The Prefabrication of Holmes

THE LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (304 pp.)--John Dickson Carr--Harper ($3.50).

Bound and writhing, Prussian Agent von Bork glared at his disguised captor and snarled:

"Then who are you?"

"It is really immaterial . . . but . . . it was I who brought about the separation between Irene Adler and the late King of Bohemia . . . It was I also who saved from murder, by the Nihilist Klopman, Count von und zu Grafenstein . . . It was I. . ."

Von Bork sat up in amazement. "There is only one man!" he cried . . .

Von Bork was right, of course: only the man from Baker Street could have outsmarted the whole German Intelligence system. And readers of this new biography will feel not only that Arthur Conan Doyle was the one man who could have created Sherlock Holmes, but that Doyle's whole life made the creation inevitable. For, as Biographer Carr clearly shows, Doyle and Holmes were at heart one & the same person.

Carr (an American who has spent most of his adult life in England) is the first biographer to get free access to Sir Arthur's huge stock of letters and manuscripts. Since Carr himself is a talented contriver of whodunits (as "Carter Dickson" he is also the creator of Detective Sir Henry Merrivale), mystery fans are likely to expect his Life to be first rate. They may be a little disappointed. The Life is highly valuable as the most definitive job to date, but some of its fine feast of facts has been spoiled by the way they have been dished up.

Where a more seasoned biographer would have stood aside as much as possible and let his eloquent hero speak for himself, Chronicler Carr has not been able to resist taking nearly all the words out of Doyle's mouth and saying them in his own less effective way. It is a tribute to Doyle that not even this defect is enough to prevent him from towering out of the pages as what he was--a many-sided, fascinating man whose stunning vitality and forcefulness mark him as one of the most striking as well as one of the last of the big Victorians.

Love That Scrubwoman! Conan Doyle was born (1859) in Edinburgh, the son of a frustrated painter who scraped a poor living in the civil service. Almost from the time he could toddle, the brawny boy was steeped in the favorite subject of Britain's poorer gentlefolk--the ancient and glorious past of the withered family tree. Impoverished Father Doyle claimed a relationship with the ducal house of Brittany. Little Arthur spent many of his juvenile hours memorizing the family coats-of-arms, while his plucky mama briskly scrubbed the floor and called out knightly maxims: "Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak!" "Chivalry towards all women, of high or low degree!"

The Doyles were Roman Catholics, and Arthur was sent to Britain's most famous Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst. He was imposingly robust: on one festive occasion he and three other Stonyhurst boys, barely in their teens, feudally consumed "two turkeys, one very large goose, two chickens, one large ham . . . two large sausages, seven boxes of sardines, one of lobster, a plate full of tarts . . . seven pots of jam . . . five bottles of sherry, five of port, one of claret and two of raspberry . . . We had also two bottles of pickles." Hellfire was the only thing that was ever known to scare little Arthur--and Mother Doyle soon fixed that by offering her son the hearty advice: "Wear flannel next your skin, my dear boy, and never believe in eternal punishment!"

Stuffed with romantic dreams of knightly prowess, passionately devoted to guns, swords and murder stories, young Doyle entered Edinburgh University as a medical student in 1876. Here, he fell under the spell of the man without whom Sherlock Holmes would never have existed, Professor Joseph Bell. It was Bell's favorite trick (and later, Holmes's) to guess who and what any patient was without being told. "This man," he would declare, "is a left-handed cobbler . . . You'll obsairve, gentlemen, the worn places on the corduroy breeks where a cobbler rests his lapstone? The right-hand side, you'll note, is farr more worn than the left . . ."

Young Arthur never forgot what Dr. Bell simply called the "trained eye." Meanwhile, he became a demon boxer, wrestler, rugby player. Before he got his medical degree he shipped on an Arctic whaler as naval surgeon, began the voyage by hanging a mouse on the steward's eye, ended it covered with snow and blood after charging a herd of seals with a poleax. "I just feel as if I could go anywhere, and do anything," he told his admiring mother.

Only Six in the World. What he actually did was set up private practice in a seaside town. His brother, Innes, aged 10, opened the door to patients--who came so rarely that when one day a pregnant woman shyly appeared on the steps, little Innes gave her one shrewd glance and screeched joyously: "Arthur! Hooray! It's another baby!" To while away the hours, Arthur began to write stories. "This morning after Breakfast," runs a typical note in Innes' boyhood diary of those days, "Arthur went downstairs and began to write a story about a man with three eyes, while I was upstairs enventing a new waterworks that will send rokets over the moon in two minutes . . . then it was a quarter past one, so, I had to go and put on the last potatoes the only six we had in the world."

In this period, two decisive events occurred in Dr. Doyle's life. The first followed his break with the Catholic Church, which had left him shaken and worried. One day, when he was wondering whether or not he should read Leigh Hunt on the comic dramatists of the Restoration (the Restoration was sometimes bawdy), he went to a seance. Unasked, the medium "received" and passed on to Doyle a "spirit-message": "Tell him not to read Leigh Hunt's book." Doyle was thunderstruck.

The second decisive event came when he decided to invent, for use in short stories, a scientific method of crime detection based on the deduction-by-observation habits of Professor Bell. He sketched out a short novel called A Tangled Skein, involving a detective named Sherrinford Holmes and a narrator named Ormond Sacker. Finally, because it sounded better, he changed Sherrinford to Sherlock, and Ormond Sacker to the simpler name of Dr. John Watson. He changed the story's title to A Study in Scarlet. Publishers Ward, Locke & Co. bought it outright (for -L-25) and published it in their Christmas annual of 1887.

Only the Dead Live. Like many another writer, Conan Doyle was convinced that his most popular pieces (the Holmes stories) were mere potboilers. Full of love of the vanished days of chivalry and armored knights, he poured his heart into what he considered his "serious" fiction: The White Company, Sir Nigel, Micah Clarke. But soon he realized that that man Holmes was stalking him as remorselessly as if he were a criminal. He tried to shake Holmes off by demanding "impossible" prices for Holmes stories--only to find that the publisher gladly paid up. Doyle became rich on Holmes--and sick to death of him. When doctors told him that his young wife would die of tuberculosis in a few months, he went to Switzerland with her. Earlier that year he had written The Final Problem, in which he drowned Holmes in a waterfall. The consequence was one of the bitterest, most ironic episodes in his life: as he sat beside his stricken wife, enraged readers showered him with savage letters, and mourned the dead Holmes by wearing crepe hatbands. Mrs. Doyle improved for a time, and her husband built her an elaborate house in the south of England.

By 1902, when he was knighted, Conan Doyle had grown into a grandiose private and public figure. His household became enormous, as he hurled his money and energy into corps of servants, stained-glass heraldic windows, horses, racing-cars, motorcycles and miniature railroads. His children were so terrified of him that once when his little daughter was prattling innocently about "the fertility of rabbits" she noticed one of her father's blue eyes appear around the corner of his morning Times and fix her with a look so deadly that she nearly fell out of her chair. The War Office regarded Doyle with much the same horror when, as early as 1900, he bombarded them with demands for reforms that seemed absurd to British Blimps: rifles (instead of sabers and lances) for British cavalry, foxholes for infantry.

Sherlock Doyle. In 1903, he was obliged to revive Sherlock Holmes--and the scenes at the railway bookstalls, says a contemporary, "were worse than anything I ever saw at a bargain sale." He demonstrated his own detective brilliance when a colored clergyman was sentenced to seven years in jail for a crime that Doyle was convinced he had never committed. Using Holmes's own methods, Doyle tracked down the real criminal and vindicated the imprisoned parson.

During and shortly after World War I, his son Kimberley and his brother Innes died; and, believing that mediums could put him "in touch" with them, the bereaved Doyle turned his whole strength into spiritualism.

With the support of his second wife (whom he married in 1907), he devoted more and more of his time to public lectures on the subject. It was this last of his many crusades that finally wore him out at 71; but those who thought that spiritualism had changed him into a benign old gentleman were often rudely brought to their senses. On one African speaking tour, he was escorted by his grown-up sons, Denis and Adrian, brawny six-footers who were more interested in girls than spirits. Said Adrian in a railroad carriage one day: "That woman? She's ugly." Next moment he fell back, slapped across the face by his 69-year-old father. "Just remember," said knightly Sir Arthur to son Adrian,* "that no woman is ugly."

* Who took chivalry lessons to heart, now agitates for the revival of jousting and likes to whack away at breastplated friends with two-handed swords (TIME, March 15).

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