Conan Doyle’s interest in the spirit realm had become a matter of public record, critics never tired of pointing out the contrast between the author’s beliefs and those of the clear-thinking, intensely logical Sherlock Holmes. The prevailing view at the time, which
persists today, held that Conan Doyle underwent some softening of the brain in later life. In fact, this strange tension between the material and the spirit worlds is evident in all phases of Conan Doyle’s career. Though The Mystery of Cloomber hardly qualifies as a neglected masterpiece, it clearly illustrates that the young novelist had already begun to question the received wisdom of science. “For what is science?” Conan Doyle asked in the book’s final pages. “Science is the consensus of opinion of scientific men, and history has shown that it is slow to accept a truth. Science sneered at Newton for twenty years. Science proved mathematically that an iron ship could not swim, and science declared that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic.”

  From there, it was only a short step to the séance room.

  7

  A Traveler from Slattenmere

  I am, I think, one of the most unsuspicious men upon earth, and through a certain easy-going indolence of disposition I never even think of the possibility of those with whom I am brought into contact trying to deceive me. It does not occur to me.

  —MR. STARK MUNRO IN THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS

  In February 1889, a Professor Milo de Meyer visited Southsea from Italy to give an exhibition of his “mesmeric force,” more familiar today as hypnotism. In the audience were some two dozen men of science and medicine, including Dr. Conan Doyle. Speaking through an interpreter, Professor de Meyer explained that the art of mesmerism had its roots in the mysterious electrical force emanating from magnets, and that “its practice would be beneficial in the case of many surgical operations.” His experiments, according to an account in the Portsmouth Evening News, had “lately attracted much attention on the Continent and in London and Brighton.”

  Conan Doyle had a long-standing interest in the subject, having studied the works of Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century Austrian physician from whom mesmerism drew its name. Also known as “animal magnetism,” mesmerism achieved a considerable vogue in the 1770s, with society patients coming to Mesmer for magnetized pills, magnetized clothing, and magnetized dinnerware. In time, when Marie Antoinette came under Mesmer’s influence, a French royal commission concluded that the physician’s success owed more to a patient’s suggestibility than to any invisible force. As a result, though Mesmer himself is generally dismissed as a charlatan, his so-called mesmeric power is the acknowledged forerunner of modern hypnotism and its medical applications.