Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  The evening ended with both men agreeing to produce a short novel for Lippincott’s. A few days later, Conan Doyle wrote to Stoddart to propose an idea. “I shall give Sherlock Holmes of A Study in Scarlet something else to unravel,” he declared. “I notice that everyone who has read the book wants to know more of that young man.” The author went on to suggest that Lippincott’s should reprint A Study in Scarlet and “give me some dollars for it.” Though Lippincott’s did take up the suggestion, Conan Doyle may have been pressing his luck, as Stoddart had already offered him a handsome £100 for the new story. The terms seemed all the more generous because Lippincott’s retained only the magazine serial rights; the book rights remained with Conan Doyle. Considering that he had signed away the entire copyright of A Study in Scarlet for a meager £25, Conan Doyle had reason to feel satisfied with his new terms.

  Conan Doyle’s contract called for a short novel of not less than forty thousand words, and he completed the commission within a month. Stoddart had wanted a “spicy title,” and Conan Doyle eventually settled on The Sign of Four, though in America, the book came to be published as The Sign of the Four. “Holmes, I am glad to say, is in capital form all through,” the author told Stoddart. “I think it is pretty fair, though I am not usually satisfied with my own things.”

  The novella appeared in Lippincott’s on both sides of the Atlantic in February of 1890. It received extremely good notices—“This is the best story I ever read in my life,” said one reviewer—and fully justified Stoddart’s confidence. Conan Doyle gave the American editor his money’s worth, including a “locked room” puzzle based on Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a missing treasure, a romance for Dr. Watson, a villainous dwarf with a blow gun, and a climactic boat chase on the Thames. As Conan Doyle had only a passing familiarity with London at this time, he had to use a post office map to chart out the action of the story. He came onto firmer ground with the romance between Dr. Watson and Mary Morstan, Holmes’s client, whose “sweet and amiable” expression suggests that of Louisa. “In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents,” Watson remarks, “I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.”

  With The Sign of the Four, Conan Doyle consolidated the innovations of A Study in Scarlet and fleshed out the character of Sherlock Holmes. For all its strengths, however, the story’s hasty composition led to several clumsy mistakes, creating endless difficulties for future generations of Sherlockians. The most prominent of these, as any Holmes fan can attest, is the bothersome matter of Dr. Watson’s war wound. In A Study in Scarlet we are told that a Jezail bullet left the doctor with a shoulder injury. In The Sign of the Four, the wound has somehow migrated to Watson’s leg. Already, Conan Doyle’s readers were beginning to notice such things.

  Oscar Wilde also did well out of his association with Lippincott’s. His contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of the finest novels of the age. Upon publication, however, Wilde’s book came under attack for its perceived immorality. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde declared, by way of defending himself. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Conan Doyle, who came to regard some of his own stories as a trifle risqué, would not have endorsed this sentiment. Nonetheless, he thought Wilde’s book was excellent and sent a letter saying so. “I am really delighted that you think my treatment subtle and artistically good,” Wilde wrote in reply. “The newspapers seem to me to be written by the prurient for the Philistine.”

  Conan Doyle’s respect for Wilde never dimmed, even after the “monstrous development” that sent Wilde to prison five years later. “[N]ever in Wilde’s conversation did I observe one trace of coarseness of thought,” Conan Doyle wrote, long after Wilde’s death, “nor could one at that time associate him with such an idea.” Needless to say, Wilde’s difficulties arose from something more than coarseness of thought, and Conan Doyle’s sympathy for Wilde should not be confused with a tolerance of homosexuality. In later years, Conan Doyle would demonstrate that he did not share in the loathing of homosexuals expressed by some of his contemporaries, but one cannot claim a modern sensibility for him. He believed that Wilde’s homosexuality was “pathological” in nature, and that “a hospital rather than a police court was the place for its consideration.”

  With The Sign of the Four behind him, Conan Doyle returned to a project that had absorbed him for more than a year. Stoddart’s commission had interrupted progress on a new historical novel, which Conan Doyle resolved to make “even bolder and more ambitious” than Micah Clarke. Once again, the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society played a role; when Conan Doyle attended a lecture entitled “Some Notes on Mediaeval Commerce,” his mind turned toward the fourteenth century. Within a few months he started in on a new novel, called The White Company, which sprang from the tales of “gallant, pious knights” and the “valiant deeds of English chivalry” that had so thrilled him as a boy.

  For several weeks in the summer of 1889, Conan Doyle sequestered himself in a small cottage in the New Forest of Hampshire—surrounded by more than a hundred books and research documents—while he drank in the historical resonances of the region. Apparently his medical practice, like Dr. Watson’s, was not so absorbing that he could not put it aside now and then. Meanwhile the success of Micah Clarke gave a renewed priority to his literary pursuits.

  “I devoted two years to the study of fourteenth-century life in England—Edward III’s reign—when the country was at its height,” he told an interviewer a short time later. “The period has hardly been treated in fiction at all, and I had to go back to early authorities for everything. I set myself to reconstruct the archer, who has always seemed to me to be the most striking figure in English history.… He was primarily a soldier, one of the finest that the world has ever seen—rough, hard-drinking, hard-swearing, but full of pluck and animal spirits.”

  The novel opened with the formation of the White Company, a band of “manly and true” bowmen commanded by Sir Nigel Loring, and followed their adventures across France and Spain. Along the way a young soldier named Alleyne Edricson faces many tests of courage and character, eventually winning a knighthood of his own along with the hand of Sir Nigel’s daughter. Conan Doyle claimed to have grown so fond of these characters that it seemed he knew them in the flesh. “I feel,” he wrote to his sister Lottie, “that the whole English-speaking race will come in time to be fond of them also.”

  Conan Doyle would always say that The White Company was the novel he most enjoyed writing. “I was young and full of the first joy of life and action,” he told a journalist thirty years later, “and I think I got some of it into my pages. When I wrote the last line, I remember that I cried: ‘Well, I’ll never beat that,’ and threw the inky pen at the opposite wall, which was papered with duck’s-egg green. The black smudge was there for many a day.”

  It is not difficult to understand why Conan Doyle singled out this book as his sentimental favorite. He had given voice to the sense of chivalry and honor that guided his own life, and made an affectionate nod to its source. At one stage, Sir Nigel and his men sit spellbound as a French noblewoman—Lady Tiphaine, the wife of a famous soldier—spins a tale of knightly deeds. “The mind had gone out of them,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and they could but look at this woman and listen to the words which fell from her lips—words which thrilled through their nerves and stirred their souls like the battle-call of a bugle … that sweet clear voice, with its high thrilling talk of the deathlessness of glory, of the worthlessness of life, of the pain of ignoble joy, and of the joy which lies in all pains which lead to a noble end. Still, as the shadows deepened, she spoke of valour and virtue, of loyalty, honour and fame, and still they sat drinking in her words while the fire burned down and the red ash turned to grey.”

  This was a son’s loving tribute to his mother. Many years had passed since Conan Doyle sat at the hearth in
Edinburgh listening to tales of long ago, but in every way that mattered, the fire had never burned down.

  For all his enthusiasm about the new novel, Conan Doyle must have felt uneasy when it came time to run the gauntlet of publishers. Once again, he tried his luck with the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, whose editor, James Payn, had given such a high-handed dismissal of Micah Clarke. Now, after the success of that novel and The Sign of the Four, Payn reversed his field. The White Company, he declared, had “such ‘go’ and vigour in it that the reader is carried back by it through the centuries, and seems to live again the life of his forefathers.” Payn ran the story in serial form throughout 1891, and at the end of the year it appeared as a three-volume novel. Oscar Wilde may have been dismissive of such works, but Conan Doyle’s effort did wonders for him. He earned £200 for the serial, and an additional £350 for the initial book rights.

  On publication, The White Company sold in vast numbers, and helped to put Conan Doyle’s name forward as a “serious” novelist. “The novel,” one reviewer declared, “commands our attention not only as a stirring evocation of our glorious past, but also as a gripping tale of adventure. Conan Doyle has balanced his twin aims with brilliant success.” As stocks of the first edition dwindled, a new single-volume reissue replaced the three-decker version. The novel would go through more than fifty editions in Conan Doyle’s lifetime, and soon found its way onto classroom reading lists, where Conan Doyle hoped it “would live and would illuminate our national traditions.”

  For all of this success, Conan Doyle remained disappointed with the verdict of the majority of the literary critics. “They treat it too much as a mere book of adventure,” he wrote to the Ma’am, “as if it were an ordinary boy’s book—whereas I have striven to draw the exact types of character of the folk then living and have spent much work and pains over it, which seems so far to be underappreciated by the critics.” He returned to the theme in his autobiography. “I cultivate a simple style and avoid long words so far as possible,” he explained, “and it may be that this surface of ease has sometimes caused the reader to underrate the amount of real research which lies in all my historical novels.”

  Conan Doyle insisted on this point again and again in the years to come. “The White Company is the best thing I have ever done,” he told The Bookman in 1892. “I endeavored in that to reconstruct the whole of the fourteenth century. Indeed, I had to do it. Scott had always avoided it.” His readers needed no reminding that he was working in the mode of Sir Walter Scott. James Payn had already assured the public that he had read “nothing of the kind so good since Ivanhoe, with which it has many points of resemblance.” For Conan Doyle, this was an act of reverence, since he yielded to no one in his admiration for Scott, the master of historical fiction. In Through the Magic Door, his anecdotal survey of his favorite books, he would devote page after page to Scott. “But of all the sons of men,” he concluded, “I don’t think there are many greater than he who lies under the great slab at Dryburgh.”

  Having embraced the Scott tradition so fully and successfully, Conan Doyle could not understand why The White Company had not garnered a similar degree of respect. He came to believe that this book, taken together with Sir Nigel, a companion piece written fourteen years later, formed the most “complete, satisfying and ambitious” work of his career. “All things find their level,” he wrote, “but I believe that if I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.”

  The point is certainly open to debate. Sir Walter Scott had been dead for almost sixty years when The White Company appeared. Though Conan Doyle’s novel achieved very considerable renown, the era of Scott and his sprawling historical novels had already passed—something Conan Doyle could never quite accept. In his so-called lesser work, Conan Doyle snatched up the inspirations of Poe and Gaboriau and transferred them to a vibrant present. With his historical novels, he celebrated the past masters at the expense of his own originality, creating an idealized and somewhat wooden view of the past. No one has ever denied that The White Company is a stirring yarn, but Conan Doyle’s veneration of the era and its traditions occasionally has a sterilizing effect, while his characterizations usually take the form of a simple repetition of stock phrases. “By my hilt!” one character repeatedly exclaims. “By the black rood of Waltham!” shouts another.

  To Conan Doyle’s way of thinking, however, another triumph of serious literature had been undermined by Sherlock Holmes. He had interrupted two years of labor on The White Company to dash off The Sign of the Four in little more than a month. The success of Holmes, which would soon reach a fevered pitch, seemed entirely out of proportion.

  If his historical novels failed to give a sufficient burnish to Conan Doyle’s reputation, at least he no longer faced obstacles from the publishing community. After Micah Clarke, he told an interviewer, “I had no further difficulty in disposing of my manuscripts.” A collection of ten short stories, entitled The Captain of the Pole-Star, appeared in March of 1890. The book carried a dedication reading: “To my friend Major-General A. W. Drayson as a slight token of my admiration of his great and as yet unrecognized services to astronomy.” The Firm of Girdlestone, the novel he abandoned four years earlier, appeared the following month in a revised form.

  “My life had been a pleasant one with my steadily increasing literary success, my practice, which was enough to keep me pleasantly occupied, and my sport,” Conan Doyle remarked of this period. “Suddenly, however, there came a development which shook me out of my rut, and caused an absolute change in my life and plans.”

  Few men would regard a successful medical practice and thriving literary career as a “rut,” but Conan Doyle had grown restless in Southsea. He was barely thirty years old, and had reached a professional and domestic plateau where he might well have remained for the rest of his life. “My mind rebels at stagnation,” Sherlock Holmes had declared in The Sign of the Four. “I abhor the dull routine of existence.”

  With little thought to the consequences, Conan Doyle resolved to make a sudden and dramatic change of course. Trying to explain his foolhardy swim in the shark-infested waters of Africa, Conan Doyle had admitted to a tendency to do “utterly reckless things” that he had difficulty explaining afterward. Now, as he surveyed his life in Southsea, he prepared once again to take a flying leap into murky waters.

  In August of 1890, the bacteriologist Robert Koch announced a bold new treatment for tuberculosis at the International Medical Congress of Berlin. Doctors from all over the world were traveling to Germany in huge numbers to see demonstrations of the new technique, which involved inoculation of the lymphatic system. Conan Doyle, who had recently defended the practice of compulsory smallpox vaccination in a letter to the press, could claim a legitimate medical interest in the topic. Even so, his abrupt decision to rush off to Berlin—literally at a few hours’ notice—speaks more of a restive spirit than a desire for medical enlightenment. “I could give no clear reason for this,” he admitted, “but it was an irresistible impulse and I at once determined to go. Had I been a well-known doctor or a specialist in consumption it would have been more intelligible, but I had, as a matter of fact, no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession.”

  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle left Southsea with his coattails flying, determined that he should witness this breaking story firsthand. On the way, he passed through London and called on the influential newspaperman W. T. Stead, then the editor of the Review of Reviews. Stead, Conan Doyle reported, was “very amiable to this big unknown provincial doctor,” and commissioned an article on Koch’s cure.

  Conan Doyle arrived in Berlin and found himself unable to get tickets for any of Koch’s demonstrations. Undaunted, he went to the home of Koch himself, but got no farther than the doctor’s front hall. There, he watched as a postal worker dumped out a huge sack of letters onto the floor of Koch’s reception area.
As he ran his eye over the letters, which bore stamps from all over Europe, Conan Doyle felt a sense of shock over “all the sad broken lives and wearied hearts which were turning in hope to Berlin.” He knew that hundreds of stricken consumptives were struggling to reach Germany for the miracle cure, many of them so ill that they died en route. It seemed to him, given that Koch’s findings had not yet been verified, that a “wave of madness had seized the world.”

  Having failed to get a ticket for one of the demonstrations, Conan Doyle had to satisfy himself with a set of lecture notes. These convinced him that the extravagant claims for Koch’s new treatment were premature. In his view, countless victims of tuberculosis were clinging to a vain hope. He returned to his hotel and dashed off a letter to the Daily Telegraph. While praising the “noble modesty” of Koch himself, who remained at work in his laboratory while others demonstrated his technique, Conan Doyle attacked the Berlin findings as incomplete and inconclusive. “The sooner that this is recognized the less chance will there be of serious disappointment among those who are looking to Berlin for a panacea for their own or their friends’ ill-health,” he wrote. He amplified the point in his article for the Review of Reviews: “It would be an encouraging of false hopes to pretend that the result is in any way assured.”

  One may well question the authority by which Conan Doyle could make such a pronouncement. He was an unknown doctor with little experience of tuberculosis, and he had not even seen an official demonstration of the technique. Under the circumstances, he had little to gain in swimming against the tide of medical opinion. It pained him, however, to think of all the cases of suffering represented by that enormous sack of letters, and he felt a duty to express his reservations in the most public forum available to him. As it happened, subsequent events confirmed his doubts about Koch’s findings, and Conan Doyle took great pride in the fact that his warnings had been justified. This was the first time he had taken up what might be called a public crusade, and he developed a taste for it.