Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  To date, Houdini—like the famous “dog in the night-time”—has been strangely silent.

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  A Packet of Salts and Three Bucketfuls of Water

  The charlatan is always the pioneer.… The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow.

  —LIONEL DACRE IN “THE LEATHER FUNNEL”

  Just before the release of Conan Doyle’s autobiography in 1924, the publisher John Murray issued a small pamphlet entitled “Conan Doyle: Teller of Tales.” It listed fifty-two of the Conan Doyle titles then available, including several multivolume collections. Potential readers were assured that “There’s a Conan Doyle book for every taste.” On the cover, a carefully trimmed photograph of the author’s head stared out with a rather dazed expression, in the manner of one of his own spirit images.

  The pamphlet made an effective promotion and paid fitting tribute to a varied and distinguished career. Inadvertently, it also highlighted a startling fact: Conan Doyle had not produced a novel since The Valley of Fear in 1915. There had been a vast quantity of writing done since then—including the six-volume history of World War I and seven spiritualist books—but his fiction had dwindled to the occasional short story.

  The reason could be found in Memories and Adventures, his autobiography, which appeared after a successful serialization in The Strand. In the final chapter, Conan Doyle made it clear that he had abandoned his “congenial and lucrative” work in favor of the psychic quest. “That is the work,” he told his readers, “which will occupy, either by voice or pen, the remainder of my life.”

  Along with his voice and pen, Conan Doyle also gave freely of his checkbook. By his own estimate, he would subsidize the spiritualist movement to the tune of some £250,000 over these years. The figure is impossible to confirm, but there can be no doubt that the toll in lost earnings was enormous. The profit from his spiritualist books and lectures went to the cause. He often agreed to underwrite the books and pamphlets of other writers. For a time, he backed the spiritualist magazine Light out of his own pocket and contributed heavily to the running of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association. He was also generous with his time, serving as president of the London Spiritualist Alliance and the British College of Psychic Science. In 1925, he traveled to Paris to act as chairman of the International Spiritualistic Congress.

  That same year, Conan Doyle opened a “central depot” of information called The Psychic Bookshop, dedicated to the dissemination of spiritualist materials. He chose a ruinously expensive site at 2 Victoria Street, mere steps from Westminster Abbey, hoping that the stately surroundings of the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster neighborhoods would prove mutually beneficial. The shop also contained a small museum, which displayed Conan Doyle’s massive collection of spirit photographs, and a reference library culled from his own shelves. Conan Doyle’s elder daughter, Mary, had a hand in running the shop, with her father and stepmother taking regular shifts at the register. Conan Doyle fussed over every detail of the operation, even issuing written instructions for the window displays. In time, the shop became the headquarters of the private Psychic Press, which published, among other things, Pheneas Speaks. Lest anyone be in doubt as to the proprietor’s leanings, the telegraph address was listed as “Ectoplasm, Southwest.”

  “The venture will cost me £1500 a year but it may in time pay its own way,” he told Lodge. “If not, I don’t see how money can be better spent.” Conan Doyle operated the shop at a heavy loss for four years, then announced that the “noble experiment” had failed, making it necessary to cut his losses. “The entire endeavour,” noted Harry Price, “had been an unmitigated disaster.”

  Conan Doyle also had to offset some of the costs of his own two-volume study, The History of Spiritualism, after several editors declined the honor of publishing it. After a string of odd and commercially disappointing volumes such as The Case for Spirit Photography, the Conan Doyle name no longer held a guarantee of success. As it happened, The History of Spiritualism would stand apart from his many other contributions to the literature of the movement, and is perhaps the only one that retains interest for the modern reader. It offers a comprehensive survey of the movement from an insider’s point of view, with careful documentation and a lucid, energetic prose style. “It will be a dignified and balanced book,” he promised Oliver Lodge, “never extreme in statement.” Whether he made good on that claim is open to debate, as Conan Doyle’s enthusiasms and biases can be found on every page. He settles old scores with the likes of Frank Podmore and other “unreasoning critics,” and expends much effort praising such mediums as the Davenports and Henry Slade, a “celebrated slate-writing medium,” who had long since been discredited. For all of that, the book captures the urgent conviction of those who “followed the call.”

  A spiritualist researcher named Leslie Curnow contributed a great deal of material and wrote some of the chapters, which Conan Doyle freely admits in the book’s preface. Conan Doyle wished to “conjoin” Curnow’s name with his on the cover, but the publisher objected, fearing that this would extinguish any lingering commercial value.

  “I should like to dedicate it to you, if I may,” Conan Doyle told Lodge as the publication date approached, “for I think no one has shown greater courage in the matter than you.” Lodge sent a grateful assent, but even he had begun to express misgivings about his friend’s intemperate views. When Conan Doyle marshaled his forces to set up the Spiritualist Church in London, Lodge worried about a potential backlash. “I rather regret Doyle’s decision,” he wrote a friend. “But that I suppose is a natural outcome of his missionary activity. I suppose he regards himself as a sort of Wesley or Whitefield.” This reference to the eighteenth-century evangelists underscores a view held by many: Conan Doyle had become too extreme for the times. Britain and the rest of the world had begun to throw off the gloom of the war years. As the Jazz Age made itself felt, the appeal of spiritualism dimmed. To some, Conan Doyle began to seem like a quaint artifact from a distant age—Sir Nigel Loring among the flappers.

  Finding himself “almost alone in the polemical arena,” Conan Doyle wrote to enlist the help of Arthur Balfour, the former prime minister, who had long kept his spiritualist sympathies silent. The statesman replied with a well-crafted evasion: “Surely my opinions upon this subject are already sufficiently well known.”

  Through it all, Conan Doyle received regular support through the Pheneas circle. “You see,” one spirit told him, “we can make friends from this side.” This was just as well, because over the final decade of his life Conan Doyle steadily alienated most of his earthbound friends. Jerome K. Jerome was the first to abandon ship, launching a public attack on the “puerile” events of the séance room and the “insipid logic” behind them. When Pheneas Speaks appeared, H. G. Wells published a withering review in the Sunday Express. “This Pheneas, I venture to think, is an imposter,” Wells wrote, “wrought of self-deception, as pathetic as a rag doll which some lonely child has made for its own comfort.”

  Whenever possible, Conan Doyle struck back with equal force. When George Bernard Shaw wrote of using séance tricks to dupe his friends, he and Conan Doyle crossed swords yet again. “His argument,” Conan Doyle wrote, “is that he himself has cheated at the séance table and has successfully deceived trusting friends, and that therefore all phenomena are suspect and worthless. To put this argument into concrete form, I have in the presence of witnesses unquestionably seen my mother since her death. But what I say must be false because Bernard Shaw cheated his friends. Was there ever a more absurd non sequitur than that?”

  In those cases where Conan Doyle happened to outlive his friends, he allowed himself the final word in any lasting dispute. When Jerome K. Jerome died in 1927, a medium soon brought forward a message that Conan Doyle broadcast to the world: “Tell him from me that I know now that he was right and I was wrong. We never know our greatest mistakes at the time we make them. Make it clear to him that I am not dead.” Conan Doyle’s oth
er skeptical friends undoubtedly hoped to survive him.

  Conan Doyle’s friendship with J. M. Barrie never descended into open conflict, but Barrie made it clear that he would not permit any discussion of psychic matters in his presence. Conan Doyle obliged, and they spent a pleasant enough evening together indulging in a favorite Barrie pastime—flicking moistened postage stamps at the ceiling on the backs of coins. Conan Doyle never lost his affection for his friend’s work. In Memories and Adventures, he expressed the hope that a chance remark of long ago had helped to inspire The Admirable Crichton, one of Barrie’s most memorable plays. It is more likely that Conan Doyle provided the stimulus for a lesser-known effort called A Well-Remembered Voice, which took a hearty swipe at the pieties of the spiritualist movement.

  If the living community of writers occasionally shunned him, the dead ones appeared to welcome Conan Doyle with open arms—as he reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Joseph Conrad sent a message that he would not be averse to seeing Conan Doyle finish up Suspense, his incomplete novel, and Charles Dickens indicated that if he made good with Conrad’s request, The Mystery of Edwin Drood would be next. “I shall be honoured, Mr. Dickens,” Conan Doyle told the spirit.

  “Charles, if you please,” came the reply. “We like friends to be friends.”

  Conan Doyle made no serious effort to fulfill these commissions, but by the end of 1924 his thoughts returned to his own career in fiction. Predictably, he approached the subject from a psychic perspective. Up to this point, his scattered attempts to blend fiction and the spirits had not been especially fruitful. Now, having reached his maturity as a spiritualist, Conan Doyle felt ready to try again. “I have for years had a big psychic novel in me,” he told Greenhough Smith, “which shall deal realistically with every phase of the question, pro and con. I waited and knew it would come. Now it has come, with a full head of steam, and I can hardly hold on to my pen it goes so fast—about 12 or 15,000 words in three days.”

  By February of 1925, the novel was complete. “Thank God that book is done!” he wrote to Smith. “It was to me so important that I feared I might pass away before it was finished.”

  The Land of Mist, his first novel in ten years, began its Strand serialization in July. Many readers, weary of spirits and ectoplasm, undoubtedly approached this new offering with caution. The opening pages offered some reassurance. Professor George Edward Challenger, the familiar and well-loved hero of The Lost World and The Poison Belt, had returned for another adventure.

  By the end of the first installment, however, the author’s new enthusiasms made themselves felt. As the story opens, the reader learns that the journalist Edward Malone, now older and wiser, has undertaken to write an article on spiritualism in partnership with Enid Challenger, the professor’s strong-willed daughter. Hearing this, Professor Challenger gives an angry snort—“Death ends all, Malone,” he proclaims. “This soul-talk is the animism of savages. It is a superstition, a myth.”

  The reader learns that Professor Summerlee, Challenger’s crusty foil in the earlier adventures, has died in Naples the previous year. When Summerlee manages to send a message from the other side, Malone and Enid Challenger find their minds opening to the new religion. Soon Lord John Roxton reappears, and he, too, falls under the sway of the spiritualist argument. At regular intervals, the trio of converts pause to derive benefit from the teachings of spiritualist leaders, some of whom are recognizable as Conan Doyle’s real-life colleagues. Prominent among them is a Mr. Algernon Mailey. “His laugh was so infectious,” the reader is told, “that the others were bound to laugh also. Certainly, with his athletic proportions, which had run a little to seed but were still notable, and with his virile voice and strong if homely face, he gave no impression of instability.” The portrait is completed by a winking allusion to “vibrations”—a prominent term in the Cottingley episode—and by a familiar declaration that the spirit message is “infinitely the most important thing in the world.” Apparently Conan Doyle could not resist giving himself a walk-on part.

  Through it all, Professor Challenger refuses to bend in his opposition, and will not even consider the psychic literature his daughter urges upon him. “Am I to study mathematics in order to confute the man who tells me that two and two are five?” he asks.

  As might be expected, Challenger sees the error of his ways by the novel’s end. His conversion comes as Enid falls into a trance and brings her father a momentous communication. Long ago, we discover, when the professor practiced as a physician, he administered an experimental drug to two patients, both of whom were found dead the following morning. “I believed that I had killed them,” Challenger admits. “It has always been a dark background to my life.” Now, these many years later, the two unfortunate patients return through Enid to offer spiritual salvation. The medications were blameless, Challenger is assured; their deaths had been the result of pneumonia.

  The news leaves the professor staggered. After so many years, his “cloud of guilt” suddenly lifts. At the same time, he must accept the “incontrovertible evidence” of spiritualism. He knows his daughter to be “incapable of deceit,” and since no living soul had known the sad fate of his former patients, no subconscious deception is possible. “It is incredible, inconceivable, grotesquely wonderful,” says the chastened professor, “but it would seem to be true.” The novel draws to a close as Challenger—now a “gentler, humbler, and more spiritual man”—declares his new faith to the world, and a happy crowd of spiritualists gather to celebrate the marriage of Malone and Enid.

  Conan Doyle had originally wanted to call this novel The Psychic Adventures of Edward Malone. Cooler heads prevailed, fearing that such a title would scare away its potential audience. By the time the second installment appeared in the The Strand, however, there could be no hiding Conan Doyle’s agenda. Twenty years earlier, in “The Abbey Grange,” Sherlock Holmes offered a telling criticism of Watson’s writings: “Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations.” By that measure, Sherlock Holmes would have been absolutely besotted with The Land of Mist. The novel managed to be instructive and scientific without any regard whatever to storytelling. The skillful characterizations and witty situations of The Lost World were nowhere to be found. Instead, a solemn procession of learned figures marched across the pages, spouting the author’s propaganda. At times, Conan Doyle appeared to flaunt his disregard for the story: “The love-affair of Enid Challenger and Edward Malone is not of the slightest interest to the reader,” he announced at one stage, “for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer.” An appendix of spiritualist documentation completed the unhappy experience.

  “This series of ill-linked stories of the supernatural may be good spiritualist propaganda,” wrote a New Statesman reviewer, “but as an essay in imaginative fiction, in which guise it is presented, it is unworthy of so skilled a story-teller as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” The New York Times agreed: “Unfortunately, yet perhaps inevitably, the characters of The Land of Mist are scarcely more than props for Sir Arthur’s propaganda.” The Times of London summed up the general chorus of negative reviews: “There is too much pill, too little sugar-coating.”

  Strangely, the Challenger of the earlier adventures had been far less intractable. In The Lost World, he showed an interest in telepathy. In The Poison Belt, he rejected Professor Summerlee’s unspiritual philosophies: “No, Summerlee, I will have none of your materialism, for I, at least, am too great a thing to end in mere physical constituents, a packet of salts and three bucketfuls of water.” But for The Land of Mist, Conan Doyle recast Challenger as a wooden skeptic, simply to throw him onto the bonfire of his belief. Challenger now believes, he told the reader—so should you.

  The question naturally arises, where was Sherlock Holmes while Professor Challenger fought the good
fight? With The Land of Mist, Conan Doyle showed himself willing to sacrifice his past triumphs at the altar of spiritualism. For him, this was a holy crusade. Fate had given him the most potent weapon any crusader could have wished, but he chose not to use it. Certainly the idea crossed his mind. As early as 1918, an interviewer asked him what Sherlock Holmes might have to say about his creator’s new religion. “I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is,” he answered, “and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved.”

  “I tell you, Watson, the thing is true.”

  The very idea brings a spasm of revulsion from the detective’s admirers. The arguments are many: The conversion of Holmes, the ultimate rationalist, would not be credible. Conan Doyle recognized—and would not relinquish—his purchase on literary immortality. Such a story would oblige the author to drag Holmes into the present day. Conan Doyle’s missionary work depended on the money that Holmes continued to provide.

  There is merit in each of these objections. Conan Doyle, however, would have been the last person in the world to concede to any of them. He had set Challenger jumping through the hoops; he could easily have done the same with Holmes. In “His Last Bow,” in which Holmes matched wits with a German spy, Conan Doyle felt perfectly comfortable using his detective as an instrument of propaganda. Why not do so again?

  Conan Doyle clearly intended that “His Last Bow,” published in 1917, should be the final adventure of Sherlock Holmes. As ever, the detective had refused to go quietly. A series of Sherlock Holmes films had sparked yet another surge of interest, just as the screen version of The Lost World, released in 1925, brought a new audience for Challenger. Beginning in 1921, Conan Doyle began periodically to produce new Holmes stories. That same year, the British Stoll Film Company made a series of fifteen two-reel Sherlock Holmes films, capped off by a full-length version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Stoll company would go on to film nearly fifty Holmes adventures, all starring Eille Norwood as the detective. Conan Doyle heartily approved of Norwood’s performance. At a 1921 testimonial dinner, he enthused over the actor’s “extraordinarily clever personation,” adding that he had “never seen anything more masterly” than Norwood’s performance in The Hound. To mark the occasion, a message arrived on behalf of Prime Minister Lloyd George. A new Holmes adventure, “The Mazarin Stone,” had just appeared in The Strand, and the prime minister praised it as “one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories that he has read.”