Arthur and Sherlock

by Michael Sims

  By 1881 he was promoting himself as a full-time literary agent. During the long history of literature, other people had at various times represented or advised writers. But Alexander Pollock Watt seems to have been the first to establish himself as a respected professional who shopped manuscripts to editors and represented authors in contractual negotiations in return for a percentage of the monies received from publishers. By the time that he expressed interest in Arthur’s career, his representation could immediately raise an editor’s estimation of a new author. A manuscript submitted under Watt’s name from his first-floor office at 2, Paternoster Square, received an editor’s attention in ways that a mailing cylinder from Southsea did not.

  “I really do not know how a busy man like myself,” wrote one publisher to Watt, “could ever manage to publish serial stories at all were it not for your assistance, which entirely saves one the trouble of ploughing through rubbish, and at the same time enables one to ascertain, at a moment’s notice, exactly to what extent leading novelists are available for the purposes of serial publication.”

  By the time he represented Arthur, Watt claimed that he did not advertise, but he cleverly exploited other methods of self-promotion. Whenever his office changed address, Watt ran many announcements as a form of advertising free of claims and self-promotion. In 1891, he publicized recent changes in copyright law as a form of notifying writers and publishers that he was conversant in these legal technicalities. His primary form of self-promotion was his shameless distribution of admiring letters by his clients to potential clients. And when an author who later became prominent left Watt for another agent, Watt retained the absentee’s name on his ever-growing client list.

  With the explosion of serial and reprint options, as well as translations and other foreign rights, publishing was becoming more complex, ever more a competitive business. When a publishing house or magazine was on the market during these unpredictable times, moreover, Watt and other agents served as legal assessor of the value of the firm’s copyrighted materials and physical office and warehouse. Agents’ position as assessors also further demonstrated the value of copyrighted materials—the kind of copyright that Ward, Lock had deprived Arthur of in 1886 when they insisted upon buying A Study in Scarlet outright, withholding the possibility of future royalties. Authors were demanding more agency and fairness in the publishing enterprise. Agents positioned themselves not only as savvy legal representatives brokering individual publishing contracts but also as protective partners in career growth. And not all Watt’s clients were authors. Publishers knew that, for a fee, they could farm out to Watt the task of selling serial rights or other potentially profitable sidelines that for some reason they could not handle themselves.

  When Smith opened the envelope from Watt, he found two new stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. He was already familiar with Arthur’s work. By this time, the young man had published numerous short stories in a wide variety of magazines, as well as the novels A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and Micah Clarke. Probably Smith had already dealt with Arthur personally. In March 1891, in only its third issue, The Strand published Arthur’s slight and gimmicky story “The Voice of Science,” featuring a gramophone, a brilliant invention that had been conjured only fourteen years earlier by the American Thomas Edison. At a party, instead of playing the scientific speech expected, the instrument reproduces a recitation of a character’s vices, as quickly recorded behind the scenes by another character. In a review of the March issue of The Strand, Arthur was identified as “Mr. A. Conan Doyle, a popular American writer,” but the error appeared only in the Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald.

  Both of the new stories submitted by Watt were far superior to “The Voice of Science.” They featured a character that Smith knew had appeared in two novels but never before in a shorter adventure—a cocksure young consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes. The author’s handwriting across these neat pages was crisp and clear, as legible as print, and Smith thought that Arthur’s writing voice now held a similar limpid clarity. Amid the usual tide of mediocrity flooding an editor’s desk, Smith decided that this young Conan Doyle fellow was writing precisely the sort of tale that The Strand had been hoping to publish. Smith claimed later that immediately after reading the stories he rushed into Newnes’s office and held them out to his boss with a dramatic flourish.

  Arthur’s first experience with a literary agent went well. Before the first issue of The Strand appeared, Watt had asked £4 per one thousand words for “The Voice of Science” and had received it. Smith and Newnes were so enthusiastic about the new Sherlock Holmes stories that Watt negotiated an agreement with them under which Arthur would produce a total of six Holmes stories, one per month, for £200. In terms of both editorial enthusiasm and professional remuneration—entwined, as usual—Arthur had arrived.

  CHAPTER 29

  Deerstalker

  All the drawings are very unlike my own original idea of the man.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES

  To illustrate the new series of Sherlock Holmes stories, George Newnes turned first to a young man named Walter Paget. He had drawn for The Sphere during the Boer War of the early 1880s, with the job of producing finished magazine illustrations from the rough front-line sketches sent by artists in the field. Walter was the youngest of three artists in a talented family. His eldest brother, Henry, painted technically good if uninspired portraits and historical scenes, with occasionally more exotic fare, such as “The Lady of Shallott,” in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.

  But it was the middle brother, Sidney, who wound up illustrating the Sherlock Holmes stories. Born in London, a year Arthur’s junior, Sidney Paget drew marble busts at the British Museum for two years before studying at Heatherley’s School of Art in London and then enrolling at the Royal Academy for several years. He had been exhibiting in annual Academy shows since the age of eighteen. Instead of illustrating Arthur’s work himself, Walter Paget served as model for Sidney’s drawings and watercolors.

  With his brother as inspiration, Sidney Paget conjured a more handsome figure than Arthur had envisioned. Arthur saw Holmes as over six feet tall but scarecrow thin, thus looking even taller, with a large aquiline nose jutting between close-set eyes. Walter Paget was better-proportioned, with a ruggedly handsome profile, and Sidney metamorphosed him into Holmes, from dimpled chin to high cheekbones and receding hairline. Like Arthur, Walter was in his late twenties at the time.

  In the fourth story, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Paget portrayed Holmes and Watson riding in a train carriage, en route to the scene of a murder near the real town of Ross on the river Wye in Herefordshire. By this time, trains provided quick and easy access to the countryside for urban residents, but the journey was accompanied by soot and ash. Thus, even in warm weather, train passengers tended to equip themselves for travel much as their horse-drawn ancestors had, in sturdy traveling cloak and headgear. When Arthur wrote a scene in which Watson arrives at Paddington Station to meet Holmes for the journey to Boscombe Valley, he described his detective as “pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling cloak and close-fitting cloth cap.” In Paget’s drawing, Holmes and Watson are framed by the window, Holmes in profile and wearing one of the illustrator’s own favorite hats—a deerstalker.

  Whether or not Paget saw the illustrations of Holmes wearing a deerstalker in the Bristol Observer’s serialization of The Sign of Four the year before, he often wore a deerstalker himself, a habit picked up in the country during his youth. Unlike the artist in Bristol, Paget understood the rules of fashion and did not assign the deerstalker to Holmes until he started out for the countryside. In the first stories for The Strand, Paget portrayed Holmes in a top hat—de rigueur for an urban gentleman—or in a bowler when wearing his Inverness cape. He might wear a tattered bowler when disguised as a drunken groom, or he might posture before Watson in a wide-brimmed hat when
personating a clergyman. But soon, thanks to the high quality of Paget’s illustrations and the popularity of the series in The Strand, the deerstalker came to be associated with Sherlock Holmes.

  In December 1890, eight and a half years after his arrival in Portsmouth, Arthur locked the doors of his Southsea medical practice. He had resolved to give up general medicine and become a specialist instead. With Touie, he moved briefly to Vienna, Austria, where he studied ophthalmology. By the end of March 1891, they were in London, where Arthur opened a new small practice at 2 Upper Wimpole Street.

  Patients were few, and Arthur found time to write six Sherlock Holmes stories in quick succession. On the tenth of April, within a week of mailing in the first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” he had finished a second, “A Case of Identity.” Ten days later he rolled up and mailed “The Red-Headed League.” Another week saw him completing “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” He mailed “The Five Orange Pips” on the eighteenth of May.

  The first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” appeared in the July issue, which went on sale on the twenty-fifth of June. Having wound up married after the romantic end of The Sign of Four, Dr. Watson visits Holmes in their old flat and participates in a charming adventure slight in detection but rich in atmosphere. In concept it bore a clear kinship with Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” but Arthur swept away the Gothic trappings and the disquisitions on logic and replaced them with humor and vivid scene-setting. In a daring move, he also provided a glimpse of an intriguingly smart foe—a woman who outwits Holmes in his very first short adventure.

  The story opened with Watson’s comments on his friend’s analytical mind:

  To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.

  The masked King of Bohemia consults Holmes in his rooms at Baker Street, offering a fortune in return for a compromising photograph of him held by his former romantic interest, the American actress and opera singer Irene Adler. Through disguise and subterfuge, Holmes learns Adler’s hiding place for this memento. By the end of the story, however, he reveals himself as far more romantically minded than Watson had realized, and indeed emerges as not only a modern-sounding, science-minded hero but something of a gallant.

  Sidney Paget drew ten illustrations to accompany “A Scandal in Bohemia.” He portrayed Holmes and Watson in their Baker Street sanctum, interacting with the king both early and late in the case, and out on the street. He also showed Holmes in disguise, as both a pious cleric and a bewhiskered, bibulous groom. Again Arthur had followed in the footsteps of Gaboriau. As early as Monsieur Lecoq, Gaboriau had described the theatrical artistry of his young detective:

  “And do you suppose he wouldn’t discover this surveillance?”

  “I should take my precautions.”

  “But he would recognize you at a single glance.”

  “No, sir, he wouldn’t, for I should disguise myself. A detective who can’t equal the most skilful actor in the matter of make-up is no better than an ordinary policeman. I have only practised at it for a twelvemonth, but I can easily make myself look old or young, dark or light, or assume the manner of a man of the world, or of some frightful ruffian of the barrieres.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you possessed this talent, Monsieur Lecoq.”

  “Oh! I’m very far from the perfection I hope to arrive at; though I may venture to say that in three days from now I could call on you and talk with you for half an hour without being recognized.”

  In a later novel, The Mystery of Orcival, Lecoq remarks, “I have been a detective fifteen years, and no one at the prefecture knows either my true face or the color of my hair.”

  In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Arthur wrote explicitly of his own detective’s talents in this field: “It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.”

  Strand readers responded with great enthusiasm. Clearly they were pleased to see the new hero return the following month, August, in “The Red-Headed League.” Built upon the absurd premise that a criminal might lure a pawnshop owner out of the way of a bank burglary by hiring him to go somewhere else and copy an encyclopedia by hand, the story was nonetheless filled with action and witty dialogue. With his usual disregard for details, Arthur jumbled the dates cited by characters, resulting in a misalignment of about six months.

  Four more Holmes stories followed, one each month: “A Case of Identity,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” The public’s response was everything that Arthur could have daydreamed about when he was sending his early manuscripts on what he had called “the circular tour.”

  In “The Five Orange Pips,” which appeared in The Strand’s November issue, Arthur returned to his scientific forebears who had drawn inspiration from Voltaire’s Zadig and who had themselves inspired Thomas Huxley and Arthur himself. He was demonstrating yet again that he saw Sherlock Holmes as a kind of scientist, in the manner of his real-life inspiration, Joseph Bell. But in doing so, he let Holmes fall into the logical, generalizing tone of Auguste Dupin. The scene merged Arthur’s inspirations:

  Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses.”

  Copies of the magazine seemed to leap off shelves. Many newspapers and magazines reviewed even short stories and articles published by their colleagues and rivals, and soon “A Scandal in Bohemia” was garnering attention from Exeter to Hull, from Sheffield to many venues in London. In Portsmouth, the Evening News of July 18 reported, “The many friends in Portsmouth of Dr. A. Conan Doyle are noting with pleasure his steady rise in literature. Dr. Conan Doyle is now one of the most attractive of modern writers, not only in the eyes of readers, but in the keener eyes of publishers and critics.”

  With financial security, Arthur and Touie were able to invite his sister Conny to retire from working as a governess. She returned from Portugal and began living with her brother and sister-in-law, busily typing up Arthur’s stories on a newfangled typewriting machine. Dr. and Mrs. Conan Doyle hosted dinner parties. They rode their new toy, a tall two-seater tricycle, to visit friends. Touie was never as robust as her husband. Riding in Surrey with Arthur, Connie, and Innes, she had to admit she could not bear the pace of cycling—but rather than end the journey, Arthur sent his wife home via train.

  Meanwhile, all signs indicated a flourishing literary career for Arthur. A. P. Watt settled with Greenhough Smith that the magazine would pay the impressive price of £300 for a second half dozen Holmes adventures, regardless of their length. Arthur set to work with the confidence of an acclaimed and well-paid writer. While writing the new stories, however, he was knocked off his feet by a fierce bout with influenza. Three years earlier, the disease had taken the life of his sist
er Annette, and for several days he wondered if it might steal his as well. After a week of misery, he emerged from delirium to find his mind clear of distractions and his road ahead clearly visible. He resolved to no longer spend time on any aspect of medicine as a profession, to renounce it completely and devote himself to writing.

  Soon he was selling his medical instruments.

  Born in Ireland, Samuel Sidney McClure moved to the United States at the age of nine when his mother immigrated after the death of her husband. By the time he encountered Arthur’s work, McClure (usually known by the initials S. S.) was in his early thirties and had long since founded the first newspaper syndicate in the United States. His network made available to many periodicals a steady stream of news stories, feature articles, cartoons, comic strips such as The Katzenjammer Kids, and opinion columns. Of more interest to Arthur’s career, McClure’s syndicate was also well-known for seeking out novels and story series for serialization.

  After a working trip to London in 1889, McClure traveled north to visit with Andrew Lang at St. Andrews University. Lang informed McClure that the venerable firm of Longmans, Green & Company, founded as Longman in 1724, was about to publish Micah Clarke, by a relatively new author named Arthur Conan Doyle. Having recently reviewed A Study in Scarlet, Lang was still full of enthusiasm for it, and he told McClure that this “shilling shocker” was also good. As he traveled south to England, McClure found the tale of Enoch Drebber’s murder on a newsstand and read it on the train. He resolved to get this new author to write something for the McClure syndicate.