Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Not everyone in his audiences agreed with him, and they were not shy about shouting out their views. In Edinburgh, Conan Doyle reported, the “art of heckling has been carried to extremes.” The noise level in some of the meeting halls, he said, came to resemble “feeding-time at the Zoo.” Conan Doyle quickly learned how to handle himself without getting ruffled. “The heckling of the candidate was carried on with great liveliness,” The Scotsman reported of one session, “his ready and straight replies being received with loud cheers.”

  Some of the hecklers took to addressing him as Sherlock Holmes, as in: “Sherlock Holmes! Are ye no’ a believer in home rule?” Here, too, Conan Doyle learned to curb his natural irritation. “This title,” reported a Glasgow paper, “the doctor acknowledges genially.”

  As the polling date drew near, Conan Doyle stated that his hecklers had convinced him of one thing—that there was no single local issue of pressing importance to the voters. “The proof of that,” The Scotsman noted, “lay in the great variety of subjects on which he had been questioned, these subjects ranging from trout fishing to the exact position of the Episcopalians in India.” The remark drew laughter from Conan Doyle’s supporters, but his indifference to local concerns undoubtedly cost him votes.

  As his campaign came to a close, Conan Doyle pulled out all the stops for an appearance before the Edinburgh Literary Institute. Crowds had waited for an hour to hear his address, and police were needed to contain a party of “unenfranchised youths” who threatened to disrupt the proceedings. When the doors finally opened there was such a rush for seats that dozens of people had to stand in the aisles and passageways. Conan Doyle took the stage amid great cheering, quickly turning his remarks toward the war. He painted a vivid portrait of a hopeful South Africa turning toward Edinburgh for deliverance. The Scotsman paraphrased his remarks: “This general election meant everything to our Colonists in South Africa, who looked to Edinburgh as the centre of their thoughts, and the heart of the Scottish people. In all the little towns in South Africa the excitement was intense, and crowds gathered in front of the screens on which the election results were displayed. [Conan Doyle] asked them to enable their brethren in South Africa to say on Friday morning, as they looked upon those screens—‘Thank God, Edinburgh has gone straight!’” This stirring rhetoric, The Scotsman noted, brought “loud and continued cheering” from the assembly.

  As the cheers subsided, Conan Doyle played his trump. His hecklers had repeatedly called for Sherlock Holmes; Conan Doyle gave them the next best thing. Dr. Joseph Bell, now sixty-three years old, emerged from the crowd and stood beside his former pupil. Stepping forward, Bell remarked that he had probably known the candidate—“my former dresser”—longer than anyone in the hall. “If Conan Doyle does half as well in Parliament as he did in the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary,” Bell declared, “he will make an unforgettable impression on English politics.” The crowd gave another thunderous ovation.

  On the eve of the election, Conan Doyle had every reason to think he might score an upset victory. He told his mother that he hoped he would carry Central Edinburgh and give a boost to all the other Liberal Unionist candidates. “May there be no contretemps,” he added.

  Just as the polls opened, there was a contretemps. Overnight, three hundred placards went up across the city that branded Conan Doyle as a “Papist conspirator, a Jesuit emissary, and a Subverter of the Protestant Faith,” whose candidacy constituted an assault on “everything dear to the Scottish heart.” Conan Doyle denounced the smear campaign as the work of an “Evangelical fanatic” named Jacob Plimmer, who operated an outfit called the Dumfermline Protestant Defense Organisation. Plimmer, Conan Doyle said, had declared it his “special mission to keep Roman Catholic candidates out of Parliament.”

  As the voters went to the polls, Conan Doyle tried frantically to repair the damage. He sent a telegram to Plimmer threatening legal action and communicated with his opponent, George Mackenzie Brown, who issued a statement denouncing the “slanderous attack.”

  The exact nature of this slander only added to the confusion. Plimmer’s attack implied a sinister agenda in Conan Doyle’s religious background. Conan Doyle told his supporters that he “doubted that anyone in the world held broader views” on the question of religion, and this was quite possibly the literal truth. But the fact remained that he had been raised a Catholic, and educated by Jesuits, which meant that Plimmer’s charges could not be denied unequivocally.

  Conan Doyle lost the election by 569 votes. It is not certain that Plimmer’s attack cost him the victory, though Conan Doyle would always believe it had. In his autobiography, he stated that he “narrowly missed the seat, being beaten by a few hundred votes.” Those few hundred votes were not quite as trifling as they might seem, given that the total number of votes cast numbered fewer than 5,500. The final tally gave Mr. Brown a total of 3,028 votes as opposed to Conan Doyle’s 2,459. Even so, Conan Doyle had surpassed all expectations, and reduced the previous Liberal majority by 1,500 votes.

  By that standard, Conan Doyle’s campaign was hailed as a victory for the party, but he felt a great deal of disgust over the devious tactics. He himself had refused to stoop to such a level. “We have a letter which would damn our opponent utterly but I won’t let them use it,” he had confided some days earlier. “It is below the belt.” He wrote an eloquent letter to The Scotsman to protest this “very grave public scandal,” but in the end he decided against lodging an official appeal.

  At his final appearance before his supporters, Conan Doyle showed himself to be a magnanimous loser. He assured his committee and the members of various Unionist associations that he did not care “a snap of the finger” about being beaten, because the greater cause—the policy in South Africa—had been carried across Britain. When a voice in the crowd shouted that he would have won if not for the “dirty placards,” Conan Doyle would not be drawn into recrimination. His opponent was a man of honor, he stated, and that was what mattered. The meeting concluded with a rousing chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  * * *

  Less than three weeks later, Conan Doyle shared a platform at London’s Pall Mall Club with a young man who had just won his first seat in Parliament. Both men, in the words of the club’s president, had distinguished themselves in the field of literature before turning their attentions to politics. The two figures made an interesting contrast. Conan Doyle shared some of his experiences in Bloemfontein. The other speaker, twenty-five-year-old Winston Churchill, spoke of the dangers of press censorship. Churchill had gone to South Africa as a war correspondent, only to be captured by the Boers. His daring escape made him a celebrity, and helped sweep him to victory in the October election.

  Listening to the young Churchill that evening, Conan Doyle must have reflected on his own recent defeat. “I am 41,” he had noted in his journal while deciding whether to enter politics. “So it is now or never.” Seeing the promising new M.P. address his audience, Conan Doyle may well have felt twinges of regret over the lost opportunity.

  If so, his regrets would have been short-lived. He cared deeply for the issues at stake, but disliked the machinations of party politics, a process he likened to “a mud bath—helpful but messy.” He could not see himself tied to one party at the cost of his own independence of thought. As the years passed, he came to regard Jacob Plimmer and his “Dumfermline Protestant Defense Organisation” in an entirely new light:

  “Looking back,” he declared, “I am inclined to look upon Mr. Plimmer as one of the great benefactors of my life.”

  17

  The Footprints of a Gigantic Hound

  “Holmes!” I cried. “Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive?”

  —DR. WATSON IN “THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE”

  In March 1901, while the nation was still in mourning over the death of Queen Victoria in January, Conan Doyle opened a fresh round of negotiations with the editor Greenhough Smith. “I have the idea o
f a real creeper for The Strand,” he wrote. “It is full of surprises, breaking naturally into good lengths for serial purposes. There is one stipulation. I must do it with my friend Fletcher Robinson, and his name must appear with mine. I can answer for the yarn being all my own, in my own style without dilution, since your readers like that. But he gave me the central idea and the local colour, and so I feel his name must appear. I shall want my usual £50 per thousand words for all rights if you do business.”

  Bertram Fletcher Robinson, known as “Bobbles” to his friends, was only twenty-eight years old when Conan Doyle took him on as a collaborator. A promising journalist, Robinson had been a correspondent for the Daily Express in South Africa. His friendship with Conan Doyle took hold when they shared a “very joyous voyage” back from South Africa aboard the Briton, whose passenger list included many aristocrats and prominent military figures. “Only one cloud marred the serenity of that golden voyage,” Conan Doyle would recall. “There was a foreign officer on board, whose name I will not mention, who had been with the Boers and who talked with great indiscretion as to his experiences and opinions.”

  Chief among these indiscretions was the accusation that the British army, in violation of international law, was using soft-tipped dumdum bullets, which expanded on impact for maximum damage, in the campaign against the Boers. The mere suggestion sent Conan Doyle into a rage, and only Robinson’s intervention averted what might have become a “serious incident.”

  The following March, the two men took a short golfing break in Cromer, on the north coast of Norfolk. Robinson, who had a strong interest in the folklore of his native Devon, kept his friend entertained with an account of a local legend involving a large, ghostly hound. This story, it seemed to Conan Doyle, had strong possibilities. He wrote a note to his mother of his plan to do “a small book” with Robinson, and he mentioned the title: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  British folklore has many phantom dogs and hellhounds. The exact origin of the legend that so entranced Conan Doyle has excited much speculation over the years. Because Robinson was a Devonshire man, and The Hound of the Baskervilles came to be set in that region, it is widely assumed that Robinson drew on a tale from his own boyhood. Much later, Greenhough Smith would recall that Robinson had taken his inspiration from a Welsh guidebook. Conan Doyle’s own boyhood would have had its Scottish “bokey hounds.” Whatever the source, the notion of a fiery hound sent Conan Doyle scrambling for his writing materials. Within hours, according to one account, he and Robinson had sketched out a rough plot line.

  It is difficult to know what Conan Doyle had in mind when he suggested a collaboration with Robinson. In the past, such partnerships had not been especially fruitful. He would not have been eager to repeat the experience of Jane Annie, and a similar exercise with his brother-in-law Willie Hornung had been abandoned after a few days. Clearly Conan Doyle felt obliged to give due credit to his new friend. Though he wanted Robinson to share the billing, Conan Doyle expected to do all of the writing himself. Robinson may have had other ideas.

  As work progressed, Robinson invited Conan Doyle to Dartmoor, a bleak expanse of moor in southwest Devon, to soak up atmosphere. They divided their time between Robinson’s home and a hotel near the famous Dartmoor prison. “One of the most interesting weeks that I ever spent was with Doyle on Dartmoor,” Robinson wrote a few years later. “Dartmoor, the great wilderness of bog and rock that cuts Devonshire at this point, appealed to his imagination. He listened eagerly to my stories of the ghost hounds, of the headless riders and of the devils that lurk in the hollows—legends upon which I had been reared, for my home lay on the borders of the moor.”

  All the while, the novel continued to take shape. “Mr. Doyle stayed for eight days and nights,” recalled Robinson’s coachman. “I had to drive him and Bertie about the moors. And I used to watch them in the billiards room in the old house, sometimes they stayed long into the night, writing and talking together.” This gentleman, it is worth noting, was named Harry Baskerville. It was his impression that his name inspired the famous title, though this is certainly debatable, since Conan Doyle mentioned the title to his mother before the Dartmoor trip.

  With Robinson as guide, Conan Doyle visited such sites as Grimspound, a Bronze Age ruin, and Fox Tor Mire, a treacherous bog. One need not be a “perfect reasoning machine” to trace the parallel to The Hound’s Grimpen Mire, where a misstep means “death to man or beast.” Conan Doyle may also have passed through a hamlet called Merripit, and heard tales of convicts who escaped from the nearby prison. The Hound of the Baskervilles features a Merripit House, home of the Stapletons, and an escaped convict named Selden—the infamous Notting Hill murderer—whose presence on the moor causes much consternation.

  Over the years, the extent of Robinson’s participation has been a subject of furious debate. Did he merely suggest the idea, as Conan Doyle told Greenhough Smith, or did Robinson actually have an uncredited role in the writing of the book? Harry Baskerville, Robinson’s driver, claimed to have seen the two men “writing and talking together” on more than one occasion. One wonders, however, whether Conan Doyle would have been so quick to share writing duties with a young, relatively unknown journalist. “Bobbles” may have been a charming companion, but Conan Doyle was well aware of his own status and reputation as a novelist. If any doubt existed as to the pecking order of this collaboration, Conan Doyle soon made a decision that effectively decided the matter. As originally conceived, The Hound of the Baskervilles did not feature Sherlock Holmes. Soon, however, Conan Doyle realized he would need a strong central figure to hold the plot together. “Why should I invent such a character,” he is supposed to have said, “when I have him already in the form of Holmes?”

  By every measure, this was a remarkable decision. Holmes had been dead for nearly eight years, and Conan Doyle had often protested that he would remain so. Moreover, the decision to cast The Hound of the Baskervilles as a Sherlock Holmes story made Robinson’s collaboration a liability, though Conan Doyle may not have realized this at the time. A letter to his mother, written from the hotel in Devonshire, suggests that the partnership had survived the introduction of Holmes. “Robinson and I are exploring the moor over our Sherlock Holmes book,” Conan Doyle wrote. “I think it will work out splendidly—indeed I have already done nearly half of it. Holmes is at his very best, and it is a highly dramatic idea—which I owe to Robinson.” In Conan Doyle’s mind, then, Robinson was mainly an idea man, though The Hound was still considered “our” book.

  With Sherlock Holmes recalled to duty, The Hound of the Baskervilles was soon complete. Conan Doyle’s stated reason for reviving the detective—that he needed a strong central character—certainly made sense, but there were other factors at work, just as there had been with his Sherlock Holmes play. Money would have been high on the list of motivations. A Duet had been a commercial failure, and Conan Doyle would draw no income from his writings about the Boer War. His other fiction continued to sell respectably, but with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle felt no qualms about doubling his price. “Now it is evident,” he told Greenhough Smith, “that this is a very special occasion since as far as I can judge the revival of Holmes would attract a great deal of attention.” As for the money, he continued, he felt sure of where he stood with the magazine’s editorial board. “Suppose,” he asked, “I gave the directors the alternative that it should be without Holmes at my old figure or with Holmes at £100 per thou., which would they choose?” Once again, The Strand offered no resistance. They cheerfully accepted Conan Doyle’s new terms.

  Conan Doyle often sacrificed his profits if a particular subject or cause appealed to him, but he remained a canny businessman. He understood that a new Holmes book would be a major event, and spark a fresh round of sales for The Adventures and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Moreover, William Gillette’s play had become a sensation in the United States, creating even more interest in the detective. The circumstances had never been better
for a new Holmes adventure.

  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle did not want to be saddled with the responsibilities of a fully resurrected Sherlock Holmes. As with his play, he made it clear that the detective was still dead. The Hound of the Baskervilles was to be presented as a previously untold tale from Dr. Watson’s battered tin dispatch box, one that predated the detective’s fatal encounter with Professor Moriarty.

  The first installment appeared in the August 1901 edition of The Strand. On the morning of publication, a long line of expectant readers waited outside the magazine’s offices, and bribes were offered for advance copies. To the delight of Greenhough Smith, the magazine’s circulation rose by thirty thousand copies.

  Almost unnoticed in the excitement was a modest footnote under the first column of text. In negotiating his fee, Conan Doyle had to give way on his demand that Fletcher Robinson share equal billing with him. Instead, alert readers were notified that: “This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr. Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details.” In the book edition, which he dedicated to Robinson, Conan Doyle expressed much the same sentiment. In subsequent editions, however, the wording changed. By the time the novel appeared in America, it no longer owed its inception to Robinson; instead, Conan Doyle expressed gratitude to his friend for having “suggested the idea.” Still later, in an omnibus edition of the longer Holmes stories, Conan Doyle acknowledged that the book “arose from a remark” by Robinson but felt compelled to assure his readers that “the plot and every word of the actual narrative was my own.”