Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: A Man of Many Parts

Our recent viewing of Lucy Worsley’s latest BBC doc Holmes vs. Doyle(2023) awakened my longstanding desire to add a post here on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) that went beyond Sherlock Holmes. We have done numerous posts related to the groundbreaking detective character here, notably:

My wife’s guest post on all the screen adaptations

My post on William Gillette, the first actor to play Holmes

My post on the film series starring Basil Rathbone (1939-46)

On Edith Meiser, who adapted the Holmes stories for radio

Ordinarily I am a Worsley-Worshipper; in our house we try to watch every one of her series and specials. Yet I confess I found myself irritated by the theme and the tone of the Doyle special, the thrust of which was to dismiss Doyle’s ambitions to be a serious literary artist by writing works outside the Holmes series, including historical novels in the Walter Scott tradition, poetry, and non-fiction on contemporary geo-politics. Critics and political leaders embraced these other works, but the public only went for Holmes, by which the viewer is supposed to conclude, I gather, that the Holmes books and stories were the only thing worth doing. Of course I revere the Holmes mysteries and have since childhood. When I was in London 30 years ago I even made a pilgrimage to the very corny Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street! But it strikes me as a dubious argument that authors should pander to the tastes of the masses. The readers may have been correct in this case that the mysteries were Doyle’s best work, but he wouldn’t have been himself (and he certainly wouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating) if his diverse other interests didn’t also command his attention. Ultimately, I think Worsley’s point is that Doyle was wrong to dismiss his detective fiction as junk that he wrote only to pay bills, and to want to kill off Holmes constantly so that he could focus strictly on writing he deemed more serious. There is some truth in that more nuanced take. But I don’t like the tone she takes, which appears scornful of his other efforts and activities.

At any rate, now some attention to the non-Sherlockian pieces of the Arthur Conan Doyle puzzle. Most of this stuff is nearly as well known as Holmes, it’s just that we haven’t yet taken the opportunity to discuss it.

First off: he created at least one other genre of fiction beyond the murder mystery. His 1912 adventure novel The Lost World, starring another recurring Doyle hero named Professor Challenger, inspired an entire subgenre of science fiction which continues to honors its source by referring to it by name The “Lost World” subgenre refers to science fiction stories in which explorers come across an undiscovered pocket of the globe where dinosaurs and other extinct species still roam the earth. It has influenced writers from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Michael Crichton. The 1925 silent film version influenced King Kong. Things like William Overgard’sThe Last Dinosaur (1977), the kids tv show Land of the Lost, and of course the Jurassic Park films all can be traced back to this book. For a while, there was also a theory that Doyle was one of those responsible for the Piltdown Man hoax, but that has been disproven. At any rate, from what we know of him, he was not the kind of man to consciously perpetrate a hoax on the public. Rather the opposite.

Which raises our second area of fascination: Spiritualism. Doyle has become a figure of fun in this regard, but I find myself in deep sympathy with the man. The topic is worth unpacking all the way back to conception. One is apt to regard the writer as the quintessential Scotsman, born, raised, and educated in Edinburgh. And the Scots are such great lovers of folk lore having to do with Second Sight, ghosts, fairies, and so forth, it’s a huge part of the national identity. But of course, as his name ought to remind us, Doyle was ethnically Irish on both sides. Not only is that surname Irish but there’s that Celtic middle name, shared by both the American comedian and the comic book warrior. Doyle was raised a Roman Catholic but later left the faith of his ancestors. Presumably, he replaced superstition with science, being a medical doctor and all. But he grew interested in the paranormal as a phenomenon, and this eventually sucked him down into quasi-religious belief in Spiritualism, bringing him full circle.

He was man of his age. His curiosity about the Great Beyond brought him into contact with some truly interesting people. He joined forces with journalist W.T. Stead (who later died on the Titanic). He was taken in by the shenanigans of mentalists Julius and Agnes Zancig, magician P.T. Selbit, spirit photographer William Hope, and of course the little girls who produced the Cottingley Fairies, eventually causing a break in his friendship with Harry Houdini (whom he also believed to have had supernatural abilities). I’d like to be able to claim that the Edwardian Era was the last period in history when so able an intellect as Doyle’s could prove so guileless, but, no, we come upon such cases down to the present day. He was a man of much imagination and much goodwill. I find it to the credit of his character that he was a believer rather than otherwise, even if it is possible for me to see what he could not a century ago.

Here is where we might also mention one of Doyle’s earliest stories “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”, to which is credited the public’s ongoing fascination with the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

As is well known, Doyle was a trained medical doctor and surgeon. Holmes was largely based on one of his own professors Joseph Bell. It was during his copious downtime during his unsuccessful stint as a small town general practitioner that Doyle accomplished his first literary efforts. Doyle had also been a ship’s doctor, sailing in such far flung places as the Arctic and off West Africa. He also served as a voluntary physician during the Boer War. His experiences during these adventures fed his writings.

On a related topic, Doyle is well known to have fond of the “manly arts” and physical culture. He was an amateur boxer, a marksman, and, at the invitation of Eugene Sandow, was a judge in the world’s first bodybuilding competition. Like all good Scotsmen (except me) he was an avid golfer. He played on amateur football (soccer) and cricket teams, the latter with a group that also included  J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne, and P. G. Wodehouse. While studying ophthalmology in Austria he took up ice skating; while living in Switzerland he took up the then-largely unknown past-time of skiing. He was also fond of billiards.

Doyle’s father, grandfather, and three older brothers were all artists and illustrators — their own lives rate exploration very nearly much as Sir Arthur’s. Was Doyle’s machismo a factor of wanting to differentiate himself from these seemingly sensitive chaps? If so, he was no less the artist, either literarily or in other realms. Doyle’s primary accomplishments in the field of visual art where architectural. His primary legacy in that field was his 1897 mansion Undershaw, which he designed in collaboration with professional architect Joseph Henry Ball. Doyle wrote many of his best known works while living there. The house still exists; it is currently a school for disabled children. I’m thinking surely it had to have been one of the inspirations for Gillette’s own such project Gillette Castle.

Having become one of Britian’s most prominent citizens by the turn of the century, Doyle quite naturally turned to politics. He ran unsuccessfully for Parliament 1900 and 1906, and was knighted in 1902. Doyle was instrumental in the creation of Britain’s Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. This was an outcome in his involvement with the case of the baseless (and undoubtedly racially motivated) prosecution of a half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji for the crime of mutilating animals. He also intervened in another case concerning Oscar Slater, a German Jew who was accused of beating an elderly Glasgow woman to death. Slater ran an illegal gambling joint. As with Edalji, it seemed that prejudice, as opposed to facts, were the basis of the cases against them. Like most Brits of his day, Doyle exhibited his share of racist sentiments from time to time, but his belief in impartial justice was offended in these particular cases. Otherwise, most of Doyle’s books on political topics had to do with international relations. They included The Great Boer War (1900), The War in South Africa – Its Cause and Conduct (1902), The Crime of the Congo (1909), The German War: Some Sidelights and Reflections(1914), A Visit to Three Fronts (1916), and The British Campaign in France and Flanders (1916-1920).

Lastly, Doyle dabbled in the theatre! He wrote or co-wrote numerous plays beyond the Sherlock Holmes adaptation he penned with Gillette in 1899. His others included Jane Annie; or, The Good Conduct Prize (an 1893 operetta co-written with J.M. Barrie), Foreign Policy (1893), The Story of Waterloo (1894), Brothers (1899), A Duet (1902), Brigadier Gerard (1906), The Fires of Fate (1910), The House of Temperley (1910), A Pot of Caviare (1910), The Speckled Band (1910), and The Crown Diamond (1921).

A few months before he died Doyle was recorded in an early talkie for a Fox newsreel. It’s a remarkable, priceless record of the man, in which he sits and chats for a couple of minutes about Holmes and Spiritualism. It was my favorite part of the Worsley documentary, absolutely thrilling. You can watch it for yourself and read a transcript of it here.