Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  One must take it as extraordinary that Conan Doyle should have launched his series in this manner, allowing his detective to be bested by a woman. In fiction, if not always in life, Conan Doyle took great delight in strong, independent women. In a later, non-Holmesian story called “The Doctors of Hoyland,” a Dr. James Ripley meets fierce competition from a lady doctor, whose very existence seems a “blasphemy” to him. Here Conan Doyle was drawing on the memory of Sophia Jex-Blake, whose pioneering effort to receive a medical education created an uproar at Edinburgh in the 1870s. In Conan Doyle’s story, the female doctor is a far superior practitioner, and Dr. Ripley finds himself falling in love in spite of himself. In time, after she has saved his leg following a riding accident, Dr. Ripley proposes marriage. “What,” exclaims the prospective bride, “and unite the practices?” A crestfallen Dr. Ripley sees his hopes dashed.

  Such characters, it seems fair to say, were not typical of late Victorian literature. Though Sherlock Holmes had not proposed marriage, his defeat at the hands of Irene Adler made for a hugely entertaining story, and humanized a character who had previously been nothing more than a “perfect reasoning and observing machine.” Sherlock Holmes, unlike Poe’s Dupin, now had an interior life.

  Ingeniously, Conan Doyle had dropped in a few titillating details that suggested real-life scandals. Many readers believed the story to be a thinly veiled account of actual events, and sought the true identities of the mysterious Irene Adler and her feckless admirer. One strong contender was a singer named Ludmilla Hubel, whose involvement with Archduke John Salvator of Tuscany—the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph—would have inspired much gossip during Conan Doyle’s stay in Vienna. Other readers inclined toward Lola Montez, who had once been the mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria. A few preferred to seek their scandals closer to home, observing certain parallels to the Prince of Wales, whose affair with the actress Lillie Langtry had been a subject of furious interest.

  Whatever Conan Doyle’s inspiration, the story created a considerable sensation when it appeared in July of 1891, and each subsequent Holmes adventure that year saw an increase in sales of The Strand. Readers became so eager to hear more about the detective that they lined up at newsstands on the day that a new issue was due. “Sherlock Holmes appears to have caught on,” Conan Doyle told his mother in a rare moment of understatement. “It augurs well for the new book.”

  George Newnes had decreed that every page of The Strand must carry an illustration, and the initial success of Sherlock Holmes owed much to the magazine’s evocative drawings, which fixed the image of the lean, pipe-smoking detective in the public’s mind. While casting about for an artist, Greenhough Smith and art editor W. H. J. Boot had been impressed by the work of Walter Paget, who contributed regularly to the Illustrated London News. As fate would have it, neither of the editors could recall Paget’s first name, so the commission went to Walter’s brother Sidney by mistake. Walter served instead as Sidney’s life model for the detective. Conan Doyle had imagined his detective as having “a thin, razor-like face, with a great hawk’s-bill of a nose, and two small eyes, set close together on either side of it.” Walter Paget, a strikingly handsome man, inspired a far more dashing incarnation of Holmes. Perhaps, Conan Doyle admitted, “from the point of view of my lady readers it was as well.” Walter Paget would probably not have agreed. Not only had he missed out on a lucrative commission, but he would soon find himself being accosted in public by enthusiastic readers of The Strand who mistook him for the newly famous detective. One evening, a popular anecdote holds, his enjoyment of an event at the Covent Garden opera house was punctuated by shouts of “There goes Sherlock Holmes!”

  Greenhough Smith recognized a literary phenomenon in the making. Four months after the stories began running, the editor asked for six more adventures. Conan Doyle, who had given no thought to extending the series, seems to have refused at first. “The Strand are simply imploring me to continue Sherlock Holmes,” he wrote to the Ma’am. “I have written by this post to say that if they offer me £50 each, irrespective of length, I may be induced to reconsider my refusal.” Smith agreed to the terms without hesitation, stating only that he would like to have the new batch as soon as possible.

  Smith and his star author were to have negotiations of this sort many times over the next forty years, usually with A. P. Watt acting as intermediary. Within a few years, Conan Doyle’s name carried such weight that it could add 100,000 copies to The Strand’s monthly circulation figures. On one occasion, after returning to England on a Channel ferry, Conan Doyle expressed wonder at the magazine’s popularity. “Foreigners used to recognize the English by their check suits,” he remarked. “I think they will soon learn to do it by their Strand magazines. Everyone on the Channel boat, except the man at the wheel, was clutching one.” He knew full well that he had played a major role in that success.

  Having agreed to Greenhough Smith’s request, Conan Doyle produced five more stories in a matter of weeks. These included “The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Noble Bachelor,” “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Beryl Coronet,” and—best of all—“The Speckled Band,” a classic locked-room chiller. This astonishing rate of production, and Conan Doyle’s ingenuity in dreaming up plots, drew almost as much interest as the stories themselves. “Dr. Doyle invariably conceives the end of his story first, and writes up to it,” The Strand reported the following year. “He gets the climax, and his art lies in the ingenious way in which he conceals it from his readers. A story—similar to those which have appeared in these pages—occupies about a week in writing, and the ideas have come at all manner of times—when out walking, cricketing, tricycling, or playing tennis.” Conan Doyle would often say that it struck him as incredible when readers asked if he knew the outcome of a story when he embarked on it. “Of course I do,” he remarked in his autobiography. “One could not possibly steer a course if one did not know one’s destination.”

  As 1891 drew to a close, Conan Doyle began steering a course toward a very unexpected destination. As he reported to his mother, he had now written five of the six new stories and he planned to make the final adventure especially memorable. “I think of slaying Holmes in the sixth and winding him up for good and all,” Conan Doyle announced. “He takes my mind from better things.”

  Mary Doyle received this news with horror—“You won’t!” she replied. “You can’t! You mustn’t!”—and went on to suggest an idea that would not involve violence to the detective. Moved by his mother’s pleas, Conan Doyle granted a stay of execution. Instead, he wrote “The Copper Beeches,” and credited the Ma’am with providing a crucial plot point. Having completed his commission, Conan Doyle now expected to say a “long farewell to Sherlock” while he turned to other matters. “He still lives,” he told his mother, “thanks to your entreaties.”

  When “The Copper Beeches” appeared in the June 1892 issue of The Strand, the first dozen Holmes stories were gathered together in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle wrote to Joseph Bell, his old medical lecturer, to ask if he might dedicate the collection to him. “I am sure,” Conan Doyle wrote, “that no other name has as good a right to the place.”

  Conan Doyle was to call this period of his life “The Great Break,” and the greatest of the changes it brought involved his medical career. While writing the early Holmes stories, he continued to trudge off to his consulting room each day, still hoping to salvage something of his new specialization. On the morning of May 4, 1891, he had set off for Wimpole Street as usual when he felt an icy shiver pass over him. He turned back and barely managed to get through the door before his knees buckled under him. “It was a virulent attack of influenza,” he recalled, “at a time when influenza was in its deadly prime.”

  The treatment for this disease, in the days before antibiotics, amounted to little more than bed rest. For several days Conan Doyle lay helpless on his back and there seemed a very real chance that he would die. He described himself as “weak
as a child and as emotional,” which was natural enough given his history with the illness. “Only three years before,” he later explained, “my dear sister Annette, after spending her whole life on the family needs, had died of it at Lisbon at the very moment when my success would have enabled me to recall her from her long servitude.”

  After a torturous week, he slowly began to recover. As his mind cleared, Conan Doyle realized that he was “once more at a crossroads.” Still too weak to move, he took stock of his life and career. It had been foolish, he now admitted to himself, to maintain an expensive consulting room in the increasingly vain hope of establishing an ophthalmic practice. For years, medicine had been Conan Doyle’s main occupation, while literature served as a pleasant sideline. Now, in the wake of the Vienna interlude, his medical practice was completely stalled while his literary career had caught fire. Sherlock Holmes had made him a celebrity. The White Company promised a degree of respect from Britain’s literary elite. Money poured in from all quarters, especially from the United States, which now submitted to international copyright laws.

  With “a wild rush of joy,” Conan Doyle decided that the time had come to cut his losses in Wimpole Street. He would abandon his medical career forever and give himself over entirely to his writing. “I remember in my delight taking the handkerchief which lay upon the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation,” he wrote. “I should at last be my own master.”

  In a few days, Conan Doyle was out of bed and hobbling around with the aid of a walking stick. With no more practice to concern him, he decided he no longer needed to live in the noisy heart of central London. He began calling on housing agents and soon found a sixteen-room redbrick house at 12 Tennison Road, in the comfortable middle-class suburb of South Norwood. In his large study on the ground floor, Conan Doyle would have peace and quiet to pursue his new projects, but could easily travel into central London by train whenever necessary.

  It is not known what Louisa thought of this latest upheaval, though she must have had qualms about uprooting the household yet again. In all, the entire length of the family’s stay in Montague Place amounted to no more than three months. Louisa must have hoped, as she saw her possessions crated up once more, that the new home would bring some measure of stability to their lives. In this, she would be sadly disappointed.

  With his immediate family settled in South Norwood, Conan Doyle began sharing his new prosperity with his other relatives. When his sister Connie returned from her governess duties in Portugal, Conan Doyle brought her to live with the family in their new home. Later, his sister Lottie would also join them. There can be little doubt that he would also have extended an invitation to the Ma’am, but apparently she preferred to stay in Masongill. Conan Doyle began sending her a monthly allowance, which helped to send his brother Innes to a military academy.

  Conan Doyle settled into a routine that found him retreating into his office each morning after breakfast and working through until lunchtime. In the afternoons he gave himself over to leisure pursuits—sports, photography, or long bicycle rides with Louisa—and then resumed writing each evening from five until eight. He had now entered the most productive stretch of his career, turning out an average of three thousand words a day when he found his stride, and, on one occasion, recording a mind-boggling ten thousand words in a single day. Although he owned a typewriter, Conan Doyle continued to work in longhand, writing out his manuscripts in the neat, precise hand that had so impressed Greenhough Smith.

  Harry How, a journalist who visited South Norwood in August of 1892, noted that the walls of Conan Doyle’s study featured several sketches by Charles Doyle, while oil paintings by the late Jack Hawkins brightened the dining room. Harpoons, a seal skull, and various sporting trophies attested to the varied interests of the occupant. “I found him totally different from the man I expected to see,” How said of Conan Doyle. “There was nothing lynx-eyed, nothing ‘detective’ about him—not even the regulation walk of our modern solver of mysteries. He is just a happy, genial, homely man; tall, broad-shouldered, with a hand that grips you heartily, and, in its sincerity of welcome, hurts.” (For How, the word “homely” would have meant comfortable and unpretentious, rather than unattractive.)

  The first series of Sherlock Holmes stories was still running in The Strand as the family settled into its new life in South Norwood, but Conan Doyle resolved “to do some work which would certainly be less remunerative but would be more ambitious from a literary point of view.” By this, of course, he meant that he would once again turn out a historical novel in the hope of luring the public away from the baser charms of detective fiction. In February 1892 he completed The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents, centered on the suppression of the seventeenth-century Huguenots, the French Calvinist Protestants, and their flight to America. The novel appeared the following year in a three-volume edition, after serial publication in The Strand and in America in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. A commentator in Harper’s found much to praise in Conan Doyle’s portrait of Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV: “He has seen the slow blood mantle her cheek and her white hand tremble. He has felt the steady gaze of her luminous gray eyes. He has heard the thrill in her vibrant voice.” Perhaps so, but Conan Doyle’s readers did not demonstrate any great enthusiasm for the enterprise. The Refugees sold respectably and enjoyed many translations, but weighed against Sherlock Holmes, its success was modest.

  As always, Conan Doyle had researched his subject exhaustively. A short time later, the Ma’am happened to be visiting the Chateau de Fontainebleau when a tour guide recommended The Refugees as a means of gaining an understanding of the court of Louis XIV. “I expect the guide would have been considerably astonished had he then and there been kissed by an elderly English lady,” wrote a gratified Conan Doyle, “but it was an experience which he must have narrowly missed.”

  Two months after winding up The Refugees, Conan Doyle threw himself into The Great Shadow, another historical novel, for which he had received a commission from the Arrowsmith publishing firm. Focused on the Battle of Waterloo, the book’s title referred to Napoleon Bonaparte himself, who had “scrawled his name in red letters across the map of Europe.” The Napoleonic era had intrigued Conan Doyle since childhood, and he would make use of his vast knowledge of the period again and again throughout his career. Despite his enormous enthusiasm, however, The Great Shadow proved to be another disappointment. Though he handled the battle scenes with his usual skill, the novel lacked the insistent drive of The White Company. Conan Doyle would shortly make better use of the material in his Brigadier Gerard stories.

  Rounding out this astonishingly fruitful period, Conan Doyle produced a third book called Beyond the City, an uncharacteristic novel of domestic life and manners. Serialization began at the end of 1891 in a magazine called Good Words. The story features a Mrs. Westmacott—a sharp-tongued, heavy-smoking old party with a taste for stout—and her muscular young nephew Charles, who have just arrived in South Norwood as the story opens. “I am sorry that I have no tea to offer you,” Mrs. Westmacott tells her new neighbors. “I look upon the subserviency of woman as largely due to her abandoning nutritious drinks and invigorating exercises to the male. I do neither.” That said, she swings a pair of heavy dumbbells over her head. “You see what may be done on stout,” she declares.

  Apparently Conan Doyle was seeking comedic possibilities in the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement, but the results were uneven. Though Mrs. Westmacott can be seen as another in his long line of strong female characters, his portrayal wavers between admiration and parody. If his humor occasionally fell flat, however, one can only marvel at the powerful opinions of Mrs. Westmacott, who seems at times to be picking a fight with Conan Doyle. “I say that a woman is a colossal monument to the selfishness of man,” she states. “What is all this boasted chivalry—these fine words and vague phrases? Where is it when we wish to put it to the test? Man, in the abs
tract, will do anything to help a woman. Of course. How does it work when his pocket is touched? Where is his chivalry then?”

  In later years, Conan Doyle would raise a strenuous objection to the violent behavior of some female suffragettes, but it is unfair to dismiss him as an opponent of women’s rights. Unlike many men of his time, he made some attempt to understand the plight of women in a repressive society, and often addressed the issue in his fiction. In this case, his evident sympathy for his female protagonist gave rise to some confusion, at least in the eyes of one New York publisher, who rushed out a pirated edition before the new copyright laws came into full force. Instead of the usual author’s photo, the cover featured an attractive young woman in Conan Doyle’s place. “I still preserve a copy of this most flattering representation,” Conan Doyle wrote.

  With Beyond the City, The Refugees, and The Great Shadow, Conan Doyle had returned to the “better things” from which Sherlock Holmes had kept him, but the public’s noisy enthusiasm for the detective had not abated. While he was writing The Refugees, Greenhough Smith had asked for another series of Holmes stories. Conan Doyle hesitated, not because he disliked the character but because he feared he would have trouble devising suitable plots. “The difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do,” he wrote in his autobiography. “One cannot without effort spin plots at such a rate. They are apt to become thin or to break.”