by Bruce Wexler
Conan Doyle as young man in 1885, suitably attired in a debonair Edwardian “boater.”
Now ensconced in a pleasant domestic life, Doyle continued with his literary ambitions. In March 1886, he finally hit upon the characters that were to make his reputation and his fortune. At first, he entitled the novel A Tangled Skein, and the two main characters were called Sheridan Hope and Ormond Sacker. Sheridan Hope became Sherrinford Holmes, and the rest is history. The first ever Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. It is in this first Holmes story that the great detective and Watson meet. Conan Doyle was paid the princely sum of £25 and had to relinquish his copyright. Further Holmesian works, The Sign of Four (1890) and “A Scandal in Bohemia” were interspersed with two historical novels, Micah Clarke (1889) and The White Company (October 1891). The latter were in the romantic adventure style of Sir Walter Scott.
Louise Hawkins, nicknamed “Touie,” was a handsome, home-loving woman. She became Conan Doyle’s first wife in 1885.
The other woman who remained central to Conan Doyle’s life was his mother, who he called “the Ma’am.” She approved of his choice of the homely Louise Hawkins as his wife. This delightful family portrait clearly shows that she was a true Victorian lady.
This body of literary work proved to be commercially successful and brought him into contact with other contemporary artists such as Oscar Wilde. Although the two men could not have been more different in character, they were instantly attracted to one another and became great friends. Conan Doyle described their meeting very warmly, as a “golden evening for me.” It took place at London’s Langham Hotel in 1889, in the company of American magazine publisher, Joseph Marshall Stoddart. Stoddart had traveled from Philadelphia to establish a British edition of his publication, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. This new publication commissioned both Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Conan Doyle’s book The Sign of Four. The title effectively secured the place of Sherlock Holmes in world literature. Without Stoddart’s involvement, the great detective may have been consigned to the slush pile of literary history.
The flourishing of Conan Doyle’s literary career was not reflected in his medical work. He decided to specialize, and traveled to Vienna and Paris to study ophthalmology. In 1891, Conan Doyle returned to London to set up an ophthalmologic practice in the elegant Upper Wimpole Street (just off Harley Street). He would later maintain that not a single patient darkened his doors. Later that year, a serious attack of influenza laid Conan Doyle seriously low and for several days, he hovered between life and death. As he began to recover, he realized that he should concentrate his efforts on the professional area in which he had found success, his writing. Having made this decision, Conan Doyle was delighted that he would “at last be my own master.” He also decided to employ a literary agent, A. P. Watt, whose duty was to take over the “hateful bargaining” that so embarrassed Conan Doyle.
A posed picture of Conan Doyle at his desk, taken after he had become a successful author.
The author himself made a very important professional decision, to write a collection of short stories around a single, detective, character. The stories were also unusual in that the observant Dr. Watson relates them in the first person. This gave Conan Doyle the opportunity to portray Holmes in a deeply personal and realistic way.
The author himself made a very important professional decision, to write a collection of short stories around a single, detective, character. The stories were also unusual in that the observant Dr. Watson relates them in the first person. This gave Conan Doyle the opportunity to portray Holmes in a deeply personal and realistic way. “A Scandal in Bohemia” duly appeared in July 1891. With this promising beginning, Doyle had hit upon a unique genre that was to bring him a great deal of critical and financial success. By October 1891, he was able to write to his mother that his publishers were “imploring him to continue Holmes.”
Watt subsequently made a deal with the Strand magazine to publish the first six short stories featuring Holmes and Watson, and Doyle’s characters were to be brought to life by Sidney Paget’s brilliant illustrations. Paget used his handsome brother Walter as a model for the great detective. A collection of twelve of these Holmes stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1892. In all, Doyle went on to compose fifty-six short stories and four complete novels featuring his most famous creation. The Valley of Fear was the last novel, published in 1914 and 1915. It is worth remembering that Conan Doyle did not write the Holmes stories chronologically, and later compilers have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to place them in the order of the events described.
By the time the Holmes stories began to appear, the Doyles had two children. Mary Louise Conan was born in 1889, and Alleyne Kingsley Conan in 1892. Arthur referred to Kingsley’s appearance as the “chief event” of his life with Touie.
Doyle’s ventures into other media were not always successful. The musical comedy Jane Annie, which he co-wrote with J.M. Barrie, was a complete flop.
Having freed himself from his oppressive lack of success in the medical profession, Doyle soon began to feel that the Sherlock Holmes sensation tied him to producing these stories, and kept him from writing in the historical genre he preferred. It is extraordinary to think that this literary ennui followed almost immediately on the heels of Holmes’s enormously successful introduction. By December 1893, Holmes and Moriarty were (apparently) already dead, having plunged over the Reichenbach Falls, locked in mortal combat. To the Strand, the end of the Holmes stories was a devastating blow; 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions, and dedicated followers of Holmes wore mourning in both Britain and America. Mary Doyle’s advice to her son had been prophetic, “You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly.” To Holmes devotees, the years of the “Great Hiatus” now began. Chronologically, in the “life” of Sherlock Holmes, this gap fell between 1891 and 1894, when the great man spectacularly reappeared in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (published in 1903). (As Conan Doyle said, he was able to revive the great man as “fortunately as no coroner had pronounced on his remains.”) In Conan Doyle’s life, the Sherlock-free hiatus lasted rather longer, from 1893 to 1901, when he penned The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes aficionados tend to end the hiatus with the short story “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which features a “living” Sherlock Holmes, rather than The Hound of the Baskervilles, where he appears posthumously.
Undershaw House near Hindhead, Surrey in England. Conan Doyle built the house in 1897 to provide the tubercular Touie with a healthy environment. This historic home is currently under the threat of redevelopment.
Not all Conan Doyle’s literary endeavors were such unqualified successes. A musical comedy he co-wrote with his close friend J. M. Barrie, titled Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize, was an embarrassing flop.
Disappointment over the failure of his operetta was replaced by a far more serious sorrow, when Touie was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. From this time on, Doyle became his wife’s doctor rather than her husband, and their marital relationship began to fail. Conan Doyle became seriously depressed, and started what was to become a lifelong fascination with spiritualism, the “life beyond the veil.”
For the moment, “work [was] the best antidote to sorrow” and in 1894, Conan Doyle embarked on a thirty-city lecture tour of the United States and Canada, accompanied by his younger brother Innes Doyle. This was to be the first of four trips to North America (1894, 1914, 1922, and 1923). Samuel Sidney McClure, of McClure’s Magazine, one of Conan Doyle’s American publishers, part-organized the visit. Starting in New York, it was a great success. North Americans responded well to Conan Doyle’s “wholesome” personality. He was rather more ambiguous in his reciprocal feelings. In particular, he considered Canadians courageous, but dull and “unimaginative.” He was, however, immediately attracted to the rugged Canadian landscape.
Conan Doyle took the American part of the tour as an opportunity to visit his literary friend Rudyard Kipling. Already rich and famous, Kipling had settled with his American wife, Caroline Belestier, in her native Vermont and they had created a beautiful estate there. Conan Doyle and Innes spent a snowy Thanksgiving at the “shingle-style” home of the Kiplings, and the two men spent their time inventing snow golf, which they played with red balls. In his autobiography, Doyle wrote that “rustics watched us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at, for golf was unknown in America at that time.” In fact, this assertion was completely incorrect, but the two Englishmen must have presented an amusing spectacle, all the same.
1894 also saw the publication of Doyle’s first Brigadier Gerard story (“The Medal of Brigadier Gerard”) in the Strand magazine, the release of an autobiographical novel, The Stark Munro Letters, and the publication of a collection of medical short stories, Round the Red Lamp.
Manuscript and cover of the Brigadier Gerard stories. Brigadier Gerard is arguably Conan Doyle’s third most successful literary character, after Holmes and Watson.
In his personal life, Touie’s health continued to give cause for concern, and doctors gave her only months to live. Appalled by a vision of a nomadic life lived between the health resorts and spas of Europe, Conan Doyle was very interested to hear of the warm, dry air of Hindhead, in a small town in the leafy county of Surrey, England. The area was credited with having a micro climate of great benefit to invalids, and was known as “Little Switzerland.” Conan Doyle bought a building plot in 1895 (for £1,000), and Undershaw House was completed in 1897. He collaborated with his friend, the architect Joseph Henry Ball, on the design of the thirty-six-room mansion, and they filled Undershaw with personal references. The entrance hall boasted a double-height stained glass window that illuminated the coats of arms of Conan Doyle’s forebears, while the downstairs doors bore his monogram. His time at Undershaw, the only house he ever built for himself, was extremely productive, and many famous people visited him there, including James Barrie, Bram Stoker, and Sidney Paget. Bram Stoker was particularly charmed with Undershaw, and described how the situation of the house was “so sheltered from cold winds that the architect felt justified in having lots of windows, so that the whole place is full of light. Nevertheless, it is cozy and snug to a remarkable degree and has everywhere that sense of ‘home’ which is so delightful to occupant and stranger alike.” The house had a profoundly beneficial effect on Touie’s health, and Conan Doyle credited it with extending her life by several years. The Conan Doyle family lived at Undershaw until her death in 1906.
Despite the pressure of Touie’s illness, Conan Doyle’s prolific literary success continued with the publication of works in various genres, including three Captain Sharkey pirate stories, the Round the Fire series, and a Napoleonic novel, Uncle Bernac. In 1896, Conan Doyle traveled to Egypt and worked as a war correspondent, covering the fighting between the British and Dervish forces.
Conan Doyle also wrote a play that centered on his old character, Sherlock Holmes, which the famous American actor William Gillette revised and performed for thirty-six years with great financial success. Gillette was the only actor to dramatize the character of Sherlock Holmes with the author’s personal endorsement. The first of hundreds of actors to take the role, he is reputed to have given over 1,300 stage performances of Holmes between 1899 and 1932.
Personally, one of the greatest experiences of Conan Doyle’s life happened the following year, on March 15, 1897. He was never to forget this date, the day he met his future wife, the twenty-four-year-old Jean Leckie. She was beautiful, intellectual, and an accomplished musician and sportswoman. Conan Doyle also loved the fact that Jean was reputed to be related to romantic Scottish hero Rob Roy. Their attraction was intense and they continued to meet discreetly. The relationship remained secret until Touie’s death in 1906.
American actor William Gillette was the only player to have his characterization of Sherlock Holmes endorsed by Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle’s literary life was to be interrupted by the Boer War (1899–1902). He was determined to join up as a soldier. Aged forty, out of shape, and overweight, Doyle was deemed unfit to enlist. He therefore volunteered to serve as a medical doctor and sailed to Africa in February 1900, where he worked for the volunteer-staffed Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein as an unofficial supervisor.
The war itself had been inspired by the desire of the British High Commissioner of South Africa’s Cape Colony to take control of the gold mines of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The Boer (ethnic Dutch) settlers to the region were in possession of these hugely valuable assets. Although the British ultimately overpowered the far weaker Boer opposition, the War proved disastrous for them as well. Despite their massive military superiority, the guerrilla tactics of the Boer fighters inflicted terrible losses on the British Army, which resulted in savage reprisals. These included the confinement of many Boer women and children in the first ever concentration camps, where at least 25,000 innocent non-combatants and wounded Boer fighters were to die of starvation and disease. Conan Doyle and the other medical staff spent the war trying to save the British forces from the scourge of typhoid, which killed far more men than did the Boer fighters.
In 1897 Conan Doyle met the attractive and accomplished Miss Jean Leckie, who was to become his second wife in 1907.
Conan Doyle in medical corps uniform during the Boer War. He was fiercely patriotic and volunteered to serve.
Conan Doyle was affected by what he had seen in South Africa and he wrote a book attempting to justify Britain’s involvement in the conflict. Most believed that he owed his knighthood to this “patriotic” work.
Various memorabilia from Doyle’s time in the Boer War, including his notebooks and medical armband.
Although the British forces ultimately triumphed, their victory came at an enormous cost. International opinion was appalled by the outrages that the British had perpetrated against other European settlers, and the large number of dead and wounded soldiers turned domestic public opinion against the British Imperial tradition.
Conan Doyle’s epic work, The Great Boer War (1900), and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, which he had published two years later, were explorations of British military failure, and an attempt to justify British involvement in the conflict. It is widely believed that he owed his knighthood to these works, rather than to his great commercial success. Partly for this reason, Conan Doyle was extremely reluctant to accept the honor. But when his mother pointed out that to refuse it would be to insult the King (Edward VII), Conan Doyle reluctantly accepted the accolade. He was knighted at Buckingham Palace, London in August 1902. Although Conan Doyle’s contribution to the nation’s war effort may have been the official reason for which he was awarded the knighthood, it was rumored that the King hoped the honor would encourage him to write more Sherlock Holmes stories. In the same year, Conan Doyle was also appointed Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey, his home county.
Although Conan Doyle’s contribution to the nation’s war effort may have been the official reason for which he was awarded the knighthood, it was rumored that the King hoped the honor would encourage him to write more Sherlock Holmes stories.
Like many returning participants in the Boer War, Conan Doyle came home a disillusioned man, and became far more politically motivated. In 1900, he ran for a parliamentary seat in Central Edinburgh (1900), in the “premier Radical stronghold of Scotland,” as a Liberal Unionist. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful, Conan Doyle lost respectably, by a narrow margin of votes.
Far more successful than Doyle’s forays into politics was his return to writing about Holmes. Legend has it that he and his close friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson came up with a brilliant new plot for Holmes while on a golfing holiday in Cromer, Norfolk (they were staying at the Royal Links Hotel). The men had met on board ship in 1900, traveling back from Cape Town, where Robinson had be
en working as a foreign correspondent for The Daily Express newspaper. Their talk of the windswept Devonshire moors at Dartmoor, the area’s rich folklore, and its infamously bleak prison helped the pair conjure a terrifying spectral hound that only the most famous detective in the world could lay to rest. The Strand published the first episode of the novel that was to become The Hound of the Baskervilles in August 1901. The completed novel was released on March 25, 1902. When it was published, Conan Doyle wrote to Robison, giving him full credit for his input, “your account of a west country legend which first suggested the idea of this little tale to mind. For that, and for the help which you gave me in its evolution, all thanks.” There is also speculation that Robinson also helped Conan Doyle to plot the book.
For Conan Doyle, the period between 1903 and 1906 was one of mixed fortunes. Professionally, these years were very active. The huge success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to American publishers offering $5,000 apiece for Holmes stories, and to Conan Doyle becoming the most highly paid author in history to this point. Huge financial offers from his American and English publishers drove Conan Doyle back to working with his most successful creation. A new Holmes series, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, began in the October issue of the Strand. It concluded in December 1904 with “The Second Stain.” The stories were published in book form in 1905. Another serial, Sir Nigel, also appeared in the Strand in December 1905, and concluded in the December 1906 issue.
The success of his literary work did not touch all areas of Conan Doyle’s life. He stood as the Liberal Unionist candidate for another parliamentary seat (Hawick District) in the General Election of spring 1906 and lost. There was still worse to come. Touie died in his arms on July 4, 1906. Although Conan Doyle had been in love with Jean Leckie for many years, he had continued to have a deep affection for his wife. He was devastated by her loss and became seriously depressed.
