In another great stroke of fortune, W. J. K. Boot, the Strand art editor, sent the commission for illustration of the Holmes stories to an illustrator named Paget. According to one source, Boot wanted Walter Paget, an artist for the Illustrated London News with the General Gordon Relief Expedition in Africa. Instead, the commission ended up in Sidney Paget’s hands. Winifred Paget, Sidney Paget’s daughter, says Boot wrote to Sidney (Walter’s brother) because he had forgotten Walter’s first name. In another version of this story, Sidney opened an envelope addressed to “Mr. Paget the illustrator.” Happily, Sidney, himself a commercial artist, took the commission and began an association with the Holmes stories that lasted until Paget’s death in 1908. Sidney Paget produced over 350 illustrations of the stories, all included in this edition. Sidney Paget’s Holmes was a commanding figure, tall but not overly lean, perhaps, in the words of one writer, “only a shade less elegant in person and appearance than a popular matinee idol.” This bore little resemblance to Conan Doyle’s descriptions. Unlike Sidney, Walter, reported Winifred, was “an artist who took great pains to get every detail accurate. It is thus possible that he would have given the world a less handsome Holmes, portraying him perhaps more as the author saw him, ‘with a great hawks-bill of a nose and two small eyes set close together.’ ” “Perhaps,” Conan Doyle admitted, “from the point of view of my lady readers it was as well.”6
Sidney Paget.
The combination of writer, subject, and artist was an immense success. “A Scandal in Bohemia” created a considerable sensation when it appeared in England in July 1891, and each subsequent Holmes adventure published that year saw an increase in sales of the Strand Magazine. An historian of the magazine called the circulation response “as immediate and as conclusive as a reflex action.” Readers reportedly stood in line for new issues of the magazine containing Holmes tales, and Conan Doyle wrote his mother, “Sherlock Holmes appears to have caught on . . .” By the end of the second series of stories, in 1893, it was estimated that Conan Doyle’s name on the cover of the magazine added 100,000 copies to its circulation.
In November 1891, Conan Doyle had apparently had enough of his association with Holmes and Watson. He wrote to his mother, “I think of slaying Holmes . . . and winding him up for good and all.” Mary Doyle persuaded him to defer any final resolution, and the stories continued. Twelve appeared between July 1891 and June 1892 and were collected in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In an extraordinary period of productivity, Conan Doyle published three novels, The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents (concerning the suppression of the Huguenots), The Great Shadow (the Battle of Waterloo), and Beyond the City (a tale of domestic life and manners). He let Greenhough Smith of the Strand Magazine know that for the unprecedented sum of £1,000,7 he would produce another dozen Holmes stories. Later collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, these began appearing in December 1892, with “Silver Blaze.”
In December 1893, upon publication of “The Final Problem,” the last story of the second series, the public was shocked to learn that Conan Doyle and Watson had for over two years kept secret a fatal struggle between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, which had occurred in May 1891. The revelation of Holmes’s death horrified the nation, and young City men that month put mourning crepe on their silk hats or wore black armbands. One anguished correspondent wrote to Conan Doyle: “You brute!” “I was amazed,” Conan Doyle admitted, “at the concern expressed by the public.” The publisher of the Strand Magazine described Holmes’s death to his shareholders as the “dreadful event,” and twenty thousand people reportedly cancelled their subscriptions.
Conan Doyle turned away from Sherlock Holmes, with no regret. “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” he was to say in 1896.
I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. . . . I have been much blamed for doing that gentleman to death, but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.
Jean Leckie.
In 1893, in the midst of Conan Doyle’s greatest celebrity, tragedy struck. Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then a virtual death sentence. The disease completely disrupted the lives of the couple, with the family travelling from spa to spa in search of a cure or at least a respite. In the autumn of 1895, they journeyed to Cairo, hoping that the hot, dry climate would aid Louise’s convalescence. Here Conan Doyle absorbed the background for his desert drama The Tragedy of the Korosko, which first appeared in 1898. When fighting broke out in the Sudan between the British-controlled Egyptian army and the Sudanese Dervishes (an anti-British faction), Conan Doyle became the war correspondent for the Westminster Gazette. Returning to England in 1896, he continued to produce a variety of literary works, including his sporting novel of the Regency, Rodney Stone; a charming tale of a young married couple, A Duet with an Occasional Chorus; and his first novel of the Napoleonic era, Uncle Bernac.
On March 15, 1897, while his wife was ill, Arthur Conan Doyle met Jean Leckie. In Conan Doyle’s autobiography, he makes no mention of her until reporting their 1907 wedding, describing Jean as “the younger daughter of a Blackheath family whom I had known for years, and who was a dear friend of my mother and sister.” While that characterisation is true, it conceals the fact that Conan Doyle fell in love with Jean immediately in 1897. He was a married man, however, and his personal code of chivalry and honour kept him at Louise’s side. Instead, he conducted secret meetings with Jean—secret, that is, from Louise, for apparently everyone else in Conan Doyle’s family, including his mother and even Louise’s mother, knew about and condoned the relationship. Divorce appeared to be out of the question, and Conan Doyle struggled to maintain balance in his personal life. Certainly neither Holmes (“I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson”) nor Watson (with “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three continents”) could serve as a rôle model for the troubled writer. “[Louise] is as dear to me as ever,” he wrote in 1899, “but, as I said, there is a large side of my life which was unoccupied but is no longer so.”
Sherlock Holmes was still very much a part of Conan Doyle’s commerce. In late 1897, he drafted a play about Sherlock Holmes, probably because his expenses had been unexpectedly heavy in building a new home in Hindhead, which he named “Undershaw.” Production of the play languished until May 1899, when American stage actor William Gillette approached Conan Doyle about a stage play based on the Adventures and the Memoirs (to be backed by American impresario Charles Frohman), and Conan Doyle revived the idea. The play, although styled Sherlock Holmes and billed as having been written by Conan Doyle and Gillette, was wholly written by Gillette. Drawing freely from the stories, the “melodrama in four acts” opened in Buffalo, New York, on October 23, 1899, and, some say, has never really ceased being performed. Gillette, who wrote his plays principally for himself, toured in it virtually continuously in America and England until 1932, giving over 1,300 performances as Holmes;8 and numerous amateur and professional theatre companies essayed the drama throughout the twentieth century and around the globe on stage, radio, and television. Since 1976, such luminaries as John Wood, Leonard Nimoy, and Frank Langella have assumed the lead rôle.
In 1898, war broke out in South Africa between the British and the Boers. Conan Doyle, keen to serve in any capacity but denied recruitment in the military on the grounds of his age and weight, agreed to supervise a hospital in Cape Town. His experiences there left an indelible mark on his character, and the Sherlock Holmes adventure “The Blanched Soldier” echoes many of those experiences. When, after the war, Britain’s treatment of its enemies (and in particular the British “concentration camps”) was called into question in world opinion, Conan Doyle rose to the defence of England, penning a pamphlet entitled The War in South Africa: Its Cau
se and Conduct (1900). Widely translated, the pamphlet caused much public attention, and Conan Doyle stood for Parliament as a Unionist candidate.
Conan Doyle at Bloemfontein.
To the great benefit of the reading public, Conan Doyle lost the election, and he returned full-time to writing. In March 1901, he approached the Strand Magazine with “the idea of a real creeper.” This was to be a novel based on Dartmoor, home of many legends and nightmares in the west of England. Although Conan Doyle reportedly stated that he introduced Sherlock Holmes into the tale because the story needed a strong central character, the decision to do so was undoubtedly partially influenced by money, for he earned nothing from his Boer War activities. Conan Doyle well understood that a new Sherlock Holmes book would revive sales of the Adventures and the Memoirs. In August 1901, the first installment of his greatest work, The Hound of the Baskervilles, appeared in the Strand Magazine.
Publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles was not a real return of Sherlock Holmes. Carefully styled a “reminiscence” of Holmes, the tale is set in an uncertain period, likely before the events recounted in “The Final Problem,” set in 1891. Public clamour continued as his friends around the world hoped for more news of the detective. In 1902, Conan Doyle received a knighthood, and while no specific grounds were cited for the monarch’s action, there were many who felt that the tale of the detective and the spectral hound was a prime cause.
In 1903, Dr. Watson penned a remarkable tale, entitled “The Empty House.” In it, he revealed that Holmes had not died in 1891 but instead had gone into hiding from the vengeance of Professor Moriarty’s gang. After a series of sojourns in the Indian peninsula, the Middle East, and the south of France, Holmes secretly returned to England in 1894 and again took up his career as a consulting detective. Conan Doyle and Watson conspired to suppress this news for nine years, until Holmes relented and Conan Doyle was able to strike a remarkably lucrative deal with the Strand Magazine for another series of tales about the celebrated detective. These appeared from 1903 through 1905 and were collected under the title The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905. Some critics felt that the tales did not measure up to Watson’s earlier works. “The most trenchant criticism of the stories as a series came from a Cornish boatman,” wrote Conan Doyle later in an article for the Strand Magazine, “who remarked to me: ‘When Mr. Holmes had that fall he may not have been killed, but he was certainly injured, for he was never the same afterwards.’ ” Whether Holmes’s performance suffered, however, is a different question from that regarding the quality of Watson’s writing, and it is difficult to find fault with such gems as “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”
Louise died in July 1906, after thirteen years of illness. Sinking into depression, Conan Doyle ceased to work, until the case of George Edalji seized his attention at the end of 1906. Conan Doyle, who, like Dickens, came to use his celebrity to right social injustices, became convinced that Edalji, a young solicitor of Parsee Indian descent, had been wrongly accused of the crime of mutilating local livestock. Having been imprisoned for the crime and then released without explanation, Edalji sought to prove his innocence and return to the practice of law, from which he was now banned. Doyle, calling it an “appalling tragedy,” plunged into investigation of the matter and wrote a book on the Edalji case. In 1907, Conan Doyle helped to secure a pardon for George Edalji, married Jean Leckie (Edalji attended the wedding), and published his paean to reading entitled Through the Magic Door. The following year, perhaps in an effort to regain his popularity to impress his new wife, Conan Doyle arranged for the publication of new tales of Holmes in the Strand Magazine, “Wisteria Lodge” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Four more adventures appeared in print from 1910 through 1913.
In 1912 Conan Doyle introduced Professor George Challenger to the public, in his highly influential account The Lost World (strikingly filmed in 1925 with stop-motion animation of dinosaurs by pioneer Willis O’Brien). Challenger’s further adventures were recounted in The Poison Belt (1913) and The Land of Mist (1926). Challenger’s popularity at its peak was said to have rivalled Holmes’s.
The Strand Magazine.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Conan Doyle, then fifty-five years old, sought to enlist. This act was consistent with Conan Doyle’s love of chivalry and his personal code of conduct. Not surprisingly, he was rejected. Frustrated, he conceived of the idea of a civilian volunteer corps, forming a company in Crowborough, his residence. Within weeks, the government took over his idea and formed a centrally administered volunteer corps, into which the Crowborough company was incorporated. Conan Doyle refused command and entered service as Private Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, actively contributing ideas to the War Department about the conduct of the war and in particular advocating various life-saving devices such as inflatable collars, inflatable lifeboats, and body armour. He also assisted Dr. Watson in publication of The Valley of Fear, the last “long” story of Sherlock Holmes, a tale of murder set in the countryside near Conan Doyle’s home. In 1916 Conan Doyle began writing his six-volume history The British Campaign in France and Flanders, which was completed in 1920. This work drew on his correspondence with at least fifty generals, many of whom gave him access to their personal papers. The work, which sacrificed historical perspective for contemporary reporting, was ultimately criticised for its excessive fascination with troop movements and technical details. Conan Doyle was actually approached by the government about heading up a propaganda office, but he declined, preferring to be a free agent. Almost as a response, His Last Bow, a collection of short adventures of Holmes, which included the remarkable tale of Holmes’s war service entitled “His Last Bow,” appeared in 1917.
By late 1917, however, Conan Doyle’s interest in Sherlock Holmes was waning once again. At a meeting of the London Spiritualist Alliance, Conan Doyle publicly declared himself a dedicated Spiritualist. Psychic phenomena had interested him for many years, and Conan Doyle, who had long sought “some big purpose” for which he was destined, became convinced that he should devote the balance of his life to the promotion of Spiritualism. He began to write extensively on Spiritualism, in such works as The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), and, in 1921, after the death of his mother (and perhaps, along with her, the severing of his connection to his childhood religion), Wanderings of a Spiritualist. He toured extensively, lecturing on Spiritualism around the world. Conan Doyle’s assertions, and his apparent gullibility, were widely assailed by the press and the public. In October 1919, the New York Times, under the heading “Credulity Hard to Understand,” wrote:
Admirers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a writer of detective stories—a company about as numerous as readers of the English language—have reason for a peculiar grief because of the strange, the pathetic, thoroughness with which he has accepted as realities the “spiritualistic” interpretation of the phenomena of trance speaking and writing. There is little of the mysterious and nothing of the other world in these phenomena for modern psychologists, and yet this well-educated and intelligent man—with not a little of the scientific and the philosophic, too, in his mental furnishings—talks much as did the followers of the Fox sisters [notorious fraudulent psychics of the nineteenth century] fifty years ago.
Conan Doyle’s personal experiences with communication with the dead made him impervious to these criticisms. In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924), he wrote,
People ask me, not unnaturally, what is it which makes me so perfectly certain that this thing is true. That I am perfectly certain is surely demonstrated by the mere fact that I have abandoned my congenial and lucrative work, left my home for long periods at a time, and subjected myself to all sorts of inconveniences, losses, and even insults, in order to get the facts home to the people. . . . I may say briefly that there is no physical sense which I possess which has not
been separately assured.
Conan Doyle’s most recent biographer, Daniel Stashower, in the award-winning Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (1999), summed up Conan Doyle’s mission:
Many others felt as [Conan Doyle] did [about Spiritualism]; all but a few kept quiet about it. Conan Doyle’s sense of duty would not permit him to keep quiet. He had found solace in the face of devastating loss, and felt he must share it with others. The task would absorb him for the rest of his life. If this makes him a madman, so be it.
There were still a few more adventures of Holmes to be published (some said to finance the Spiritualism cause), and the last round of tales, commencing in 1921 with “The Mazarin Stone” and concluding in 1927 with “Shoscombe Old Place,” included some cases which critics found offered little challenge to Holmes’s talents; yet “Thor Bridge,” “The Retired Colourman,” and “The Illustrious Client” must rank among Holmes’s triumphs. The cases were collected in the last Holmes volume under Conan Doyle’s supervision, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, in 1927. One in particular, “The Sussex Vampire,” shows the marked differences between Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, as the latter rejects entirely the notion of supernatural intervention in his cases—“No ghosts need apply.”
Conan Doyle also wrote a science fiction story in 1927. The Maracot Deep, set in Atlantis, seems to express Conan Doyle’s frustration with the public’s reception of his Spiritualist message. A very personal Spiritualist book, Pheneas Speaks, which details spirit messages delivered through his wife, was published that year as well. In 1928–1929, Conan Doyle and his family toured Africa, and he produced a book (Our African Winter) covering both his psychical researches there and his political and economic commentary on the continent. His last Spiritualist tract (The Edge of the Unknown) was published in 1930, but at last Conan Doyle’s seemingly inexhaustible pen came to rest. In 1929, he toured Scandinavia and Holland but returned to England exhausted, and there he suffered a heart attack.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 3