Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Perhaps, but Conan Doyle, the canny propagandist, had already scored his point. He racked up further capital by appearing to disagree with one of Horace Leaf’s psychic impressions. “[E]verything in the reading,” he reported, “proved to be true. The only error was that he had an impression of water, though whether the idea of a Hydro was at the bottom of this feeling is at least arguable.” This was exceedingly deft. Only a total pedant would deny a link between Leaf’s impression of water and Mrs. Christie’s discovery at a hydropathic spa, as Conan Doyle knew perfectly well. His apparent hesitation over the point invited the reader to affirm the association—and therefore take a step toward belief—while Conan Doyle himself maintained the appearance of critical scruple.

  As it happened, Mrs. Christie had been located on a Tuesday, rather than a Wednesday, as Leaf had predicted. However, since Conan Doyle had recorded the phrasing as “You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday,” he could claim that the statement had been at least partly accurate—as the newspaper accounts did not appear until the following day.

  No one knows what Agatha Christie thought of all this, though she soon threw off the ill effects of the Harrogate drama. In time she would agree to a divorce from Colonel Christie, who went on to marry Nancy Neele. She herself married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, four years later. She would remain silent about her eleven-day disappearance for the rest of her life, but there can be no doubt that she had mixed feelings about the involvement of Conan Doyle in the affair. He would have been an intimidating figure to any budding crime writer, but especially to Agatha Christie, who had felt a heavy burden at the start of her career to create a fictional detective who was “not like Sherlock Holmes.” In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes made famously derogatory remarks about Dupin and Lecoq. In Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, published in 1952, Holmes himself became the target of a similar diatribe: “I have my methods, Watson,” a detective novelist remarks to Hercule Poirot. “If you’ll excuse me calling you Watson. No offence intended. Interesting, by the way, how the technique of the idiot friend has hung on. Personally, I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated.”

  “The doll and its maker are never identical,” as Conan Doyle once remarked, so one hesitates to ascribe her character’s views to Mrs. Christie. It is well known, however, that the Harrogate drama would remain a sensitive topic for the rest of her life. It cannot have pleased her to find Conan Doyle, the colossus of detective fiction, hovering at the edge of this highly personal, deeply painful episode.

  * * *

  In 1929, three years after the disappearance, an unusual Agatha Christie story appeared in her Partners in Crime collection. The action begins as a gentleman calls on Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Mrs. Christie’s husband and wife sleuths, for help in locating his missing fiancée. Tommy’s appraisal of the new client has a familiar ring: “Beyond the fact that it is urgent, that you came here in a taxi, and that you have lately been in the Arctic—or possibly the Antarctic, I know nothing.”

  Tommy, we discover, is writing “a little monograph” on the effects of the midnight sun and has taken to playing the violin—badly. At one stage, Tommy’s impersonation of Sherlock Holmes grows so pronounced that Tuppence offers to get him a vial of cocaine.

  As the story progresses, however, the initial suspicion of foul play proves unfounded. The missing fiancée, it emerges, has simply removed herself to a spa for slimming purposes. Crestfallen, Tommy expresses a hope that no record of the case will survive. “It has absolutely no distinctive features,” he declares.

  Did Agatha Christie intend a sly dig at Conan Doyle for his involvement in the affair? It is difficult to say, but the title of the story is highly suggestive. It was “The Case of the Missing Lady.”

  30

  The End of the World

  “I’m expecting the end of the world today, Austin.”

  “Yes, sir, what time, sir?”

  —PROFESSOR CHALLENGER AND HIS BUTLER IN THE POISON BELT

  In March 1927, Conan Doyle wrote to Oliver Lodge to discuss the end of the world. For five years, mediums from around the world had been forwarding dire warnings of a global apocalypse. They came from many sources, but the forecast was essentially the same. “The earth will rock and the seas run dry,” ran one message. “A great calamity is about to happen to your earth,” insisted another. “Thousands will perish by plagues and floods.”

  Conan Doyle had accumulated more than a hundred of these warnings by 1927. The urgent tone of the messages, along with an apparent increase in seismic activity worldwide, convinced him that the crisis was imminent. If nothing else, he believed, the sheer number of these grim portents could not be ignored. “It is impossible in my opinion not to take them seriously,” he said of the messages, “for they represent in themselves a psychic phenomenon for which I know no parallel.” Prominent among the soothsayers was Pheneas, Jean’s spirit guide, who spoke of a coming “harvest time.” Commenting on a powerful earthquake in Japan, Pheneas left little room for doubt: “We are loosening the rivets,” he declared.

  Conan Doyle believed that the cataclysm would take the form of earthquakes and tidal waves, a “terrific convulsion” that would sweep the globe in an instant. Entire countries would disappear, and the present form of civilization would end. The tide of death, it appeared, was to be selective. A great number of people—the “hopeless material”—would be culled, while members of the “Elect,” who had accepted the message of spiritualism, would remain to govern over a new order. Conan Doyle theorized that some form of fatal gas would be released, to which members of the Elect would be rendered immune. For a brief time, the veil separating this world and the next would lift, so that earthly beings and spirits would stand face to face. After a short period of “utter chaos,” an idyllic spiritualist utopia would emerge.

  These prophecies, it would seem, grew out of a belief that the entire planet had become a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. In turning a deaf ear to the teachings of spiritualism, humanity had doomed itself to a painful period of cleansing and rebirth. Conan Doyle freely acknowledged the biblical aspects of this scenario and saw no contradiction in terms. He had long since come to regard spiritualism as the successor to traditional religious thought, absorbing some elements and discarding others. “Spiritualism,” he insisted, “is the basis of the religion of the future.”

  Up to this stage, Conan Doyle had shown no great restraint in the psychic arena. Now, for perhaps the first time, he recognized the need for caution. He could imagine only too vividly how this new announcement would be greeted if he made it public. At the same time, for all the apparent consensus of psychic opinion, he felt some skepticism. “I repeat that I have no certainty over these events,” he told Lodge. “We want no hysterical developments, nor do we wish to commit the spiritualistic movement to a prophecy which may not materialize.”

  In spite of his reservations, Conan Doyle felt a duty to circulate the forecasts among a small circle of enlightened friends, since he believed it would be the job of spiritualists to provide comfort and instruction if the crisis came. He drew up a small pamphlet entitled “A Warning,” but urged that it be handled with discretion. “Let those hear who have an ear to hear,” he wrote, “but let it not be broadcast.” Conan Doyle removed all references to the coming apocalypse from Pheneas Speaks, which appeared in 1927, and held them in reserve for a second volume—“which,” he told Lodge, “will be much sterner stuff.” This second volume never appeared.

  Conan Doyle’s colleagues were perplexed by this latest turn. “It won’t do any good,” Lodge wrote to a friend, “even if it should be true.” Harry Price, writing in the Journal for the American Society for Psychical Research, would dismiss the matter in a smirking editorial: “The cataclysmic disaster of cosmic magnitude with which Doyle has been trying to make our flesh creep for the past two years still hangs fire and the dawn of 1927 finds us sleeping serenely in our beds, giving little heed to the devast
ating seismic catastrophe with which—says Sir Arthur—we are threatened by evil spirits on both sides of the veil.… We are now promised a new Armageddon for 1928!”

  Price had been unjust, as the apocalyptic visions had not originated with Conan Doyle. One might argue over the source of Pheneas’s predictions, but Conan Doyle could hardly have influenced each of the dozens of far-flung mediums who reported their results to him. His spiritualist fellows, seeing their influence fade, would not have been the first zealots to dangle the threat of extinction before an unresponsive world. Conan Doyle saw himself only as the “clearing house” of a strange concordance of psychic thought. He expressed sorrow, but no vindictiveness, toward the many millions who had failed to heed the psychic call and took no satisfaction that his message would be verified in such dramatic fashion.

  Price aside, few who met the aging Conan Doyle would have cast him as a prophet of doom. He seemed instead a genial, contented figure, who spoke often of the “perfect happiness” of his family life. Each spring he hunted through the gardens at Windlesham for the first white snowdrop of the season, presenting it to Jean to mark the anniversary of their meeting. His younger daughter—nicknamed “Billie”—would remember him as an attentive and loving father, who would often make time to accompany her to the dentist or to Brownie meetings. In spite of his well-known distaste for the suffragettes, she recalled, he raised her to consider herself the equal of her two brothers. At the same time, according to her brother Adrian, their father would brook no violation of the family honor. As young men, Adrian would write, he and his brother Denis were given to occasional fits of recklessness. Conan Doyle would soon forgive the destruction of an expensive automobile or an accidental fire in the billiards room, but Adrian never forgot the “white blast of fury” that greeted an offense his father regarded as far more serious. Adrian, it seems, had been rude to the second housemaid.

  Sports remained a favorite leisure activity. Although Conan Doyle had finally given up cricket, he golfed often at the nearby Crowborough Beacon Golf Club. On one occasion he returned home in his stockinged feet, having given his golf shoes to a passing tramp.

  To the end of his life, he took a keen interest in new inventions and technological developments, and even posed with his radio and headphones for the cover of Popular Wireless Weekly. He remained enthralled with automobiles, though he now left the fast driving to his sons, and was taken on a high-speed circuit of the Brooklands racetrack at the age of seventy.

  If the modern world fascinated him, modern art did not. Many of the new trends seemed strange and even offensive to him. As early as 1912, he had expressed despair over the direction of modern art, which had drifted so far from the familiar world of his famous uncles. “One should put one’s shoulder to the door,” he wrote, “and keep out insanity all one can.” His tastes in literature, too, remained firmly rooted in the previous century. He repeatedly urged the work of authors such as Scott and Thackeray on young readers, while up-and-coming figures such as Hemingway, Eliot, and the members of the Bloomsbury group held no attraction. He would not have been the only reader who failed to apprehend the charms of Ulysses, first published in 1922, but at least one phrase would have struck a chord: “He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing him up.…”

  As he fell out of step with contemporary trends, Conan Doyle retreated into the imaginative realm of science fiction, though not always with the distinction of his younger days. Science fiction presented a clean slate on which to work out new ideas and enthusiasms, much as he had done with The Lost World. One of these fresh interests was the legend of Atlantis. In The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, the chronicle of his Australian lecture tour, Conan Doyle speculated at some length over the fate of the mythic island and traced its legend through the works of Plato and the ancient Egyptians. If the legends were true, he theorized that the destruction of Atlantis would have raised an enormous tidal wave, wiping out much of the world’s population to make room for the present inhabitants. A similar fate, he hinted darkly, might lay in store for the modern world. “The great war,” he suggested, “is a warning bell perhaps.”

  In 1927, Conan Doyle took up the theme in a cautionary novel called The Maracot Deep, which carried the subtitle “The Lost World Under the Sea.” The story followed the adventures of a Professor Maracot and his companions, who set out to explore the ocean floor in a pressurized diving bell. When a giant lobsterlike creature attacks, sending the diving bell plunging into a mysterious trench, the adventurers are rescued by inhabitants of Atlantis. There, Maracot learns the sad fate of the Atlantean people, who have fallen into such a state of “moral degeneracy” as to be enslaved by an inferior race. This unhappy situation, the reader discovers, might have been averted if the Atlanteans had only heeded the warnings of a small minority of reformers, whose history is displayed for Maracot and his men on a luminous screen. “We saw them, grave and earnest men, reasoning and pleading with the people,” Conan Doyle wrote, “but we saw them scorned and jeered at by those whom they were trying to save.” Subtlety, it would seem, was in short supply beneath the sea.

  For all of that, Conan Doyle handled the action scenes with his usual skill, and many reviewers compared the book favorably with Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which had been an obvious influence. Jules Verne was also much in evidence when Conan Doyle brought Professor Challenger back for a pair of brief curtain calls. In “The Disintegration Machine,” Conan Doyle explored the potential of matter transmission—the ability to reduce an object to its component atoms and reassemble them elsewhere—an idea he had first considered in The Mystery of Cloomber some forty years earlier. This concept, now a science-fiction bromide, would have been startling to Conan Doyle’s original readers, for whom the home radio set represented a fairly new technology. Challenger’s other appearance, in a novella called When the World Screamed, found him drilling a tunnel deep into the earth’s crust. The incursion produces a mighty roar of “Plutonic indignation” from deep within the earth, along with the eruption of every volcano on the surface—proving that the planet is, as Challenger had suspected, a living organism. “It has been the common ambition of mankind to set the whole world talking,” wrote Conan Doyle in conclusion. “To set the whole world screaming was the privilege of Challenger alone.”

  Conan Doyle would have relegated these tales to that “different and humbler plane” that we recognize today as genre fiction. He never revised his view that Challenger—along with Sherlock Holmes and, to a lesser extent, Brigadier Gerard—had denied him his rightful place as the modern master of historical romance. In these latest efforts, however, he once again demonstrated the innovations of thought and style for which he is remembered today. He may have looked to Verne and H. G. Wells for raw material, just as he turned to Poe for the spark that became Sherlock Holmes, but the results showed the same pioneering spirit. Unfortunately, these last stories also show clearly that his mind was on other things. “Ideas and wit were there in abundance,” as he once said of his friend James Barrie, but he did not carry them through to a satisfying conclusion. The plots fell short, and the characters appeared to be going through the motions.

  In November 1928, Conan Doyle launched a five-month lecture tour of Africa, retracing some of the same ground he had covered during the Boer War, complete with a stop in Bloemfontein. Once again the family accompanied him, but the tour was not an especially happy one. Many local newspapers were hostile to the spiritualist crusade, and even he admitted that some audiences “listened with indulgence if not acquiescence.” Lingering resentments from the war years brought further difficulties. Visiting a memorial to the casualties of British concentration camps, Conan Doyle employed a “warm expression” at a suggestion of British mistreatment. The press reported his outburst, with the result that a crowd of several hundred people gathered at his hotel threatening violence, only to be dispersed by police before Conan Doyle appeared. He wrot
e a letter of apology to the Cape Times, stating that he had misinterpreted the meaning of the monument’s inscription.

  At another stage of the tour, a critic of spiritualism baited him with charges of using Kingsley’s death for propaganda purposes. Conan Doyle had to be restrained from administering a thrashing with his umbrella. The umbrella also came into play as Denis and Adrian ventured out on a big-game hunt. When beaters offered to drive a rhinoceros into the line of fire, Conan Doyle suggested that a surprise flick of his umbrella would distract the beast long enough for his sons to bag it. It seems the rhinoceros, who would have none of it, survived the encounter.

  Visiting the grave of Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Jean yielded to one of her frequent psychic impulses and took down a communication from the late British imperialist. “This way I came and I went to my destiny, partly of happiness and partly of regret,” the message ran. “But here one makes up for missed opportunities.”

  By the close of the tour, the heat and the long hours of travel had taken a toll on Conan Doyle. He began to experience dizzy spells and occasional jolts of pain in his chest. Where possible, he concealed his symptoms and soldiered on. As a medical man, however, he knew perfectly well that his campaigning days were coming to an end.

  Back in England, he regained his strength in the relative isolation of the New Forest of Hampshire. Since 1925, the family had divided its time between Windlesham and a quiet retreat called Bignell House, near the town of Minstead. Conan Doyle had developed a lasting fondness for the area in his Southsea days, when he sequestered himself to a rustic cottage to write The White Company. As a gift to Jean, he purchased a small cottage that dated to the reign of George I and featured a greenhouse and a thatched Saxon barn. Conan Doyle had the property modified to join up the cottage and barn, and installed a heating system and water pump, driven by generators.