POPULAR BIOGRAPHY MARCHES ON Jon Lellenberg © Jon Lellenberg, 1997 Conan Doyle by Michael Coren [1] The Doctor, the Detective & Arthur Conan Doyle by Martin Booth [2] In recent years, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers unavailable for scholarly use, it has seemed that progress toward definitive biography could only be made around the edges of his life. And while this has been unsatisfying for many, progress nonetheless continued to be made, with useful efforts ranging from Geoffrey Stavert’s look back at Portsmouth and Southsea, during Conan Doyle’s days there as a young doctor and struggling writer, to Owen Dudley Edwards’ brilliant use of Edinburgh sources to explore Conan Doyle’s upbringing. But to delve deeply into the principal biographical issues of Conan Doyle, most felt, would surely require renewed access to the family papers which Pierre Nordon was the last to use, 30-odd years ago. i Nonetheless, Michael Coren, fresh from biographies of G. K. Chesterton and H. G. Wells, presented a new life of Arthur Conan Doyle in late 1995. As the biographies go, it is in the line established 50 years ago by Hesketh Pearson, taking its place alongside the popular lifes of the creator of Sherlock Holmes by the Hardwicks, Hoehling, Wood, Brown, and Julian Symons. And among that company, Coren’s book is not the least of them. While his depiction of Conan Doyle is marred by frequent small mistakes of detail, and some larger ones of inference or supposition, it is on the whole a serviceable biography for people who, having read Sherlock Holmes, display casual interest in the author. From Coren’s treatment those readers will learn that Conan Doyle’s upbringing at his mother’s hands was imbued with a romantic view of history; that he was raised Roman Catholic, but broke with the Church, and was left with an aching void of faith; that he was struck by the uncanny powers of observation displayed by Dr. Joseph Bell, and derived Sherlock Holmes’s method from them; that Sherlock Holmes made him a popular and immensely successful writer, but that he thought Holmes less worthy than much of his other work; that he went on to take strong stands on many public issues; and that he, while living a life of loyalty to his ailing wife, conducted a platonic love affair with another woman, whom he finally married in 1907 after his wife’s death. And so on. At an Arthur Conan Doyle Society convention in Toronto in 1994, Coren remarked that given the unavailability of the family papers, his biography of Conan Doyle would necessarily be more along the lines of Pearson’ s than Nordon’s. And so it is. But in his introduction to the published volume, he goes further than his book actually justifies in suggesting that it is something more than just a new popular biography. He calls it “a biographical study of Conan Doyle rather than an orthodox literary biography,” arguing that the unavailability of the family papers “must not, cannot, stop us from bringing new perspectives to bear on so fascinating a character”— by which he seems to mean downplaying the importance of Sherlock Holmes to allow the things Conan Doyle thought more important about his life to emerge: “Conan Doyle the doctor, Conan Doyle the adventurer, Conan Doyle the journalist, and, above all, Conan Doyle the spiritualist.” It is the “intention of the present book,” says Coren, “to describe Conan Doyle the man, composite of all these aspects and of many more.” If this was Coren’s intention, he failed to do the research necessary, relying far too heavily upon his subject’s Memories and Adventures. Seventeen of the book’s 36 scanty footnotes cite it. For someone purportedly interested in Conan Doyle the doctor, Coren does not have much at all to say about that, and his bibliography includes no work shedding light on Conan Doyle’s medical education, practice, and outlook, or the ways they influenced his writing, such as Alvin E. Rodin’s and Jack D. Key’s Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle. His examination of Conan Doyle’s adventures, among which he includes his tours of North America in 1894, 1914, 1922, and 1923, is without reference to Howard Lachtman’s Sherlock Slept Here (Capra Press, 1985) and Christopher Redmond’s Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Simon & Pierre, 1987), the two comprehensive sources on the subject. And where Conan Doyle the journalist, pamphleteer, and public figure is concerned—Coren provides accounts of the divorce law reform work, the Titanic, Boer War and Belgian Congo controversies, and the campaigns to clear George Edalji and Oscar Slater—many specialized works about the issues involved do not appear in his bibliography either. Conan Doyle the Spiritualist does receive a good deal of attention from Coren, giving his biography one dimension that many others had lacked. Instead of sliding past the embarrassing subject as rapidly as possible, like John Dickson Carr, Coren focuses upon it from the beginning, giving it more attention than any other friendly biography save the Reverend John Lamond’s, which after all was Spiritualist biography. And Coren’s treatment is less skeptically condescending than some of his own writings preceding this biography. He makes it clear that Spiritualism did not (as some would have it) suddenly seize an ageing Conan Doyle at the end of the Great War, but that he took an interest in psychic investigation from at least his youthful Southsea years, under the influence of men like Major General Alfred Drayson. The importance of Conan Doyle’s declaratory letter to Light in 1887 is emphasized, and Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist development from then on is followed, and here Coren’s bibliography cites Lamond’s biography, Kelvin Jones’s Conan Doyle and the Spirits, and half a dozen other works about Spiritualism. An extensive account of Conan Doyle’s debate with Joseph McCabe in 1920 gives readers a good idea of the arguments for and against Spiritualism in those years, and of the way Conan Doyle handled himself on the public platform. Coren concludes with a sympathetic judgment about Conan Doyle’s faith: we cannot dismiss his religious and philosophical ideas as absurd if we wish to retain any intellectual consistency in the study and appreciation of Conan Doyle. A man who was sufficiently gifted and brilliant to invent and develop Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, qualify as a doctor and suggest military reforms far ahead of their time surely did not have one gargantuan weak spot when it came to his personal belief in life after death and the supernatural. We may disagree with him but we would do well also to respect him. He was no extremist and blind zealot. He understood compromise and moderation. It is a perspective for which some admirers of Conan Doyle may be grateful—but serious students of his life are more likely to regard Coren’s treatment as a copout, taking an easy narrative path and preaching homilies about openmindedness instead of doing a biographer’s hard work. There are other aspects of Coren’s biography which deserve to be noted. While he did little original research, his· earlier exploration of G. K. Chesterton’s papers at the British Library turned up a number of letters from Conan Doyle which add to our knowledge of his views on various subjects. Coren, who is Jewish, is also interested in Conan Doyle’s attitude toward Jews and Jewish issues, and a 1905 letter to Israel Zangwill, now in Jerusalem’s Central Zionist Archives, provides an interesting look at Conan Doyle’s attitude toward Zionism. Coren returns to the Jewish thread repeatedly, in ways as diverse as the use of the name Adler for the woman in Sherlock Holmes’s life, to the protracted campaign to set Oscar Slater free, to the friendship with Harry Houdini. In the end, Coren finds Conan Doyle more enlightened than most of his gentile contemporaries. But on the whole, aside from the sympathetic treatment of the Spiritualism, Coren presents what is today’s conventional wisdom about Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, and less of it than he could have from published sources. His discussion of Conan Doyle’s relationship with his mother is inadequate, and his account of Conan Doyle’s father is so slight and unrevealing as to startle anyone who has read Michael Baker’s The Doyle Diary, one more important work not in Coren’s bibliography. Dr. Bryan Charles Waller and his reported influence on the young Conan Doyle is never mentioned, and for someone who has exhibited interest in Roman Catholic writers in the past, Coren looks less into the youth’s religious upbringing and education than one would have expected . As far as Conan Doyle’s place as a writer is concerned, Coren seems to give him high marks without ever actually taking a stand, or tackling the issue of whether his work was literature or popular fiction. Despite his initial intention to downplay Sherlock Holmes, it is Holmes who receives most of the literary attention in this book. The Challenger stories, the historical novels, and to a lesser extent the Brigadier Gerard stories are also there, but whole areas of Conan Doyle’s fiction are ignored, and nowhere does Coren make any attempt to assess the literary value of what Conan Doyle wrought. The Sign of the Four is described as the work which established Conan Doyle as a writer (leading Coren to make some peculiar suppositions about Conan Doyle and drugs), and all of the Holmes novels and stories receive rather pointless plot summaries, but the actual creation of Sherlock Holmes is almost dismissed in a couple of paragraphs which give readers no appreciation at all of the power of what Conan Doyle’s imagination had created. Coren eventually quotes at length from T. S. Eliot’s 1929 Criterion review of the Complete Sherlock Holmes (without giving the source), about the literary and mythic meaning of Sherlock Holmes, but beyond this borrowed authority, he makes no assessment at all. As for Conan Doyle as person—was he simple or complex, was he Holmes himself or did he merely borrow from Joe Bell, what was his psychology and how did it reflect itself in his work—readers will not find Coren very useful in examining these issues. What we know today to have been some of the important influences upon Conan Doyle’s personality and character are neglected by Coren, providing little justification for the many times he writes as if knowing exactly what was in Conan Doyle’s mind: for example, linking a growing desire to take part in one of Britain’s wars to a “mild hypochondria” that Coren claims emerged as Conan Doyle entered his thirties. Despite a tone of authority, readers familiar with Conan Doyle’s life will discern that Coren does not really know his subject very well; to cite only one example, Coren speaks of Conan Doyle needing a secretary to help him write letters as the end of his life approached in 1930, without apparently realizing that Conan Doyle had had a secretary for several decades, Alfred Wood, “Uncle Woody” to the children. This was not a good biography, neither was it a particularly bad one. It gave students of Conan Doyle’s life little that they did not already know, but it was not the worst of the biographies to have in print for casual readers interested in Sherlock Holmes’s creator. But it soon became clear that it would never have the shelf life of John Dickson Carr’s. When it appeared, it aroused little but indifference from critics and readers alike, and two years later, it already seems nearly forgotten. ii Martin Booth must have been working on his biography of Conan Doyle when Michael Coren’s came out in England in the autumn of 1995. That neither he nor his publisher were disheartened turns out to be a boon to those interested in the subject, for while this book is one more volume of popular biography, it is the best full biography of Conan Doyle to date. Booth is the middle-aged English author of a number of fiction and nonfiction books. His strongest interests seem to be Asian matters, particularly Chinese. He remarks that his interest in Conan Doyle was rekindled in the mid-1980s by a chance encounter with Sherlock Holmes in India, and that all he really knew of him at the time “was his creation of Sherlock Holmes and his conversion to spiritualism.” Once he set about learning more about Conan Doyle, however, he “quickly came to the realisation that there was much, much more to him than I had ever perceived or, indeed, could have conceived.” And Booth has striven, and in large measure succeeded, to tell the story of Conan Doyle’s life more fully than anyone else has before. In doing so, it must be said, he too did little if any original research. The family archives were as unavailable to him as they were to Coren, and no member of the family is mentioned in his acknowledgments. Booth relied on existing sources rather than adding much that is new. And where there are nuggets of new information—for example, he says that “two independent doctors signed the papers that first committed Charles Doyle to an asylum,” undermining one of Owen Dudley Edwards’ seductively intriguing speculations, that his young physician son and the family’s mysterious benefactor Dr. Bryan Charles Waller signed the committal papers—it is usually impossible to say from whence they come, for the book lacks a single documentational footnote from beginning to end, save for one following the author’s foreword: For several decades, access to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s private papers has been refused to biographers, due to an ongoing and complicated legal dispute. All letters quoted in this biography, therefore, have been drawn from previously published records or material available prior to the withdrawal of the archives. Several early biographers were allowed access to the papers but the contents of their biographies was, to some extent, controlled by the family who only permitted what they wished to see printed being released. Needless to say, when these papers are, once more, made available to biographers, then a thorough and much more comprehensive biography than this one may be written. The photographs and other illustrations in Booth’s biography will also be familiar to students of Conan Doyle’s life, except for one showing Charles Doyle among a number of other inmates of Sunnyside asylum in 1889, clutching what the photo caption says is the diary published in 1978 by Michael Baker as The Doyle Diary. [3] What Booth has done, and very well, is to stitch together a new life of Arthur Conan Doyle out of the work of others. He is far from the first to take this approach, but he does it far better than his predecessors, and certainly much better than Coren, who consulted considerably fewer published source-s about Conan Doyle than Booth did, to judge from a comparison of both their texts and their bibliographies. And while a previous biographer like John Dickson Carr may have had access to the family archives, Booth was not required to tell the story that Adrian Conan Doyle wanted told. The result is an account of Conan Doyle’s life and activities which does not stint, for example, when it comes to his nearly lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, and the final period as a Spiritualist missionary (including apocalyptic prophecies which other writers never mention or at most pass over lightly). Booth’s Conan Doyle is not an unfamiliar one to us, but drawn in much more detail than usual. Booth does a far better job than any of his predecessors in relating Conan Doyle’s early life as a boy, student, and young physician, and linking it to the celebrity who emerged after the success of Sherlock Holmes. In accomplishing this, he owes a great debt to prior work by Owen Dudley Edwards and Geoffrey Stavert, and is quick to acknowledge it, repeatedly , as he also does Alvin Rodin’s and Jack Key’s investigation of Conan Doyle’s medical life. Booth’s use of these sources is a pleasure to read. There are a few valuable works about Conan Doyle which were overlooked, and readers who are aware of them will miss them sharply. It is a pity, for example, that Booth was apparently unaware of Christopher Redmond’s Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for a richer account of Conan Doyle’s 1894 American speaking tour. [4] Booth combines his portrait of the younger Conan Doyle with literary criticism that seems to nod in the direction of Charles Higham’s fascination with Conan Doyle’s horror stories—struck by the contrast between the active and generally sunny life of the young physician in Southsea, and stories like “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” “John Barrington Cowles,” and “The Ring of Thoth.” Stories like these combine Conan Doyle’s medical knowledge, his interest in the supernatural, the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, and his fascination with the bizarre and macabre, far removed from the general view of him as a cricketer, doctor, and Liberal Unionist activist. Certainly, it seems as if the family doctor of Bush Villas had a darker, repressed side to his nature which only appeared in some of his writings. If Booth does not develop this theme fully, his discussion of Conan Doyle’s psychic interests and experimentation in Southsea, and of Conan Doyle’s literary inclinations in those directions, avoids making his subject’s embrace of Spiritualism thirty years later seem like an abrupt change of direction. Depending on others has its dangers, of course. Booth repeats some mistakes by others in his account of Conan Doyle’s life. Most of them are minor ones, posing no serious danger to the author’s or reader’s attempt to understand Conan Doyle. Neither, perhaps, do the two or three more serious errors. He perpetuates the misunderstanding that Conan Doyle was one of those who helped the Italian marathon runner Pietri Dorando to stagger across the finish line in the 1908 London Olympics, when Conan Doyle was a special correspondent there for the Daily Mail. The evidence that Conan Doyle was one of those guilty of such a gaffe is the familiar photograph Booth reprints, when in fact the person helping Dorando across the finish line bears only a superficial resemblance to Conan Doyle. (In the background, in straw boater, is the man whom Dame Jean Conan Doyle has wearily pointed out as her father to more than one journalist rehashing the tale in the press.) Booth also acknowledges Dr. Kenneth McCall, a crank who bought Conan Doyle’s Bignell Wood house in the New Forest in the 1960s, and for some years thereafter was the despair of Dame Jean as a source of misinformatiuon about her father—some of which has found its way into this book. One must expect even the best popular biographers to go wrong at times. Certain stories about Conan Doyle, some of them rooted in fact, some of them not, are deeply embedded now in the popular mythology about the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Booth nonetheless succeeds in depicting Conan Doyle not only by paying close attention to the more reliable sources of information, but also by paying more attention than most of his predecessors to his subject’s psychology, and to providing serious criticism of his literary work in an integrated way. Booth is on his surest ground where Sherlock Holmes is concerned, and the seventh chapter of his book, “Characters, Crime, and Cocaine,” looks at Conan Doyle’s most memorable character in a way that is original and powerful. He gives serious attention to the significance of the cocaine in the stories, linking it not only to the image of aestheticism for Holmes which Booth believes was Conan Doyle’s main motive, but also to his medical knowledge, and even, possibly, to the treatment his father was receiving in his institutionalization for alcoholism and epilepsy. Absent is the kind of lurid speculation about Conan Doyle using cocaine which sometimes accompanies popular discussion of Sherlock Holmes, Booth saying that “if he tried cocaine, or chewed coca leaves, Conan Doyle was certainly never addicted to them. There are no signs of his having a dependency. His fertile mind and energetic lifestyle were the result of his own impetuosity and verve rather than an artificially stimulated state.” While Booth lets Sidney Paget share the credit for the astounding popular success of Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s, [5] he concludes his assessment of the Sherlock Holmes stories by making them serious contenders for serious literature: Whatever their faults or strengths, the Sherlock Holmes stories succeeded and have endured because they were told with such mastery, such panache, such excitement. They also work on so many levels, as evocations of their period, as adventure stories, as intellectual conundrums, as allegories of good and evil and, more recently, as ideal material for adaptation for the stage and screen. The characterisations of Holmes and Watson are unsurpassed in English Literature. What started off as a means of making some ready money has turned into a truly memorable and universal fictional character known around the world like no other. In other areas of Conan Doyle’s work, Booth’s literary criticism is less thorough, but he pays Conan Doyle the compliment of considering his overall output, for good or for bad, coupling it with a portrait of the author far more nuanced than the images of the hearty Victorian hero or philistine which others have insisted upon. After consideration of the youthful historical novel Micah Clarke – The main characters come alive, the descriptions are vivid and the scenes accurate as a result of Conan Doyle’s painstaking research. . . . It brought Conan Doyle to maturity as a writer, taught him how to sustain a long, involved narrative inhabited by realistic characters who interrelated and interacted like actual people. He also learnt the lessons of genuine research, which not only lent reality to stories but also gave them originality. [6] Booth goes on to dismiss Conan Doyle’s next novel, The Mystery of Cloomber, as “a shallow, almost ephemeral story not worthy of its author.” (Booth notes ironically, however, that “the ease with which this piece of spiritualist tosh found a publisher was not shared by Micah Clarke”—which was rejected by James Payn and other editors, until Andrew Lang finally rescued it from oblivion in time for Oscar Wilde to praise it at the famous Langham Hotel dinner in 1889, where Conan Doyle and Wilde were commissioned to write The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Sign of the Four respectively.) Some of the criticism, while not making more than literary judgments, is biographically useful for noting Conan Doyle’s development as a writer. About the Brigadier Gerard stories, for example, Booth says: The stories speed along, punctuated by severed heads and a good washing of blood, glorifying warfare and manly derring-do. They are also cliché-ridden, the characters shallow, and the action sequences, though immediate, become tedious after a while. For all that, the stories are superbly told, the research is impeccable and the French attitude is exact. The research paid dividends. What is more, Conan Doyle enjoyed writing them—they took him little effort with the research already done—but he always considered them his “little book of soldier stories” and not serious literature. He could not see anything that was light in style as having lasting value, but these stories, with their action and vitality, were far better than many of what be thought of as his serious historical novels. . . . Today, the stories are very dated and seem almost like children’s fiction, but it might be argued that, had Gerard been as universal a character as a detective, he could have survived the test of time, for he was a realistic and breathing entity. . . . Once more, a character he had created as an amusing pot-boiler became a mainstay, although Conan Doyle was to admit in due course that the stories did earn their place in the genre of historical fiction. And in examining The Poison Belt (1913), the second of the Professor Challenger novels, Booth credits Conan Doyle with more influence on 20th century English writing than very many academics do: The story lacked the ripping-yarn adventure elements of The Lost World, yet it was important because in it Conan Doyle not only expressed, through Challenger, his meditations on morality but also showed how he had picked up a new stylistic technique. As a result of his involvement with the theatre, he had learnt to write more tersely, more dramatically and with a certain direct punchiness that was to be much imitated in the future and set a trend in English fiction. The long-winded descriptions of the nineteenth century were, through Conan Doyle, transformed into the concise, exact diction of the twentieth, with direct speech becoming far more realistic. In integrating literary criticism with a psychology of the author, on the other hand, Booth sees the greatest value in parts of Conan Doyle’s work which are read today by few people who read Sherlock Holmes, or Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger, for that matter. While appreciating Conan Doyle’s horror stories much as Charles Higham did, Booth says that he wrote in the genre for most of his life, but literary history has tended to overlook this aspect of his work, which has been overshadowed by Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s historical fiction. This is, in fact, an injustice, for his horror stories often come up to the standard of Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, E. F. Benson or M. R. James, and have stood the test of time, the amalgamation of medical information and the gothic qualities of the settings still thrilling, even today. Booth does not go overboard by considering them the psychosexual key does not go overboard by considering them the psychosexual key to Conan Doyle’s psychology, as Higham tended to. Discussing The Parasite, he says: To what extent the plot and subject had anything to do with Conan Doyle’s own sexuality is the subject of speculation. Much has been written about and hypothesized concerning Conan Doyle’s repressed sexuality. Theories have ranged widely and drawn no conclusions. In many respects, Conan Doyle was no different from any other man of his time, constrained by the morality and hypocrisy of the Victorian era, governed by the codes of honour and loyalty his mother had instilled in him, obliged by the society in which he lived to suppress his deeper emotions. Whatever came out in his writing was no more than would have emanated from many writing within the confines of the age. Samuel Rosenberg, whose Naked Is the Best Disguise is listed in Booth’s bibliography, might say that Booth overlooked his opportunities; but what Booth’s comment actually suggests is the potential value of a careful re-reading of Ronald Pearsall’s Conan Doyle, A Biographical Solution—more for what he has to say about Victorian sexuality and sexual repression, than for his ill-informed judgments about Conan Doyle as an individual. [7] What Booth does see as valuable keys to Conan Doyle’s evolving psychology are one of his poems and one of his domestic novels. He does not give Conan Doyle high marks as a poet. Conan Doyle’s poetry “was not in the least literary,” he says: “It was more the verse of the common man, sub-Kiplingesque narrative ballads, superficial odes, comical verse and semi-doggerel.” But he looks closely at “The Inner Room” (1898), which he calls “a sobering, moving and unique piece” for its rather grim self-examination of conflicting instincts in Conan Doyle’s makeup.[8] These Booth sees not only as Conan Doyle’s growing awareness of unresolved emotions and instincts in himself up to that point, but also of new strains caused by his mixed feelings over the approaching death of his first wife and his secret love for the woman who would become his second. Conan Doyle sought to resolve his conflicts, Booth argues, in A Duet, which was “not autobiographical and yet it had a deep sense of personal experience underlying it.” One has the feeling that Conan Doyle was in some way coming to terms with his own past as Louise’s death drew inexorably near. He had the manuscript bound and gave it to Jean. His motivation for such an action is hard to appreciate. Perhaps, by giving the book to Jean, he was somehow forging a link between his past with Louise and his planned future with her. Maybe the book was written as a foretaste of the life he hoped to live with Jean after Louise’s death. Where he found the inspiration for the story is also in doubt. The narrative seems to refer to his life with Louise and yet Conan Doyle confided to his mother that it was born straight from his love for Jean which had, he declared, “kept my soul and my emotions alive.” “Around this time,” Booth continues, “Conan Doyle took stock of his life, stepping back and looking pensively at himself. Much of his earlier naiveté was gone. In its place was a man with a complex personal nature.” And he continues by quoting Conan Doyle’s description in A Duet of its husband-hero, Frank Crosse: “Strength, virility, emotional force, power of deep feeling—these are traits which have to be paid for. There was sometimes just a touch of the savage, or at least there were indications of the possibility of a touch of the savage in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the open air and of physical exercise was a sign of it. He left upon women the impression, not altogether unwelcome, that there were unexplored recesses of his nature to which the most intimate of them had never penetrated. In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found him dull. Perhaps it would have been better for him if they had, for his impulsive nature had never been content with a chill friendship.” It is a self-portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle which many of his admirers, fed on Carr seasoned with a dash of Higham, would recognize and be happy to agree with. But Booth is insightful enough not to be satisfied with that. “The image of Frank,” he stresses in his analysis of A Duet, “is that which Conan Doyle would have liked to project of himself. How he described Frank is how Conan Doyle hoped Jean saw him.” Martin Booth has written an admiring biography of Conan Doyle, but not a hagiography. He learned enough about Conan Doyle to see him as not just the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the Knight-Errant of Carr’s heroic tale, but as a complex personality, marred by painful episodes in his early life, and struggling always but less than successfully to deal with the emotional challenges of his later life—while realizing that if Arthur Conan Doyle had been emotionally whole, he would not have been able to give the world Sherlock Holmes. If and when the family archives do finally become available to scholars again, it’s possible, as Booth suggests, that a more thorough and comprehensive biography of Conan Doyle will be written. But unless there are great surprises in store for us in those papers, it will not be easy to do a great deal more than Booth has done to tell the story of Conan Doyle’s life, and help us understand the kind of man and artist he was. NOTES [1] London: Bloomsbury, 1995. [2] London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997. [3] On the other hand, the book possesses a lengthy, detailed index, the useful kind that American scholars have tended to believe Britons were incapable of. [4] Also missing from Booth’s bibliography is Howard Lachtman’s Sherlock Slept Here, whose account of all four of Conan Doyle’s North American trips could have been drawn upon profitably. [5] Sherlock Holmes was scarcely less popular in America, without the aid of Sidney Paget or any other comparably powerful artist, not until Frederic Dorr Steele began to illustrate the Return of Sherlock Holmes stories in 1903. [6] A judgment very far from Hesketh Pearson where Conan Doyle’s painstaking research for his historical fiction was concerned. [7] Christopher Redmond’s far more thoughtful In Bed With Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is not in Booth’s bibliography. [8] See the Epilogue (“The Quest Continues”) for the text of Conan Doyle’s poem “The Inner Room,” and a discussion of its biographical significance.

POPULAR BIOGRAPHY MARCHES ON

Jon Lellenberg

Conan Doyle

by Michael Coren [1]

The Doctor, the Detective &

Arthur Conan Doyle

by Martin Booth [2]

In recent years, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers unavailable for scholarly use, it has seemed that progress toward definitive biography could only be made around the edges of his life. And while this has been unsatisfying for many, progress nonetheless continued to be made, with useful efforts ranging from Geoffrey Stavert’s look back at Portsmouth and Southsea, during Conan Doyle’s days there as a young doctor and struggling writer, to Owen Dudley Edwards’ brilliant use of Edinburgh sources to explore Conan Doyle’s upbringing. But to delve deeply into the principal biographical issues of Conan Doyle, most felt, would surely require renewed access to the family papers which Pierre Nordon was the last to use, 30-odd years ago.

Nonetheless, Michael Coren, fresh from biographies of G. K. Chesterton and H. G. Wells, presented a new life of Arthur Conan Doyle in late 1995. As the biographies go, it is in the line established 50 years ago by Hesketh Pearson, taking its place alongside the popular lifes of the creator of Sherlock Holmes by the Hardwicks, Hoehling, Wood, Brown, and Julian Symons. And among that company, Coren’s book is not the least of them. While his depiction of Conan Doyle is marred by frequent small mistakes of detail, and some larger ones of inference or supposition, it is on the whole a serviceable biography for people who, having read Sherlock Holmes, display casual interest in the author. From Coren’s treatment those readers will learn that Conan Doyle’s upbringing at his mother’s hands was imbued with a romantic view of history; that he was raised Roman Catholic, but broke with the Church, and was left with an aching void of faith; that he was struck by the uncanny powers of observation displayed by Dr. Joseph Bell, and derived Sherlock Holmes’s method from them; that Sherlock Holmes made him a popular and immensely successful writer, but that he thought Holmes less worthy than much of his other work; that he went on to take strong stands on many public issues; and that he, while living a life of loyalty to his ailing wife, conducted a platonic love affair with another woman, whom he finally married in 1907 after his wife’s death. And so on.

At an Arthur Conan Doyle Society convention in Toronto in 1994, Coren remarked that given the unavailability of the family papers, his biography of Conan Doyle would necessarily be more along the lines of Pearson’ s than Nordon’s. And so it is. But in his introduction to the published volume, he goes further than his book actually justifies in suggesting that it is something more than just a new popular biography. He calls it “a biographical study of Conan Doyle rather than an orthodox literary biography,” arguing that the unavailability of the family papers “must not, cannot, stop us from bringing new perspectives to bear on so fascinating a character”— by which he seems to mean downplaying the importance of Sherlock Holmes to allow the things Conan Doyle thought more important about his life to emerge: “Conan Doyle the doctor, Conan Doyle the adventurer, Conan Doyle the journalist, and, above all, Conan Doyle the spiritualist.” It is the “intention of the present book,” says Coren, “to describe Conan Doyle the man, composite of all these aspects and of many more.”

If this was Coren’s intention, he failed to do the research necessary, relying far too heavily upon his subject’s Memories and Adventures. Seventeen of the book’s 36 scanty footnotes cite it. For someone purportedly interested in Conan Doyle the doctor, Coren does not have much at all to say about that, and his bibliography includes no work shedding light on Conan Doyle’s medical education, practice, and outlook, or the ways they influenced his writing, such as Alvin E. Rodin’s and Jack D. Key’s Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle. His examination of Conan Doyle’s adventures, among which he includes his tours of North America in 1894, 1914, 1922, and 1923, is without reference to Howard Lachtman’s Sherlock Slept Here (Capra Press, 1985) and Christopher Redmond’s Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Simon & Pierre, 1987), the two comprehensive sources on the subject. And where Conan Doyle the journalist, pamphleteer, and public figure is concerned—Coren provides accounts of the divorce law reform work, the Titanic, Boer War and Belgian Congo controversies, and the campaigns to clear George Edalji and Oscar Slater—many specialized works about the issues involved do not appear in his bibliography either.

Conan Doyle the Spiritualist does receive a good deal of attention from Coren, giving his biography one dimension that many others had lacked. Instead of sliding past the embarrassing subject as rapidly as possible, like John Dickson Carr, Coren focuses upon it from the beginning, giving it more attention than any other friendly biography save the Reverend John Lamond’s, which after all was Spiritualist biography. And Coren’s treatment is less skeptically condescending than some of his own writings preceding this biography. He makes it clear that Spiritualism did not (as some would have it) suddenly seize an ageing Conan Doyle at the end of the Great War, but that he took an interest in psychic investigation from at least his youthful Southsea years, under the influence of men like Major General Alfred Drayson. The importance of Conan Doyle’s declaratory letter to Light in 1887 is emphasized, and Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist development from then on is followed, and here Coren’s bibliography cites Lamond’s biography, Kelvin Jones’s Conan Doyle and the Spirits, and half a dozen other works about Spiritualism. An extensive account of Conan Doyle’s debate with Joseph McCabe in 1920 gives readers a good idea of the arguments for and against Spiritualism in those years, and of the way Conan Doyle handled himself on the public platform. Coren concludes with a sympathetic judgment about Conan Doyle’s faith:

we cannot dismiss his religious and philosophical ideas as absurd if we wish to retain any intellectual consistency in the study and appreciation of Conan Doyle. A man who was sufficiently gifted and brilliant to invent and develop Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, qualify as a doctor and suggest military reforms far ahead of their time surely did not have one gargantuan weak spot when it came to his personal belief in life after death and the supernatural. We may disagree with him but we would do well also to respect him. He was no extremist and blind zealot. He understood compromise and moderation.

It is a perspective for which some admirers of Conan Doyle may be grateful—but serious students of his life are more likely to regard Coren’s treatment as a copout, taking an easy narrative path and preaching homilies about openmindedness instead of doing a biographer’s hard work.

There are other aspects of Coren’s biography which deserve to be noted. While he did little original research, his· earlier exploration of G. K. Chesterton’s papers at the British Library turned up a number of letters from Conan Doyle which add to our knowledge of his views on various subjects. Coren, who is Jewish, is also interested in Conan Doyle’s attitude toward Jews and Jewish issues, and a 1905 letter to Israel Zangwill, now in Jerusalem’s Central Zionist Archives, provides an interesting look at Conan Doyle’s attitude toward Zionism. Coren returns to the Jewish thread repeatedly, in ways as diverse as the use of the name Adler for the woman in Sherlock Holmes’s life, to the protracted campaign to set Oscar Slater free, to the friendship with Harry Houdini. In the end, Coren finds Conan Doyle more enlightened than most of his gentile contemporaries.

But on the whole, aside from the sympathetic treatment of the Spiritualism, Coren presents what is today’s conventional wisdom about Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, and less of it than he could have from published sources. His discussion of Conan Doyle’s relationship with his mother is inadequate, and his account of Conan Doyle’s father is so slight and unrevealing as to startle anyone who has read Michael Baker’s The Doyle Diary, one more important work not in Coren’s bibliography. Dr. Bryan Charles Waller and his reported influence on the young Conan Doyle is never mentioned, and for someone who has exhibited interest in Roman Catholic writers in the past, Coren looks less into the youth’s religious upbringing and education than one would have expected .

As far as Conan Doyle’s place as a writer is concerned, Coren seems to give him high marks without ever actually taking a stand, or tackling the issue of whether his work was literature or popular fiction. Despite his initial intention to downplay Sherlock Holmes, it is Holmes who receives most of the literary attention in this book. The Challenger stories, the historical novels, and to a lesser extent the Brigadier Gerard stories are also there, but whole areas of Conan Doyle’s fiction are ignored, and nowhere does Coren make any attempt to assess the literary value of what Conan Doyle wrought. The Sign of the Four is described as the work which established Conan Doyle as a writer (leading Coren to make some peculiar suppositions about Conan Doyle and drugs), and all of the Holmes novels and stories receive rather pointless plot summaries, but the actual creation of Sherlock Holmes is almost dismissed in a couple of paragraphs which give readers no appreciation at all of the power of what Conan Doyle’s imagination had created. Coren eventually quotes at length from T. S. Eliot’s 1929 Criterion review of the Complete Sherlock Holmes (without giving the source), about the literary and mythic meaning of Sherlock Holmes, but beyond this borrowed authority, he makes no assessment at all.

As for Conan Doyle as person—was he simple or complex, was he Holmes himself or did he merely borrow from Joe Bell, what was his psychology and how did it reflect itself in his work—readers will not find Coren very useful in examining these issues. What we know today to have been some of the important influences upon Conan Doyle’s personality and character are neglected by Coren, providing little justification for the many times he writes as if knowing exactly what was in Conan Doyle’s mind: for example, linking a growing desire to take part in one of Britain’s wars to a “mild hypochondria” that Coren claims emerged as Conan Doyle entered his thirties. Despite a tone of authority, readers familiar with Conan Doyle’s life will discern that Coren does not really know his subject very well; to cite only one example, Coren speaks of Conan Doyle needing a secretary to help him write letters as the end of his life approached in 1930, without apparently realizing that Conan Doyle had had a secretary for several decades, Alfred Wood, “Uncle Woody” to the children.

This was not a good biography, neither was it a particularly bad one. It gave students of Conan Doyle’s life little that they did not already know, but it was not the worst of the biographies to have in print for casual readers interested in Sherlock Holmes’s creator. But it soon became clear that it would never have the shelf life of John Dickson Carr’s. When it appeared, it aroused little but indifference from critics and readers alike, and two years later, it already seems nearly forgotten.

Martin Booth must have been working on his biography of Conan Doyle when Michael Coren’s came out in England in the autumn of 1995. That neither he nor his publisher were disheartened turns out to be a boon to those interested in the subject, for while this book is one more volume of popular biography, it is the best full biography of Conan Doyle to date.

Booth is the middle-aged English author of a number of fiction and nonfiction books. His strongest interests seem to be Asian matters, particularly Chinese. He remarks that his interest in Conan Doyle was rekindled in the mid-1980s by a chance encounter with Sherlock Holmes in India, and that all he really knew of him at the time “was his creation of Sherlock Holmes and his conversion to spiritualism.” Once he set about learning more about Conan Doyle, however, he “quickly came to the realisation that there was much, much more to him than I had ever perceived or, indeed, could have conceived.” And Booth has striven, and in large measure succeeded, to tell the story of Conan Doyle’s life more fully than anyone else has before.

In doing so, it must be said, he too did little if any original research. The family archives were as unavailable to him as they were to Coren, and no member of the family is mentioned in his acknowledgments. Booth relied on existing sources rather than adding much that is new. And where there are nuggets of new information—for example, he says that “two independent doctors signed the papers that first committed Charles Doyle to an asylum,” undermining one of Owen Dudley Edwards’ seductively intriguing speculations, that his young physician son and the family’s mysterious benefactor Dr. Bryan Charles Waller signed the committal papers—it is usually impossible to say from whence they come, for the book lacks a single documentational footnote from beginning to end, save for one following the author’s foreword:

For several decades, access to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s private papers has been refused to biographers, due to an ongoing and complicated legal dispute. All letters quoted in this biography, therefore, have been drawn from previously published records or material available prior to the withdrawal of the archives. Several early biographers were allowed access to the papers but the contents of their biographies was, to some extent, controlled by the family who only permitted what they wished to see printed being released. Needless to say, when these papers are, once more, made available to biographers, then a thorough and much more comprehensive biography than this one may be written.

The photographs and other illustrations in Booth’s biography will also be familiar to students of Conan Doyle’s life, except for one showing Charles Doyle among a number of other inmates of Sunnyside asylum in 1889, clutching what the photo caption says is the diary published in 1978 by Michael Baker as The Doyle Diary. [3]

What Booth has done, and very well, is to stitch together a new life of Arthur Conan Doyle out of the work of others. He is far from the first to take this approach, but he does it far better than his predecessors, and certainly much better than Coren, who consulted considerably fewer published source-s about Conan Doyle than Booth did, to judge from a comparison of both their texts and their bibliographies. And while a previous biographer like John Dickson Carr may have had access to the family archives, Booth was not required to tell the story that Adrian Conan Doyle wanted told. The result is an account of Conan Doyle’s life and activities which does not stint, for example, when it comes to his nearly lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, and the final period as a Spiritualist missionary (including apocalyptic prophecies which other writers never mention or at most pass over lightly).

Booth’s Conan Doyle is not an unfamiliar one to us, but drawn in much more detail than usual. Booth does a far better job than any of his predecessors in relating Conan Doyle’s early life as a boy, student, and young physician, and linking it to the celebrity who emerged after the success of Sherlock Holmes. In accomplishing this, he owes a great debt to prior work by Owen Dudley Edwards and Geoffrey Stavert, and is quick to acknowledge it, repeatedly , as he also does Alvin Rodin’s and Jack Key’s investigation of Conan Doyle’s medical life. Booth’s use of these sources is a pleasure to read. There are a few valuable works about Conan Doyle which were overlooked, and readers who are aware of them will miss them sharply. It is a pity, for example, that Booth was apparently unaware of Christopher Redmond’s Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for a richer account of Conan Doyle’s 1894 American speaking tour. [4]

Booth combines his portrait of the younger Conan Doyle with literary criticism that seems to nod in the direction of Charles Higham’s fascination with Conan Doyle’s horror stories—struck by the contrast between the active and generally sunny life of the young physician in Southsea, and stories like “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” “John Barrington Cowles,” and “The Ring of Thoth.” Stories like these combine

Conan Doyle’s medical knowledge, his interest in the supernatural, the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, and his fascination with the bizarre and macabre, far removed from the general view of him as a cricketer, doctor, and Liberal Unionist activist. Certainly, it seems as if the family doctor of Bush Villas had a darker, repressed side to his nature which only appeared in some of his writings.

If Booth does not develop this theme fully, his discussion of Conan Doyle’s psychic interests and experimentation in Southsea, and of Conan Doyle’s literary inclinations in those directions, avoids making his subject’s embrace of Spiritualism thirty years later seem like an abrupt change of direction.

Depending on others has its dangers, of course. Booth repeats some mistakes by others in his account of Conan Doyle’s life. Most of them are minor ones, posing no serious danger to the author’s or reader’s attempt to understand Conan Doyle. Neither, perhaps, do the two or three more serious errors. He perpetuates the misunderstanding that Conan Doyle was one of those who helped the Italian marathon runner Pietri Dorando to stagger across the finish line in the 1908 London Olympics, when Conan Doyle was a special correspondent there for the Daily Mail. The evidence that Conan Doyle was one of those guilty of such a gaffe is the familiar photograph Booth reprints, when in fact the person helping Dorando across the finish line bears only a superficial resemblance to Conan Doyle. (In the background, in straw boater, is the man whom Dame Jean Conan Doyle has wearily pointed out as her father to more than one journalist rehashing the tale in the press.) Booth also acknowledges Dr. Kenneth McCall, a crank who bought Conan Doyle’s Bignell Wood house in the New Forest in the 1960s, and for some years thereafter was the despair of Dame Jean as a source of misinformatiuon about her father—some of which has found its way into this book.

One must expect even the best popular biographers to go wrong at times. Certain stories about Conan Doyle, some of them rooted in fact, some of them not, are deeply embedded now in the popular mythology about the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Booth nonetheless succeeds in depicting Conan Doyle not only by paying close attention to the more reliable sources of information, but also by paying more attention than most of his predecessors to his subject’s psychology, and to providing serious criticism of his literary work in an integrated way. Booth is on his surest ground where Sherlock Holmes is concerned, and the seventh chapter of his book, “Characters, Crime, and Cocaine,” looks at Conan Doyle’s most memorable character in a way that is original and powerful. He gives serious attention to the significance of the cocaine in the stories, linking it not only to the image of aestheticism for Holmes which Booth believes was Conan Doyle’s main motive, but also to his medical knowledge, and even, possibly, to the treatment his father was receiving in his institutionalization for alcoholism and epilepsy. Absent is the kind of lurid speculation about Conan Doyle using cocaine which sometimes accompanies popular discussion of Sherlock Holmes, Booth saying that “if he tried cocaine, or chewed coca leaves, Conan Doyle was certainly never addicted to them. There are no signs of his having a dependency. His fertile mind and energetic lifestyle were the result of his own impetuosity and verve rather than an artificially stimulated state.” While Booth lets Sidney Paget share the credit for the astounding popular success of Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s, [5] he concludes his assessment of the Sherlock Holmes stories by making them serious contenders for serious literature:

Whatever their faults or strengths, the Sherlock Holmes stories succeeded and have endured because they were told with such mastery, such panache, such excitement. They also work on so many levels, as evocations of their period, as adventure stories, as intellectual conundrums, as allegories of good and evil and, more recently, as ideal material for adaptation for the stage and screen. The characterisations of Holmes and Watson are unsurpassed in English Literature. What started off as a means of making some ready money has turned into a truly memorable and universal fictional character known around the world like no other.

In other areas of Conan Doyle’s work, Booth’s literary criticism is less thorough, but he pays Conan Doyle the compliment of considering his overall output, for good or for bad, coupling it with a portrait of the author far more nuanced than the images of the hearty Victorian hero or philistine which others have insisted upon. After consideration of the youthful historical novel Micah Clarke –

The main characters come alive, the descriptions are vivid and the scenes accurate as a result of Conan Doyle’s painstaking research. . . . It brought Conan Doyle to maturity as a writer, taught him how to sustain a long, involved narrative inhabited by realistic characters who interrelated and interacted like actual people. He also learnt the lessons of genuine research, which not only lent reality to stories but also gave them originality. [6]

Booth goes on to dismiss Conan Doyle’s next novel, The Mystery of Cloomber, as “a shallow, almost ephemeral story not worthy of its author.” (Booth notes ironically, however, that “the ease with which this piece of spiritualist tosh found a publisher was not shared by Micah Clarke”—which was rejected by James Payn and other editors, until Andrew Lang finally rescued it from oblivion in time for Oscar Wilde to praise it at the famous Langham Hotel dinner in 1889, where Conan Doyle and Wilde were commissioned to write The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Sign of the Four respectively.)

Some of the criticism, while not making more than literary judgments, is biographically useful for noting Conan Doyle’s development as a writer. About the Brigadier Gerard stories, for example, Booth says:

The stories speed along, punctuated by severed heads and a good washing of blood, glorifying warfare and manly derring-do. They are also cliché-ridden, the characters shallow, and the action sequences, though immediate, become tedious after a while. For all that, the stories are superbly told, the research is impeccable and the French attitude is exact. The research paid dividends. What is more, Conan Doyle enjoyed writing them—they took him little effort with the research already done—but he always considered them his “little book of soldier stories” and not serious literature. He could not see anything that was light in style as having lasting value, but these stories, with their action and vitality, were far better than many of what be thought of as his serious historical novels. . . . Today, the stories are very dated and seem almost like children’s fiction, but it might be argued that, had Gerard been as universal a character as a detective, he could have survived the test of time, for he was a realistic and breathing entity. . . . Once more, a character he had created as an amusing pot-boiler became a mainstay, although Conan Doyle was to admit in due course that the stories did earn their place in the genre of historical fiction.

And in examining The Poison Belt (1913), the second of the Professor Challenger novels, Booth credits Conan Doyle with more influence on 20th century English writing than very many academics do:

The story lacked the ripping-yarn adventure elements of The Lost World, yet it was important because in it Conan Doyle not only expressed, through Challenger, his meditations on morality but also showed how he had picked up a new stylistic technique. As a result of his involvement with the theatre, he had learnt to write more tersely, more dramatically and with a certain direct punchiness that was to be much imitated in the future and set a trend in English fiction. The long-winded descriptions of the nineteenth century were, through Conan Doyle, transformed into the concise, exact diction of the twentieth, with direct speech becoming far more realistic.

In integrating literary criticism with a psychology of the author, on the other hand, Booth sees the greatest value in parts of Conan Doyle’s work which are read today by few people who read Sherlock Holmes, or Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger, for that matter. While appreciating Conan Doyle’s horror stories much as Charles Higham did, Booth says that

he wrote in the genre for most of his life, but literary history has tended to overlook this aspect of his work, which has been overshadowed by Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s historical fiction. This is, in fact, an injustice, for his horror stories often come up to the standard of Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, E. F. Benson or M. R. James, and have stood the test of time, the amalgamation of medical information and the gothic qualities of the settings still thrilling, even today.

Booth does not go overboard by considering them the psychosexual key does not go overboard by considering them the psychosexual key to Conan Doyle’s psychology, as Higham tended to. Discussing The Parasite, he says:

To what extent the plot and subject had anything to do with Conan Doyle’s own sexuality is the subject of speculation. Much has been written about and hypothesized concerning Conan Doyle’s repressed sexuality. Theories have ranged widely and drawn no conclusions. In many respects, Conan Doyle was no different from any other man of his time, constrained by the morality and hypocrisy of the Victorian era, governed by the codes of honour and loyalty his mother had instilled in him, obliged by the society in which he lived to suppress his deeper emotions. Whatever came out in his writing was no more than would have emanated from many writing within the confines of the age.

Samuel Rosenberg, whose Naked Is the Best Disguise is listed in Booth’s bibliography, might say that Booth overlooked his opportunities; but what Booth’s comment actually suggests is the potential value of a careful re-reading of Ronald Pearsall’s Conan Doyle, A Biographical Solution—more for what he has to say about Victorian sexuality and sexual repression, than for his ill-informed judgments about Conan Doyle as an individual. [7]

What Booth does see as valuable keys to Conan Doyle’s evolving psychology are one of his poems and one of his domestic novels. He does not give Conan Doyle high marks as a poet. Conan Doyle’s poetry “was not in the least literary,” he says: “It was more the verse of the common man, sub-Kiplingesque narrative ballads, superficial odes, comical verse and semi-doggerel.” But he looks closely at “The Inner Room” (1898), which he calls “a sobering, moving and unique piece” for its rather grim self-examination of conflicting instincts in Conan Doyle’s makeup.[8] These Booth sees not only as Conan Doyle’s growing awareness of unresolved emotions and instincts in himself up to that point, but also of new strains caused by his mixed feelings over the approaching death of his first wife and his secret love for the woman who would become his second. Conan Doyle sought to resolve his conflicts, Booth argues, in A Duet, which was “not autobiographical and yet it had a deep sense of personal experience underlying it.”

One has the feeling that Conan Doyle was in some way coming to terms with his own past as Louise’s death drew inexorably near. He had the manuscript bound and gave it to Jean. His motivation for such an action is hard to appreciate. Perhaps, by giving the book to Jean, he was somehow forging a link between his past with Louise and his planned future with her. Maybe the book was written as a foretaste of the life he hoped to live with Jean after Louise’s death. Where he found the inspiration for the story is also in doubt. The narrative seems to refer to his life with Louise and yet Conan Doyle confided to his mother that it was born straight from his love for Jean which had, he declared, “kept my soul and my emotions alive.”

“Around this time,” Booth continues, “Conan Doyle took stock of his life, stepping back and looking pensively at himself. Much of his earlier naiveté was gone. In its place was a man with a complex personal nature.” And he continues by quoting Conan Doyle’s description in A Duet of its husband-hero, Frank Crosse:

“Strength, virility, emotional force, power of deep feeling—these are traits which have to be paid for. There was sometimes just a touch of the savage, or at least there were indications of the possibility of a touch of the savage in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the open air and of physical exercise was a sign of it. He left upon women the impression, not altogether unwelcome, that there were unexplored recesses of his nature to which the most intimate of them had never penetrated. In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found him dull. Perhaps it would have been better for him if they had, for his impulsive nature had never been content with a chill friendship.”

It is a self-portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle which many of his admirers, fed on Carr seasoned with a dash of Higham, would recognize and be happy to agree with. But Booth is insightful enough not to be satisfied with that. “The image of Frank,” he stresses in his analysis of A Duet, “is that which Conan Doyle would have liked to project of himself. How he described Frank is how Conan Doyle hoped Jean saw him.”

Martin Booth has written an admiring biography of Conan Doyle, but not a hagiography. He learned enough about Conan Doyle to see him as not just the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the Knight-Errant of Carr’s heroic tale, but as a complex personality, marred by painful episodes in his early life, and struggling always but less than successfully to deal with the emotional challenges of his later life—while realizing that if Arthur Conan Doyle had been emotionally whole, he would not have been able to give the world Sherlock Holmes. If and when the family archives do finally become available to scholars again, it’s possible, as Booth suggests, that a more thorough and comprehensive biography of Conan Doyle will be written. But unless there are great surprises in store for us in those papers, it will not be easy to do a great deal more than Booth has done to tell the story of Conan Doyle’s life, and help us understand the kind of man and artist he was.

NOTES

[1] London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

[2] London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997.

[3] On the other hand, the book possesses a lengthy, detailed index, the useful kind that American scholars have tended to believe Britons were incapable of.

[4] Also missing from Booth’s bibliography is Howard Lachtman’s Sherlock Slept Here, whose account of all four of Conan Doyle’s North American trips could have been drawn upon profitably.

[5] Sherlock Holmes was scarcely less popular in America, without the aid of Sidney Paget or any other comparably powerful artist, not until Frederic Dorr Steele began to illustrate the Return of Sherlock Holmes stories in 1903.

[6] A judgment very far from Hesketh Pearson where Conan Doyle’s painstaking research for his historical fiction was concerned.

[7] Christopher Redmond’s far more thoughtful In Bed With Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is not in Booth’s bibliography.

[8] See the Epilogue (“The Quest Continues”) for the text of Conan Doyle’s poem “The Inner Room,” and a discussion of its biographical significance.