Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Barrie also had problems in this area. He cultivated a particular liking for the character of a ten-year-old page boy named Caddie, played by an accomplished twelve-year-old actor named Henry Rignold. When Rignold distinguished himself in rehearsal, Barrie heaped additional lines of dialogue on him—far more, in the end, than the script would bear. In the final week of rehearsal, Barrie hit on a peculiar solution: he gathered up Rignold’s extra lines and had them printed as marginal notes in the play’s program book, to be read along by the audience as the production unfolded. “Miss Sims was the kind of mistress as is always making you turn out your pockets,” one note reads. “Mine is a very difficult part,” says another, “and I want the critics to say about it that it would be nothing in less experienced hands.”

  This was not an entirely happy brainstorm, since not everyone in the audience elected to purchase the program book. Worse yet, it required that the house lights be left up throughout the evening, so that those who did purchase the notes would be able to read them.

  Not surprisingly, Richard D’Oyly Carte felt no great confidence in the emerging production. He pushed back the opening for five days to allow some frantic last-minute tinkering, but the curtain finally went up on May 13, 1893. Barrie and Conan Doyle received a loud ovation as they took their seats, but this enthusiasm dimmed noticeably as the evening wore on. “At the end a youthful friend came into our box,” Barrie recalled, “and Doyle expressed my feelings in saying to him reprovingly, ‘Why did you not cheer?’ but I also sympathized with our visitor when he answered plaintively, ‘I didn’t like to, when no one else was doing it.’”

  There seemed little point in waiting for the customary “Author! Author!” from the audience—indeed, one critic would note that “some dissentient noises” were heard at the final curtain. One of the female leads, Decima Moore, grew so distressed by the hostile mood of the audience that she refused to leave her dressing room for the curtain call. By this time, Barrie and Conan Doyle had quietly removed themselves to commiserate over dinner at the Athenaeum Club.

  The reviews were not kind. Most expressed wonder that two such capable writers had stumbled so badly. “Messrs. Barrie and Conan Doyle have thoroughly exemplified how not to do it,” noted the Sporting Times. “It is quite unworthy of the two eminent names,” observed the Pall Mall Gazette.

  More than one critic indicated that the play might have benefited from the presence of a certain Baker Street detective, a remark seemingly calculated to infuriate Conan Doyle. “The presence of this remarkable individual,” the Morning Post offered, “would have been of great service to the spectators in helping them to unravel the tangled skein of the story.”

  Perhaps the loudest voice in the chorus of boos was that of George Bernard Shaw, the “raw-boned Irishman” whom Conan Doyle had seen rolling about London. “It would ill become me, as a brother of the literary craft, to pretend to congratulate them seriously upon the most unblushing outburst of tomfoolery that two responsible citizens could conceivably indulge in publicly,” Shaw wrote in The World. “The high privilege of joking in public should never be granted except to people who know thoroughly what they are joking about.”

  Other, more forgiving critics strained desperately to find some note of kindness among the wreckage. “The orchestra,” observed one reviewer, “is never obstreperous.” Another found the pretty girls in “dishabille” to be a pleasant compensation for the faults of the play. The London Times, in a surprisingly cordial review, voiced its expectation that the show would run until the girls had learned to handle their golf clubs a little less stiffly, and the college caps had lost their “very unrealistic condition of preternatural neatness.”

  Sadly, the college caps were still gleaming when Jane Annie folded seven weeks later. The production ran for fifty performances, but only because D’Oyly Carte had nothing ready to take its place. In that time no less than four versions of the libretto appeared, reflecting the feverish pace of revision. A modest tour extended its life a while longer, but by August Jane Annie was buried for good.

  Strangely, the most forbearing of the critics may have been W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had by now agreed to renew their partnership. Sullivan, who attended the opening night, is reported to have made a note in his diary: “Dialogue dull—music very pretty.” Gilbert is thought to have allowed the influence of two of the characters to creep into the libretto of Utopia, Limited, which opened in October of that year.

  This would have been a slender consolation, but both Conan Doyle and Barrie managed to be philosophical. Barrie, for his part, had recovered his health and good spirits. With The Admirable Crichton and Peter Pan still ahead of him, he could afford to laugh about Jane Annie in years to come.

  Conan Doyle also had reasons for optimism. “There is indeed nothing more miserable than a theatrical failure,” he wrote some years later, “for you feel how many others who have backed you have been affected by it. It was, I am glad to say, my only experience of it, and I have no doubt that Barrie could say the same.”

  Actually, this was by no means his only experience of theatrical failure—Conan Doyle would go on to produce several more box office duds—but none quite as leaden as Jane Annie. If his memory played false on the subject, perhaps it was clouded by the stunning success of his next play, A Story of Waterloo, which was to appear the following year. For the moment, however, Conan Doyle withdrew into the more familiar territory of historical fiction and Sherlock Holmes.

  Some time later, a copy of Barrie’s A Window in Thrums arrived at Conan Doyle’s home in South Norwood. Written on the flyleaves in Barrie’s hand was a short story called “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators,” in which a pair of writers call on Sherlock Holmes to discover why their musical comedy has failed. The collaborators—one of whom is tall and brutish, the other small and “handsomer”—receive a cold reception at Baker Street: “I am not particular about the people I mix with for business purposes,” Holmes declares, “but at literary characters I draw the line.”

  As Watson relates, the two men (“if such they can be called”) are not long in coming to the point:

  “Let us cut the first four pages,” said the big man, “and proceed to business. I want to know why—”

  “Allow me,” said Mr. Holmes, with some of his old courage. “You want to know why the public does not go to your opera.”

  “Exactly,” said the other ironically, “as you perceive by my shirt stud.” He added more gravely, “And as you can only find out in one way, I must insist on your witnessing an entire programme of the piece.”

  It was an anxious moment for me. I shuddered, for I knew that if Holmes went, I should have to go with him. But my friend had a heart of gold. “Never,” he cried fiercely. “I will do anything for you save that.”

  “Your continued existence depends on it,” said the big man menacingly.

  “I would rather melt into air,” replied Holmes, proudly taking another chair. “But I can tell you why the public don’t go to your piece without sitting the thing out myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” replied Holmes calmly, “they prefer to stay away.”

  11

  The Tremendous Abyss

  After a glorious career, happily and decently dead.

  —H. G. WELLS ON SHERLOCK HOLMES, 1896

  “I was certainly working hard,” Conan Doyle said of his prolific days in South Norwood, but so far he had not succeeded in coaxing his readers away from Baker Street. “It was still the Sherlock Holmes stories for which the public clamoured,” he admitted, “and these from time to time I endeavoured to supply. At last, after I had done two series of them I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore as a sign of my resolution I determined to end the life of my hero.”

  The decision had been brewing for some time, and only Greenhough Smith’s checkbook and the
Ma’am’s remonstrances had kept the detective alive for a second collection of stories. Now, as he neared the end of this new series, Conan Doyle renewed his conviction that Holmes must die. As he had told his mother on more than one occasion: “I am weary of his name.”

  Conan Doyle discussed his plans with any number of friends and colleagues, most of whom tried to talk him out of it. “I sat with him on the seashore at Aldeburgh when he decided to kill Sherlock Holmes,” James Barrie wrote, though in all likelihood Conan Doyle had long since made up his mind. The chief difficulty lay in finding an appropriately dramatic way of doing the deed. “A man like that mustn’t die of a pin-prick or influenza,” Conan Doyle explained to Frederic Villiers, a journalist and artist. “His end must be violent and intensely dramatic.”

  For the moment, Conan Doyle seemed content to wait for inspiration, as he had other things to occupy his mind. In November 1892, Louisa had given birth to a son, Alleyne, which the proud father called “the chief event” of their life in Norwood. Named for the young hero of The White Company, the boy would always be known to the family by his second name, Kingsley. The following month, as a special Christmas surprise, Conan Doyle dressed himself up as a scaly green monster and burst in on his family and friends as they gathered by the fireside. Panic broke out as the noisy intruder flailed about with its pointed claws, with the result that Conan Doyle sat up well into the night with his hysterical four-year-old daughter, reassuring her that the monster would not return. Only the baby appeared unperturbed.

  The monster might have provided a novel means of doing away with Sherlock Holmes, but Conan Doyle elected to seek out a more traditional finale. A suitable method came to hand on a trip to Switzerland the following year. There is a difference of opinion as to when Conan Doyle made this visit, and some researchers, in attempting to piece together his hectic itinerary at this time, have concluded that he made more than one excursion. Problems of this sort have long troubled Conan Doyle’s admirers; fans of Sherlock Holmes, in attempting to establish a chronology for the stories, have concluded that Dr. Watson must have married more than once—and possibly as many as six times. Only in this fashion, the reasoning holds, can we understand Watson’s fitful habitation of the rooms in Baker Street.

  It is fairly certain, however, that Conan Doyle brought Louisa to Switzerland in August of 1893 (just as Jane Annie was breathing her last) so that he could give a series of lectures in Lucerne. From there, they traveled on to the Rifel Alp Hotel in Zermatt, where Conan Doyle fell into conversation with a pair of English clerics, Silas K. Hocking and Edward F. Benson, who also happened to be novelists. Anxious to see some of the local scenery, the three men hired a guide to help them climb a section of the nearby Findelen glacier. Their ascent was slow, as they had to follow in a line as the guide chopped steps into the ice with an ax, and soon enough the three writers began talking shop. By the time they reached the top, the conversation had turned to Sherlock Holmes. “Doyle confessed frankly that he was tired of his own creation,” Hocking recalled in his memoirs. “‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘he has got to be an “old man of the sea” about my neck, and I intend to make an end of him. If I don’t he’ll make an end of me.’”

  Both Hocking and Benson made some effort to change Conan Doyle’s mind. Such a drastic action, Hocking declared, would be “rather rough on an old friend” who had brought his author such fame and fortune. Seeing that Conan Doyle would not be swayed, Hocking naturally wanted to know how he planned to dispose of the detective. Conan Doyle admitted that he did not yet know. “We reached at length a wide crevasse,” Hocking continued, “and stood for some time on the brink looking down into its bluey-green depths. ‘If you are determined on making an end of Holmes,’ I said, ‘why not bring him out to Switzerland and drop him down a crevasse? It would save funeral expenses.’”

  Conan Doyle seems to have found the suggestion amusing. He laughed “in his hearty way,” Hocking recalled, and said, “Not a bad idea.”

  Apparently the notion set Conan Doyle’s mind turning. At another stage of the journey, when the Conan Doyles stopped in Meiringen, the intrepid hiker went out to see the famous Reichenbach Falls. Then as now, Reichenbach was a popular tourist destination—a “necessary and illuminating point of interest,” according to a guidebook of the day. Here, Conan Doyle decided, was a place that would make a “worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him.”

  Having found a suitable venue, Conan Doyle took up his pen to write “The Final Problem,” the story he sincerely believed would be the end of Sherlock Holmes. If the sinister Reichenbach Falls seemed appropriate to his intent, there still remained the difficulty of dropping Sherlock Holmes into the chasm. Rising to the challenge, Conan Doyle created one of the most memorable villains of all time. The notorious Professor Moriarty, who has since become such a fixture of stage and screen, appears only briefly in Conan Doyle’s original work, but he made a formidable impression. “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson,” Holmes declared. “He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”

  Conan Doyle took delight in presenting Moriarty as the dark mirror of Sherlock Holmes. By this time, his readers had come to expect showy displays of deduction from the detective—in the tradition of Joseph Bell and the cobbler’s lapstone. When Holmes faces off with Moriarty in the rooms at Baker Street, however, Conan Doyle puts an evil spin on his established formula: “All that I have to say,” the professor declares, “has already crossed your mind.”

  “Then possibly,” answers Sherlock Holmes, “my answer has crossed yours.”

  “You stand fast?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Clearly, Arthur had found his Mordred. “Your memoirs will draw to an end,” Holmes tells Watson in a none-too-subtle piece of foreshadowing, “upon the day that I crown my career by the capture or extinction of the most dangerous and capable criminal in Europe.” Extinction proved to be the only option, but at the cost of Holmes’s own life. By the end of the story the two men—“the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation”—have apparently plunged to their deaths at Reichenbach.

  This done, Conan Doyle made a laconic notation in his diary—“Killed Holmes”—and moved on to other matters.

  “The Final Problem” appeared in the December 1893 edition of The Strand, and readers lost no time in making their displeasure known. “I was amazed,” Conan Doyle admitted, “at the concern expressed by the public.” The author had good reason to feel amazed, as much of this concern took the form of outright hostility. Angry letters poured in—“You Brute!” one of them began—and a popular anecdote of the time has Conan Doyle on the receiving end of a blow from an irate reader’s handbag. At the offices of The Strand, where Greenhough Smith had quite literally pleaded for the detective’s life, shareholders braced for the repercussions of what George Newnes called the “dreadful event.” For Newnes and Smith, the initial dismay turned to genuine alarm as twenty thousand people canceled their subscriptions. Only eighteen months had elapsed since “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but already the fate of the magazine had become entwined with that of Sherlock Holmes.

  No one, least of all Conan Doyle, anticipated such a furor. In London, black mourning bands were seen. The detective’s passing was discussed in language usually reserved for state funerals. Members of the royal family were said to be distraught. The general sentiment was later captured in a cartoon by H. T. Webster, which showed a boy sitting up in bed with the story, his face a study in heartbreak and shattered innocence. The caption read: “Life’s Darkest Moment.”

  Even as the news traveled around the world—“Tragic Death of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” read one headline—commentators
sifted through the evidence for any sign that Holmes might one day return from his watery grave. “There is no proof positive given by any eyewitness whose veracity is unimpeachable,” noted the humor magazine Punch. “Where is the merry Swiss boy who delivered the note and disappeared?”

  Conan Doyle did nothing to encourage this sort of speculation. Silas Hocking is supposed to have received a terse communication that read “Have dropped Sherlock Holmes down the Reichenbach Falls,” which does not suggest an author overcome with remorse. The public uproar did nothing to soften his mood. “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” he was to say in 1896. “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” He took up the theme again that year in a speech to the Author’s Club: “I have been much blamed for doing that gentleman to death,” he said, “but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.”

  In spite of such pronouncements from Conan Doyle, Holmes fans held fast to one immutable fact: Dr. Watson had not actually seen the detective fall to his death. The doctor had been called away at the critical moment to tend “an English lady” who was suffering through the last stage of consumption. “She had wintered at Davos Platz,” the explanation ran, “and was journeying now to join her friends at Lucerne, when a sudden haemorrhage had overtaken her.” In the story, the consumptive proved to be nothing more than a ruse. For Conan Doyle, however, the patient had become a bitter reality.