by Michael Sims
Two years later, when Arthur’s Sherlock Holmes stories began appearing in The Strand in 1891, McClure read them and judged them by the personal standard that had served him well: Did the story exert a pull on him—hitting him in his solar plexus, as he liked to say, rather than in his brain? He claimed to work by the rule of three: Each story that he considered buying had to survive three readings within a single week. Those that passed this test would garner his agency’s support. He often found himself, while commuting homeward on a Philadelphia train after a long workday, missing his station because he had yet again been drawn into a story that he had already read.
The Holmes adventures passed McClure’s test with flying colors, and he bought them for £12 apiece—a good price for reprints. When his syndicate began to distribute them in the United States, however, many magazine editors responded with less enthusiasm than had McClure himself. For one thing, editors complained that the stories were too long for syndicated work—eight or nine thousand words instead of the usual five or so. Thus editors had a difficult time placing them in newspapers and magazines. The stories were also slow to gain reader enthusiasm in the United States. Most of the first dozen had been reprinted there before readers began to sway editors. The gradually accumulating reader response, and a blossoming affection for the character himself, finally wooed editors to share McClure’s view of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
CHAPTER 30
To My Old Teacher
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE VALLEY OF FEAR
In October 1891, four months after “A Scandal in Bohemia” launched the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand, and after the series had demonstrated broad popularity, Ward, Lock asked Arthur to write a preface for their new edition of A Study in Scarlet.
Still resenting the exploitative contract that Ward, Lock had offered for his first Sherlock Holmes novel, Arthur refused. He had money in the bank and a growing reputation.
They replied begging permission to use a subtitle for their new edition that would mention the now well-known name of Sherlock Holmes.
He refused.
The new year of 1892 was exciting for Arthur. Eleven years after leaving college in Edinburgh, he was tasting the fruits of success. The January issue of The Strand, which appeared in December 1891, featured the seventh Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” a lighthearted Christmas tale rich in wintry London atmosphere. It was followed by “The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Noble Bachelor,” “The Beryl Coronet,” and “The Adventure of Copper Beeches.” The run finished in July.
Arthur was also still writing nonfiction. The January issue of The Speaker, edited by influential journalist Wemyss Reid, carried his essay on British humor, which highly praised the comic novel Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. The same month, he met Jerome at a party of the informal Idlers’ Club hosted by Robert Barr, a loudmouthed but kindhearted editor who was about to launch a new monthly, The Idler. There Arthur also met other young writers, including James Barrie, who had graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1882, a year after Arthur, and who had since written three novels about his native Kirriemuir (disguised as Thrums), Scotland, and was making a name for himself as a playwright. Barr had grown up in Canada and built a reputation there and in the United States through his writing for The Detroit Free Press. Barr would later create Eugène Valmont, a vainglorious French sleuth who would serve as one of the inspirations for Agatha Christie’s pompous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.
In May 1892, The Idler published its editor’s own parody of Sherlock Holmes, “Detective Stories Gone Wrong: The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs.” With a parenthetical apology to his friend “Dr. Conan Doyle, and his excellent book, ‘A Study in Scarlet,’” Robert Barr (under his old American pen name Luke Sharp) launched into a gentle skewering of this character so colorful and larger-than-life that he irresistibly invited burlesque:
I dropped in on my friend, Sherlaw Kombs, to hear what he had to say about the Pegram mystery, as it had come to be called in the newspapers. I found him playing the violin with a look of sweet peace and serenity on his face, which I never noticed on the countenances of those within hearing distance.
On the last day of May, Charles Doyle was transferred to Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, southwest of Edinburgh, almost to the coast across from the Isle of Man. Diagnosed as a dipsomaniac, he was also described as afflicted with dementia; shortly after a visit by a physician, he could not recall it. “Facile and childish,” one attendant said of him. He seemed unable to recognize even the staff he regularly dealt with. At sixty, he was gentle and quiet. “Certainly not dangerous to others,” wrote a physician in Charles’s file.
At first Charles became known as the patient who might praise the food or remark upon how well he slept. Gradually, however, he declined. Soon he suffered more epileptic seizures. By the following summer, Charles was noisy and incoherent. Although restless, he spent months in bed.
On the third of October 1893, an attendant noted that Charles seemed in a good mood and happy with his surroundings. The patient solemnly gave the attendant a folded paper, saying that it was in gratitude for excellent service, and that it contained gold dust gathered during the night from moonlight that had fallen onto Charles’s bed.
A week later, tossing on the same bed, Charles Doyle died of an epileptic seizure.
Arthur’s financial worries seemed to be over, at least for a while. With Micah Clarke selling well and drawing new readers to The Sign of Four, and with his series of stories in The Strand making the name of Sherlock Holmes known far and wide, he could take a deep breath. In December 1891, he, Touie, and Mary Louise settled in South Norwood, on the southern side of London almost to Croydon, in a three-story, sixteen-room redbrick house with gated wall and balconies, bargeboard gable and chimney pots. This new domain on handsome Tennison Road was a long way from the surgery at Bush Villas. Norwood was named for the Great North Wood’s vast tract of oaks, which had supplied shipyard timber and charcoal for centuries. It had been the haunt of generation after generation of Gypsies, some of whom found their way into Samuel Pepys’s diary in 1688.
Arthur was quick to credit Joseph Bell for his role in inspiring the unique abilities of the suddenly famous consulting detective in Baker Street. During the eleven years since his departure from Edinburgh, Arthur had stayed in touch with his former professor. In early 1892, only halfway through the run of the first dozen Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand, Arthur was interviewed by Raymond Blathwayt, a travel writer and journalist, for the May issue of the recently launched London monthly The Bookman.
Blathwayt and Arthur sat in the study, which Arthur had decorated with Arctic trophies and with drawings and paintings by his father.
How on earth, the reporter demanded of Arthur, had he evolved out of his “own inner consciousness” such an extraordinary person as Sherlock Holmes?
Arthur laughed heartily. “Oh, but if you please, he is not evolved out of anyone’s inner consciousness. Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment, if I may so express it, of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University.”
He provided anecdotes of Bell’s diagnostic technique and concluded, “So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is utterly inhuman—no heart—but with a beautifully logical intellect. I know nothing about detective work, but theoretically it has always had a great charm for me.”
Arthur was quick to cite his literary genealogy as well: “The best detective in fiction is E. A. Poe’s Monsieur Dupin; then Monsieur Lecoq, Gaboriau’s hero.”
Bell wrote to Arthur, perhaps in response to this interview. On the fourth of May, Arthur replied:
It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think tha
t his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward. Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go—further occasionally—and I am so glad that the result has satisfied you, who are the critic with the most right to be severe.
In August, after concluding a year of monthly installments in the Sherlockian adventures, The Strand Magazine itself ran an interview with Arthur. They sent Harry How, a journalist known for his insightful interviews, to talk with their suddenly famous contributor.
How was effusive in his article:
Detectivism up to date—that is what Dr. Conan Doyle has given us. We were fast becoming weary of the representative of the old school; he was, at his best, a very ordinary mortal, and, with the palpable clues placed in his path, the average individual could have easily cornered the “wanted” one without calling in the police or the private inquiry agent.
During their conversation, Arthur not only mentioned Joseph Bell but showed off a framed photograph of him, sharp-eyed and eagle-nosed—that immortalized him from a dozen years earlier, when Arthur studied with him.
After talking with Arthur, Harry How wrote to Bell in Edinburgh for more information from his point of view, and he received a typically modest reply.
2, Melville Crescent, Edinburgh, June 16, 1892.
Dear Sir, —
You ask me about the kind of teaching to which Dr Conan Doyle has so kindly referred, when speaking of his ideal character, “Sherlock Holmes.” Dr Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has coloured the picture.
He went on to give examples of how he and other professors tried to encourage observation and deduction among their students. Then he added a disclaimer:
Dr Conan Doyle’s genius and intense imagination has on this slender basis made his detective stories a distinctly new departure, but he owes much less than he thinks to yours truly,
Joseph Bell
Despite his disclaimers, Bell may have found the temptation to hold forth about his former student irresistible. Four months later, The Bookman followed up Blathwayt’s interview with an essay on Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes written by no less an authority than Bell himself. Arthur was astonished when he saw a listing for it and was eager to read it when it appeared.
Again, rather than take any credit, Bell cited his own revered mentor, James Syme, as someone whose teaching legacy had “made a mark on Dr. Conan Doyle’s method.” Then he made several interesting points about the appeal of Arthur’s detective stories.
Dr. Conan Doyle’s education as a student of medicine taught him how to observe, and his practice, both as a general practitioner and a specialist, has been a splendid training for a man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory, and imagination. Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at pleasure the impressions of the senses, and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain, or unravelling a tangled clue, such are implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician. . .
Dr. Doyle saw how he could interest his intelligent readers by taking them into his confidence, and showing his mode of working. He created a shrewd, quick-sighted inquisitive man, half doctor, half virtuoso . . . He makes him explain to the good Watson the trivial, or apparently trivial, links in his chain of evidence. These are at once so obvious, when explained, and so easy, once you know them, that the ingenuous reader at once feels, and says to himself, I also could do this; life is not so dull after all; I will keep my eyes open, and find out things.
In a later interview, Bell went further:
I should just like to say this about my friend Doyle’s stories, that I believe they have inculcated in the general public a new source of interest . . . They make many a fellow who has before felt very little interest in his life and daily surroundings think that after all there may be much more in life if he keeps his eyes open than he had ever dreamed of in his philosophy. There is a problem, a whole game of chess, in many a little street incident or trifling occurrence, if one once learns how to make the moves.
George Newnes was not one to waste time or opportunities. Only four months after “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” the last of the first dozen Sherlock Holmes stories, appeared in the June issue of The Strand, Newnes capitalized upon the phenomenal success of his new favorite author by publishing a collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, illustrated with more than one hundred of Sidney Paget’s pictures from the pages of the magazine. Soon Harper & Brothers in the United States published an edition, which included fifteen illustrations and a frontispiece by Paget. The book was hugely popular, removing Arthur’s last doubts about his potential to make a good living as a writer.
Now there were three books out in the world showcasing the fictional legacy of Joseph Bell. In fact, Arthur had modeled aspects of Sherlock Holmes upon Bell so clearly that readers who had known the medical professor immediately caught the resemblance. The next year Arthur received a letter from former Edinburgh University student Robert Louis Stevenson. He was now famous. His rousing pirate saga Treasure Island had been published to universal acclaim in 1883, and the dark science fictional novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. Stevenson had also written two historical novels of the kind that Arthur loved; The Black Arrow had been serialized in 1883 and Kidnapped in 1886.
Suffering from tuberculosis, Stevenson had traveled to the tropics and settled in Samoa. In a letter to Arthur dated April 5, 1893, he blended the praise of a reader and the condescension of a rival.
Dear Sir, — You have taken many occasions to make yourself agreeable to me, for which I might in decency have thanked you earlier. It is now my turn; and I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That is the class of literature I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual.
Stevenson ended his letter with a question that hearkened back to his own studies at Edinburgh medical school: “Only the one thing troubles me: can this be my old friend Joe Bell?”
“I’m so glad Sherlock Holmes helped to pass an hour for you,” replied Arthur on May 30. “He’s a bastard between Joe Bell and Poe’s Monsieur Dupin (much diluted).”
Stevenson could see through Holmes to the inspiration behind. And he knew from visceral personal experience the mountains of paper and rivers of ink that a writer must exhaust before reaching success. But he could not have known how much affection, experience, admiration, and debt were distilled into Arthur’s words for the dedication on the first page of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Although he was only thirty-three when he penned the brief tribute, Arthur well understood his own journey—from racing up the wide infirmary staircases in Edinburgh to peering anxiously through wooden blinds at Bush Villas in Southsea to being applauded by George Newnes and Greenhough Smith as he, they, Sherlock Holmes, and The Strand soared to fame. Sherlock Holmes had bought Arthur’s home and enabled him to bring his sister Conny home from Portugal. So in the front of the book that brought him freedom and acclaim, Arthur inscribed simply:
To
my old Teacher
Joseph Bell, M.D., ETC.
of
2 Melville Crescent, Edinburgh
Acknowledgments
“Now, Watson,” said Holmes, as a tall dog cart dashed up through the gloom, throwing out two golden tunnels of yellow light from its side-lanterns, “you’ll come with me, won’t you?”
“If I can be of use.”
“Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.”
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE ADVENTURE OF T
HE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP”
My wife, Laura Sloan Patterson, once again proved smart, witty, encouraging, and supportive, as she has through fourteen books during fifteen years together. Every day she improves my life and work. Recently we heard our three-year-old, Vance, say to himself, “Daddy is working on Sherlock,” which reminds me how much Laura has heard about the subject of this volume.
Thanks to my wonderful agent, Heide Lange, who has been guarding my career for two decades, and to her excellent assistants Stephanie Delman and Samantha Isman. George Gibson, my editor at Bloomsbury through seven books, helped me figure out my goals for Arthur and Sherlock, and then marched through various drafts. This book is dedicated to him as a token of appreciation for his talents and commitment as an editor, and of my admiration for his character as a gentleman. Thanks also to the rest of the crew at Bloomsbury USA: George’s former assistant Lea Beresford, my former publicist Carrie Majer, assistant editor Callie Garnett, assistant editor Grace McNamee, art director Patti Ratchford, managing editor Laura Phillips, production editor Jenna Dutton, publicist Sarah New, copy editor Sue Warga, proofer David Chesanow, and indexer Kay Banning. At Bloomsbury UK I want to thank editor Alexa von Hirschberg, managing editor Imogen Denny, editorial assistant Callum Kenny, and art director and illustrator Paul Mann.
Many thank-yous go to Sherlockians. Leslie S. Klinger and Mike Whelan invited me to be Distinguished Speaker at the annual Baker Street Irregulars national party in New York City, where I met great people and learned from responses to my talk. Andrew Solberg was my Sherlockian sage on this book, answering all sorts of questions and encouraging the whole way. Both Les and Andy generously critiqued parts of the manuscript. Jacquelynne Bost Morris invited me to speak at the annual Baltimore gathering A Scintillation of Scions and explore some of these topics aloud among the faithful. Nancy Coble Damon at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville and Serenity Gerbman at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville also invited me to speak on these topics, which resulted in great conversations and connections.
