Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  “I came back a changed man,” he declared. “I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me.” What changed him was not his time in Germany so much as a chance meeting he had during the journey. On the Continental Express to Berlin, he fell into a conversation with a Harley Street specialist named Malcolm Morris. The two doctors sat up most of the night talking. Morris, a “very handsome and courteous” man, had been a provincial doctor like Conan Doyle, but soon realized that his practice had reached a dead end. He took himself to London and developed a specialty—dermatology—which brought success well beyond the scope of a small-town practice. Conan Doyle, Morris advised, must do the same if he hoped to get ahead. Otherwise, he was wasting his life.

  For Conan Doyle, already grown so restless in Southsea, the advice carried a great deal of weight. Still, as he told Morris, he could not afford to be cavalier with his medical practice, which represented years of sacrifice on the part of his mother. When Morris persisted, Conan Doyle allowed that he had recently developed an interest in ophthalmology. For some time he had been writing to his sister Lottie about the possibility of training as an eye surgeon—“still, of course, keeping literature as my milk-cow.” With this in mind, he had studied at the Portsmouth Eye Hospital under his friend Arthur Vernon Ford, an ophthalmic surgeon, and he had qualified to perform eye tests and prescribe eyeglasses. For Morris, this seemed to decide the matter. “Well,” he said, “why not specialize upon the eye? Go to Vienna, put in six months’ work, come back and start in London. Thus you will have a nice clean life with plenty of leisure for your literature.”

  By the time the Continental Express reached Berlin, Conan Doyle needed no further convincing, nor did he waste any time putting Morris’s advice into effect. He returned to Southsea on November 22, and two days later he announced to a local newspaper that he would be leaving for the continent. As for the practice he had struggled so hard to build, it was too small to sell to another physician, so Conan Doyle simply closed it up and referred his patients elsewhere.

  Louisa, Conan Doyle recalled, was “quite willing” to follow along with the new plans, though she cannot have had any choice in the matter. She undoubtedly trusted her husband’s business sense, but she can’t have been entirely sanguine about leaving her daughter behind while they trotted off to Vienna. Two-year-old Mary remained in England with Mrs. Hawkins, Louisa’s mother, who now lived on the Isle of Wight.

  The Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which had been the center of so much of Conan Doyle’s social life, threw a farewell banquet at the local Grosvenor Hotel. Dr. James Watson presided over the festivities, and General Drayson gave a warm tribute to his young friend. In response, Conan Doyle rose and recounted the story of his first night in Southsea, which found him scuffling with the unruly scissor-grinder in the public square. It made a remarkable contrast to this, his final night in the town, surrounded by his many friends and colleagues. He expressed regret over leaving such genial companions behind, but, as he intended eventually to settle in London, he consoled himself with the knowledge that “London nowadays was after all a suburb of Southsea, or vice versa.” It pleased him to think that he left no enemy behind him—with the possible exception, he added, of the scissor-grinder.

  With this, Dr. Conan Doyle took down his shingle, paid up the eight months remaining on his annual lease, put his belongings in storage, and quit Southsea forever. On mature consideration, he might have thought better of his new career plans, which required him to attend medical lectures in a language he barely understood. Translating an article on gas pipes was one thing; qualifying in ophthalmic surgery was quite another.

  For the moment, such considerations did not trouble him. “We closed the door of Bush Villas behind us for the last time,” he recalled. “Now it was with a sense of wonderful freedom and exhilarating adventure that we set forth upon the next phase of our lives.”

  9

  Reams of Impossible Stuff

  Good night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.

  —IRENE ADLER IN “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

  After spending the holidays with the Ma’am in Masongill, the Conan Doyles reached Vienna on January 5, 1891. A “gloomy, ominous reception” of bitter cold and swirling snow awaited them, but their spirits soon lifted as they settled in rented rooms at a cheery pension. Conan Doyle had a few hundred pounds in savings thanks to the initial sales of The White Company, which was just beginning its run in Cornhill Magazine, but he hoped he would not have to dip into them to finance the Vienna expedition. After closing the practice in Southsea, he had a belated inspiration to offset his expenses with a new book. With his growing status as a writer, he had no trouble drumming up interest. A magazine called Answers commissioned him to produce a novella.

  It proved fortunate that Conan Doyle had something to occupy his time, as the folly of his intended course of study soon became apparent. “I attended eye lectures at the Krankenhaus,” he recalled, “but could certainly have learned far more in London, for even if one has a fair knowledge of conversational German it is a very different thing from following accurately a rapid lecture filled with technical terms.”

  Indeed, the medical lectures left him so baffled that he soon abandoned his intended course of study—“if it can be said to have ever begun”—and turned the Vienna sojourn into something of an extended vacation. The Conan Doyles spent their days ice-skating, sipping coffee on the banks of the Danube, and enjoying “a little of gay Viennese society.”

  It cannot have all been steamed milk and pastries, as Conan Doyle completed his commission for Answers in just over three weeks. The result was a novella of nearly forty thousand words entitled The Doings of Raffles Haw, which even he admitted was “not a very notable achievement.” The story centers on the unhappy fate of a chemist who discovers the secret of alchemy, the power of transmuting base metal into gold. “This is the great secret,” the title character tells an admiring companion. “It is the secret which endows the man who knows it with such a universal power as no man has ever enjoyed since the world was made. This secret it is the dearest wish of my heart to use for good, and I swear to you, Robert McIntyre, that if I thought it would tend to anything but good I would have done with it forever.”

  Not surprisingly, Mr. Haw’s charitable impulses soon miscarry, but in a manner that one reviewer dismissed as “unfortunate, but uninvolving.” In recent years there has been a halfhearted effort to reclaim the book as an early work of science fiction, but it would probably be more accurate to view the effort as another homage to Poe, whose story “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” offers many suggestive parallels. The Doings of Raffles Haw appeared in 1892, and soon joined The Mystery of Cloomber on the list of Conan Doyle’s most obscure works.

  Conan Doyle originally intended to spend half a year in Vienna, but he cut this back to two months once he dropped his medical studies. Before returning to England, he and Louisa stopped in Venice and Milan, then made their way to Paris where the young doctor attempted to resurrect something of the journey’s original purpose. He spent a few days observing Edmund Landolt, “the most famous French oculist of his time,” who had written an influential treatise on diseases of the eye.

  At the end of March, the Conan Doyles arrived in London and took a large flat at 23 Montague Place, directly behind the British Museum. Mrs. Hawkins brought the couple’s daughter up from the Isle of Wight and was soon spending most of her time with the family in London.

  Conan Doyle had brought back no official qualifications from Vienna, but he still declared himself ready to “put up my plate as an oculist.” He signed a lease for £120 per year on a consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, a short distance from Harley Street, where the more established medical men plied their trade. “I was aware that many of the big men did not find time to work out refractions,” he wrote. “I was capable in this work and liked it, so I hoped that some of it might drift my way.”

  For a time, Conan Doyle
made a concerted effort to put his name around, just as he had in the early days in Southsea. He joined the Ophthalmologic Society of the United Kingdom and wrote to Dr. Hoare that he had “hooked on” with the Royal Westminster Eye Infirmary, around the corner from Montague Place. It soon became evident, however, that London would be even less congenial to an unknown, untested doctor than Southsea had been. His lease on Upper Wimpole Street entitled him to a consulting room and a share of a waiting room, but, as Conan Doyle ruefully admitted, “I was soon to find that they were both waiting rooms.”

  Once again, such remarks show that Conan Doyle was all too willing to disparage his own medical skills. This time, however, he had good reason. Although he had enjoyed reasonable success in Portsmouth for eight years, the London eye practice—which had been a rash undertaking from the first—never got off the ground. London already had plenty of eye specialists, and potential patients were unlikely to entrust their vision to an unknown practitioner who could demonstrate so few qualifications.

  Undeterred, Conan Doyle set out each morning from Montague Place and walked the fifteen minutes or so to Upper Wimpole Street. There, he sat at his desk until late afternoon—“with never a ring to disturb my serenity.” In contrast to his early days in Southsea, he could now afford to take a relaxed view. Installments of The White Company were still appearing each month in Cornhill Magazine, which gave him tremendous confidence in his literary prospects, if not his medical ones. Still, though he would often joke about the solitary fastness of his London consulting room, at the time he tried to give the opposite impression. In at least one interview, given to The World the following year, he presented himself as a man so torn between the demands of literature and a thriving practice that his health began to suffer. At length, he told his sympathetic interviewer, he resolved to “throw physic to the dogs” and give himself over entirely to the life of an author.

  This seems to have been wishful thinking. The portrait he gave in his autobiography—in which he admitted that not a single patient ever crossed the threshold of Upper Wimpole Street—appears to be the truth. As far as his literary ambitions were concerned, this was just as well. Sitting alone in his consulting room, Conan Doyle hit on an idea that may well have been the single greatest inspiration of his career.

  For some time, Conan Doyle had poured most of his energy into novels, because the disjointed collection of stories from his early days had done nothing to advance his career. Now, as he surveyed the publishing scene from his vantage on Wimpole Street, he changed direction once again. It struck him that there might be some benefit in writing a series of short stories featuring a single, continuing character. This offered an advantage over the more conventional serialized novel, because the reader would not lose interest if one installment or another was missed. Conan Doyle realized, of course, that the serialization of novels had done no harm to Charles Dickens, but there were now far more magazines on the stands, and a far greater number of literate people to read them, not all of whom would have the patience or the means to follow a continuing saga. “Looking round for my central character,” he wrote, “I felt that Sherlock Holmes, whom I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories.”

  The importance of this decision cannot be overstated. Not only had Conan Doyle made a canny marketing decision, he had also found an especially good showcase for his own talents. “This I am sure of,” he would write in Through the Magic Door, “that there are far fewer supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long books. It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the statue.” Conan Doyle, as it happened, possessed this skill in abundance, and this was never more apparent than in the character of Sherlock Holmes. In the novellas and the later novels, the detective was obliged to trundle offstage for long, dull patches of exposition. The short story format offered a compact execution and brisk pace, and highlighted Conan Doyle’s singular talent for puzzle plots. Of the sixty tales that compose the complete Sherlock Holmes adventures, fifty-six are short stories. Sherlock Holmes was a sprinter, not a distance runner.

  Having decided on this new direction, Conan Doyle needed only to find a magazine receptive to the idea. For ten years, a magazine called Tit-Bits had been a fixture at every corner newsstand. Made up of nuggets, or “tit-bits,” of informative material, humor, and stories, the magazine made a fortune for its founder, George Newnes, who parlayed the success into an entire stable of periodicals. The latest of these, as Conan Doyle set to work on his Sherlock Holmes short stories, was The Strand magazine, which began publication in January of that year under the editorship of Herbert Greenhough Smith.

  In The Strand’s first issue, Greenhough Smith wrote an editor’s letter setting forth his agenda. The new magazine, he announced, would “contain stories and articles by the best British writers, and special translations from the first foreign authors. These will be illustrated by eminent artists.… The past efforts of the Editor in supplying cheap, healthful literature have met with such generous favour from the public, that he ventures to hope that this new enterprise will prove a popular one.”

  The Strand was to justify its editor’s ambitions for nearly sixty years, thanks in no small part to its long association with Conan Doyle. After a brief flirtation with crusading journalism in its first year, the magazine soon settled into a pattern largely inspired by the American Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Fiction, interviews, and fact pieces formed the bulk of its content, spelled off by topical filler material. The magazine had a particular weakness for celebrity reporting, as demonstrated by a long-running feature called “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives.” Interviews with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt alternated with somewhat fawning profiles of the royal family. One typical issue included articles on “Lord Rosebury’s Turf Successes” and “A Visit to the Patent Office,” along with a profile of a one-legged daredevil and a sampling of antique riddle books—“When is a jar not a door? When it’s partly open.” Another popular running feature showcased curiosities sent in by readers, such as a metal cigarette box that had stopped a bullet, and a portrait of President McKinley rendered in canceled postage stamps. The mixture of “healthful literature” and up-to-date happenings proved successful straight out of the starting gate, with the first issue selling in excess of 300,000 copies.

  Conan Doyle had recently acquired a professional representative, A. P. Watt, to relieve him of the “hateful bargaining” associated with magazine and book publishing. Watt, who is credited with having coined the term “literary agent,” was known to be a shrewd operator. Initially, Conan Doyle may have engaged Watt to tend his interests during the hiatus in Vienna, but the association continued for years to come. While Conan Doyle was still abroad, Watt had submitted a story called “The Voice of Science” to The Strand. Set in “Birchespool”—Conan Doyle’s fictional name for Portsmouth—the story centers on a recording phonograph, intended to play some learned remarks on the “life history of the Medusiform Gonophore,” which instead becomes instrumental in breaking off an unsuitable romance. Conan Doyle received payment of £4 per thousand words for this story, which appeared in the third issue of The Strand in March.

  In April, Conan Doyle began sending the first of his Sherlock Holmes short stories to his agent. Two of these—probably “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Red-Headed League”—were forwarded to Greenhough Smith at The Strand. “The Voice of Science” seems not to have made much of an impression on the editor, but in later years Smith would often speak of the day when the first Holmes stories crossed his desk: “What a God-send to an editor jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff! The ingenuity of plot, the limpid clearness of style, the perfect art of telling a story! The very handwriting, full of character, and clear as print.”

  In years to come, Conan Doyle would speak of the many “kind friends” who continually pressed him for more Sherlock Holmes adventures. Of all of these, Greenhoug
h Smith was by far the most prominent. Almost from the first, as Conan Doyle wearied of Sherlock Holmes, Greenhough Smith managed to draw ever more stories out of his reluctant author through a combination of encouragement, financial inducement, and appeals to loyalty. As for Conan Doyle, he would feel a debt to Smith for the rest of his life, and often refused higher fees in order to give preference to The Strand.

  Educated at Cambridge, Greenhough Smith was a bookish but powerfully built man whose heavy eyeglasses and bushy mustache contributed to a somewhat melancholy demeanor—earning him the nickname of “Calamity Smith.” Thirty-five years old when the magazine debuted, he remained in the editor’s post for nearly forty years. His career had many highlights, but he ranked his introduction to Conan Doyle’s work as the most memorable. “I realized at once that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe,” he recounted. “I can still remember rushing into Mr. Newnes’ room and thrusting the stories before his eyes.”

  The publisher shared Smith’s enthusiasm, and The Strand immediately commissioned four more Sherlock Holmes tales, for a total of six stories to run from July to December of that year. Along with the two originally submitted, Conan Doyle added “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “A Case of Identity,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and “The Five Orange Pips.” He received £35 per story.

  The first to appear was “A Scandal in Bohemia,” perhaps the finest Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle would ever write. Though the central plot device recalls Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the story draws its energy from Conan Doyle’s vivid prose, skillful pacing, and easy wit. The story opens as a heavily disguised client presents himself at Baker Street. Holmes recognizes him as no less a personage than the King of Bohemia, who has come to enlist the detective’s aid in recovering an indiscreet photograph of himself in the company of a young opera singer—Irene Adler of New Jersey. Holmes attacks the problem with uncommon subtlety, but the plot machinations are secondary to the remarkable portrait of Miss Adler, the “well-known adventuress,” who outmaneuvers Holmes in the end. The detective is so chastened and impressed by this outcome that he requests a photograph of Miss Adler instead of payment for his services. “He used to make merry over the cleverness of women,” Watson writes in conclusion, “but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.”