Conan Doyle’s writings shed no light on the matter. Perhaps he felt embarrassment over his family’s enormous debt to Waller. Possibly he avoided the subject to avoid dredging up any appearance of impropriety. Whatever his motivation, in order to preserve his silence he would have had to omit any detail of his wedding to Louisa Hawkins, which took place at Masongill on August 5, 1885, with Waller himself serving as best man.
Bryan Waller would have been the de facto host of the wedding festivities, as Louisa’s father was dead and Charles Doyle remained in custodial care in Edinburgh. The demands on Waller’s hospitality were considerable; he not only welcomed Louisa and Mrs. Hawkins to his estate for the wedding preparations, but also must have defrayed some if not all of the expenses. In the face of such benevolence, Conan Doyle’s public silence must have been galling, especially in later life. Waller would outlive Conan Doyle by two years.
Following the wedding, Conan Doyle took his bride to Dublin for their honeymoon. Little is known of the trip, though in all likelihood Conan Doyle took the occasion to call on some of the Doyle relations who remained in Ireland. He also found time to play in two cricket matches for Stonyhurst, his old school.
The new Mrs. Conan Doyle would soon grow accustomed to her husband’s athletic interests. On their return to Bush Villas, Conan Doyle resumed his calendar of sporting events with undiminished vigor, while she took over the running of the household. Mrs. Hawkins, Louisa’s mother, came to live with the Conan Doyles while Innes went off to a boarding school in Yorkshire.
Another change at Bush Villas could be found on the brass nameplate outside, which now read “A. Conan Doyle, M.D.” In the months prior to his wedding, Conan Doyle completed a medical thesis entitled “An Essay upon the vasometer changes in tabes dorsalis and on the influence which is exerted by the sympathetic nervous system in that disease, being a thesis presented in the hope of obtaining a degree of the Doctorship of Medicine of the University of Edinburgh, by A. Conan Doyle, MB, CM.” It was not the catchiest title he ever devised, nor was the content—on the problem of constricted blood flow to the spinal column—likely to attract a wide readership. Fortunately, it found favor with the medical faculty. Conan Doyle went to Edinburgh in July 1885 for his oral examination, and returned to Southsea with his doctorate.
To a large extent, the days of struggle were behind him. Louisa received an annual income of £100 from her late father’s estate, which added a comfortable margin to Conan Doyle’s medical earnings. The marriage also conferred a certain social respectability on him, and made him a more suitable physician for female patients than he had been as a bachelor.
Against this backdrop of modest prosperity, Conan Doyle’s literary output began to increase. A common misapprehension, bolstered by the author’s own testimony, holds that he wrote out of desperation, grinding out stories in the solitary fastness of his consulting room while bill collectors hammered at the door. “I should like to say that I was led into the field of letters by a cheering ambition,” he once told a gathering at the Author’s Club, “but I fear it is more correct to say that I was chased into it by a howling creditor.” Actually, he produced most of his memorable early work in relative comfort, dashing off a few lines in between patients or in the evening after the doors of the surgery had closed. “After my marriage,” he wrote, “my brain seems to have quickened and both my imagination and my range of expression were greatly improved.” His work now appeared with greater regularity, and magazines that had been closed to him began to welcome his submissions.
A story called “The Fate of Evangeline,” written earlier but published toward the end of that year, gave a glimpse of the road ahead. “It would be well,” ran a notable passage, “if those who express opinions upon such subjects would bear in mind those simple rules as to the analysis of evidence laid down by Auguste Dupin. ‘Exclude the impossible,’ he remarks in one of Poe’s immortal stories, ‘and what is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
The pronouncement made a lasting impression on Conan Doyle, and he recycled it to great effect in a story he wrote a short time later. “How often have I said to you,” he wrote, paraphrasing Poe’s original remark, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
This time, however, Monsieur Dupin would be dismissed as “a very inferior fellow,” and the maxim would be claimed by Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
6
“You Have Been in Afghanistan, I Perceive”
“He was a concoction, a myth, an isolated strand from my bundle of personalities.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES IN “HIS LAST BOW”
“It was about a year after my marriage that I realized that I could go on doing short stories forever and never make headway,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography. “What is necessary is that your name should be on the back of a volume. Only so do you assert your individuality, and get the full credit or discredit of your achievement.”
Short fiction had provided a pleasant supplement to his income, but Conan Doyle now regretted the anonymous and transient nature of its rewards. Like most young writers, he longed for a book of his own. Marriage may have sharpened the edge of his ambition, but Conan Doyle had been striving toward book publication for some time. He began work on a novel called The Narrative of John Smith soon after his arrival in Southsea. Like The Stark Munro Letters, this early effort probably took its inspiration from the George Budd fiasco, though Conan Doyle described it as having a “personal-social-political complexion.” His satisfaction at completing the manuscript soon gave way to feelings of horror when his only copy went missing in the mail. “The publishers never received it,” he wrote, “the post office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of it. Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who ever lost a manuscript that wasn’t? But I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again—in print.”
With this first effort “safely lost,” Conan Doyle settled in to work on a new book, which eventually came to be called The Firm of Girdlestone. Still in his early twenties, Conan Doyle had not yet found a voice of his own. He tried instead to duplicate the effects of two of his literary heroes, Dickens and Thackeray, with predictably uneven results. Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle seemed most comfortable with the character of Thomas Dimsdale, a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, who finds employment aboard an African trading vessel. His story, Conan Doyle admitted, “interested me extremely at the time, though I have never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else afterwards.”
As his practice grew, Conan Doyle found it harder to balance the demands of fiction and medicine. With his short stories, he could make good use of the lulls between patients. A novel required a more sustained effort, which suffered from the frequent interruptions of the consulting room. Years later, Conan Doyle outlined his difficulties for an American magazine:
How often have I rejoiced to find a clear morning before me, and settled down to my task, or rather, dashed ferociously at it, as knowing how precious were those hours of quiet. Then to me enters my housekeeper, with tidings of dismay.
“Mrs. Thurston’s little boy wants to see you, doctor.”
“Show him in,” say I, striving to fix my scene in my mind that I may splice it when this trouble is over. “Well, my boy?”
“Please, doctor, mother wants to know if she is to add water to that medicine?”
“Certainly, certainly.” Not that it matters in the least, but it is well to answer with decision. Exit the little boy, and the splice is about half accomplished when he suddenly bursts into the room again.
“Please, doctor, when I got back mother had taken the medicine without the water.”
“Tut, tut!” I answer. “It really doesn’t matter in the least.” The youth withdraws with a suspicious glance, and one mo
re paragraph has been written when the husband puts in an appearance.
“There seems to have been some misunderstanding about that medicine,” he remarks coldly.
“Not at all,” I say, “it really didn’t matter.”
“Well, then, why did you tell the boy it should be taken with water?” And then I try to disentangle the business, and the husband shakes his head gloomily at me. “She feels very queer,” says he, “we should all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at her.” So I leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an express thundering towards her, and trudge sadly off, with the feeling that another morning has been wasted, and another seam left visible to the critic’s eye in my unhappy novel.
Conan Doyle hoped the anecdote would explain the deficiencies of his novel, but the portrait of an easily distracted practitioner contrasts sharply with the recollection of others. “He would sit at a small desk in a corner of his own drawing room, writing a story, while a dozen people round about him were talking and laughing,” a fellow writer would recall. “He preferred it to being alone in his study. Sometimes, without looking up from his work, he would make a remark, showing that he must have been listening to our conversation; but his pen never ceased moving.”
Distracted or not, Conan Doyle took nearly two years to complete The Firm of Girdlestone. Even then, he had reservations about the book—and would later dismiss it as largely worthless—so he cannot have been entirely surprised when the publishers sent it circling back with “the precision of a homing pigeon.” Eventually he decided to let the manuscript settle at the back of a drawer, and would not attempt to revive it for another four years.
With his usual resilience, Conan Doyle poured his energy into a new project, called A Tangled Skein, which introduced a character named Ormond Sacker and a “sleepy-eyed young man” variously called Sheridan Hope and Sherrinford Holmes. He began writing on March 8, 1886, and by the time he finished in April the title had been changed to A Study in Scarlet and the characters had become Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
In later years, Conan Doyle would often claim that he did not recall how he chanced upon those names, and the subject has long been a source of cheery debate among Baker Street aficionados. In his autobiography, Conan Doyle raised an objection to the “elementary art” of revealing personality traits through a character’s name. The common-sounding “Holmes,” then, seemed preferable to something on the order of “Mr. Sharps” or “Mr. Ferrets.” Conan Doyle underscored the theme in a speech given in 1921. “In those old days,” he said, “there was a reaction against what I look upon as the one blot in Charles Dickens, and I give way to no one in my admiration for that great man. But I think that if he had dropped all the Turveydrops and the Tittletits and the other extraordinary names he gave to people, he would have made his work more realistic.”
Strong words from the author of The Firm of Girdlestone, which contained a Major Tobias Clutterbuck. But if Conan Doyle came to prefer a less flamboyant sound, his remarks do nothing to pinpoint the specific origin of the names. Over the years, various cricketers have been put forward as the likely source of “Sherlock,” and Conan Doyle himself once endorsed this train of thought as “the most productive line to follow.” He also had a classmate at Stonyhurst named Patrick Sherlock, and the name William Sherlock appears in his beloved Macaulay’s History of England.
The name of “Holmes,” though Conan Doyle used it once before in an early essay, almost certainly derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American physician and man of letters. “Never,” Conan Doyle once wrote, “have I so known and loved a man whom I have never seen.” As fate would have it, Oliver Wendell Holmes spent three months in Britain in 1886—the year Conan Doyle composed A Study in Scarlet—and received an honorary degree from Conan Doyle’s own University of Edinburgh. Though Conan Doyle never mentioned him in connection with Sherlock Holmes, he often acknowledged the American scholar as one of his own literary inspirations. “The gentle laughing philosopher whether as autocrat, poet, or professor, made a very deep mark upon my young mind,” he wrote in later years. “Glorious fellow, so tolerant, so witty, so worldly-wise.”
The naming of Dr. Watson also opens a rich field for speculation. There was a Dr. James Watson among the members of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, and a Dr. Patrick Heron Watson assisted Joseph Bell at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. One hesitates to invest too heavily in any one explanation, as Conan Doyle himself took a fairly relaxed view of the matter. In a later Holmes adventure, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Watson’s own wife adds to the confusion—calling her husband “James” though his name is actually “John.”
Names aside, Conan Doyle’s inspiration for his famous detective is more certain. “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell,” he wrote, “of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science.”
With his sharp features and aquiline nose, Sherlock Holmes bore an obvious physical resemblance to Dr. Bell. The similarity grew more pronounced as soon as Holmes opened his mouth. “How are you?” asked Sherlock Holmes, upon meeting Dr. Watson. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
Just as Bell had inferred a Highland officer’s background from his failure to remove his hat, Sherlock Holmes found enormous significance in Dr. Watson’s stiff left arm and pale wrist:
Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.
This early display of the “science of deduction” set a pattern for every subsequent Holmes adventure. The detective’s seemingly magical ability to conjure case histories from apparent trifles became his trademark, and remains the most engaging aspect of the stories. Later, when an interviewer expressed wonder that such a character had sprung from Conan Doyle’s inner consciousness, the author gave an emphatic nod to his old teacher. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “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.”
In a letter to Bell himself, Conan Doyle made the point even more forcefully. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” he wrote, “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 that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some of the effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward.”
Dr. Bell would come to relish his identification with Sherlock Holmes, but he was always quick to reflect due credit back onto Conan Doyle. “Dr. Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little,” Bell would tell a journalist, “and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has coloured the picture.” This becoming display of modesty invites the reader to disagree with Bell, but his reading was accurate—Conan Doyle had sold himself short. As with his disparaging remarks about his own medical skills, the young Conan Doyle seemed eager to play down his achievement with Sherlock Holmes.
That achievement was considerable. With A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle no longer contented himself to walk in the footsteps of other writers. He now had greater confidence in his own talent and imagination, which freed his mind for the series of inspirations that became Sherlock Holmes.
The first of these inspirations was to apply Bell’s lecture room techniques to detective fiction. This decision would not have been an obvious one at the time. The genre—and the very word detective—had exis
ted for barely forty years, and offered few worthwhile literary models. “The great defect in the detective of fiction is that he obtains results without any obvious reason,” Conan Doyle told an early interviewer. “That is not fair, it is not art.” With Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle resolved to play fair with his audience. He would not withhold vital evidence from the reader, as was common at the time, nor would he rely on outlandish coincidences or dim-witted criminals to drive his plots and make his hero look good. Instead, Conan Doyle aspired to create “a scientific detective, who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”
Having made this decision, Conan Doyle sought inspiration from the master of the form, Edgar Allan Poe. Sherlock Holmes might dismiss Poe’s Dupin as “very inferior,” but Conan Doyle revered both the author and his creation, and Tales of Mystery and Imagination had been a favorite book of his boyhood. “I read it young when my mind was plastic,” he later wrote. “It stimulated my imagination and set before me a supreme example of dignity and force in the methods of telling a story.”
Poe’s reputation as the father of modern detective fiction rests on five short stories written between the years of 1841 and 1844. In these stories, three of which feature C. Auguste Dupin, Poe anticipated virtually every convention of the classic detective story—the brooding, eccentric sleuth; the comparatively dense sidekick; the wrongfully accused client; the unlikely villain; the secret code; the false clue; and the impossible crime.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 9