February 13, 2005

Churning out stories fraught with mystery and thrill is no mean feat; it takes special skill

SHERLOCK Holmes is the world’s most popular detective character. This famous fictitious character was first created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his story Study in scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.

Sir Arthur was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Doyles were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family, who had a prominent position in the realm of art. Charles Altamont Doyle, Sir Arthur’s father, a chronic alcoholic, was the only member of his family who, apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note. At the age of nine Sir Arthur was sent to England where he was educated in Jesuit schools and eventually lost his faith in Catholicism in favour of his Jesuit training. He would later use his friends and teachers from Stonyhurst College as inspiration for creating characters in his Holmes stories. In those difficult years of boarding, Sir Arthur realized that he also had a talent for storytelling. He was often found, surrounded by a throng of totally enraptured young students, listening to the amazing stories he would make up to amuse them. Sir Arthur graduated in 1885 as a doctor from the Edinburgh University. He had an inborn sense of humour and sportsmanship.

Sir Arthur’s family tradition would have dictated the pursuit of an artistic career, yet he decided to follow a medical one. This decision was influenced by Dr Bryan Charles Waller, a young lodger his mother had taken in to make both ends meet. In his student life, he met many future authors like James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the man with whom he was greatly impressed was one of his teachers, Dr Joseph Bell. Therefore, most of his qualities were later found in Sir Arthur’s celebrated detective character Sherlock Holmes. During his studies Sir Arthur tried his pen at writing a short story The mystery of Sasassa valley, which was published in an Edinburgh magazine called Chamber’s Journal.

After graduation, Sir Arthur was employed as a medical officer on the steamer Mayuba, a battered old vessel navigating between Liverpool and the west coast of Africa, but soon gave up that position. During the next few years he managed to divide his time to practise medicine and to become a recognized author. In August 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins. He described her in his memoirs as gentle and amiable.

In March 1886, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle started writing a novel which flung him to fame. At first it was named A tangled skein and the two main characters were called Sheridan Hope and Ormond Sacker. Two years later the novel was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, under the title A study in scarlet which introduced us to the immortal characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Sir Arthur followed his first novel in 1890 with The sign of four and then in 1891 The adventures of Sherlock Holmes was incrementally published by The Strand Magazine. His works were met with public approval and he soon became quite popular. In fact, he would eventually, in the 1920s, become one of the highest paid writers in the world. But the massive initial popularity had an affect on Sir Arthur and in spite of everyone’s entreaties, the amazingly prolific but very impulsive author decided to get rid of Sherlock Holmes. In The final problem, published in December 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged to their deaths at The Reichenbach falls. As a result, 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine.

When the Boer War started in 1899, Sir Arthur settled on to go as a volunteer. He had written about many battles but had never had the opportunity to be a part of any one of them as a soldier. So he felt this would be his last chance to do so. Not surprisingly, being somewhat overweight at the age of 40, he was deemed unfit to enlist. But he didn’t give up and without losing an instant, he volunteered as a medical doctor and sailed to Africa in February, 1900. There, instead of fighting bullets, Sir Arthur had to wage a ferocious battle against bacteria. During the few months he spent in Africa, he saw that soldiers and medical staff died more of typhoid fever than from war wounds. The great Boer War, a 500-page chronicle, published in October 1900, was a magnum opus of military scholarship. Besides being a report on the war, it was also a highly intellectual and well-informed annotation about some of the organizational shortcomings of British forces at the time. On his return to England, Sir Arthur found his way in politics but to his credit he lost the election by only a narrow margin and went back to London and continued as an author.

To the delight of thousands of frustrated fans, The Strand Magazine published the first episode of The hound of the Baskervilles in August 1901. The novel became, and is to this day, a worldwide sensation. A year later, King Edward VII knighted Conan Doyle for services rendered to the Crown during the Boer War. His lingering deep desire for public service made him go for a second attempt at politics in the spring of 1906 but he lost the election once more.

After Louisa died in his arms on July 4, 1906, Conan Doyle slipped into a devastating state of depression which lasted many months. He disentangled himself of his misery by trying to help someone in a worse condition than he was. His intolerance to prejudice made him to write another crime story The case of Oscar Slater, in 1912.

In 1907 Doyle married Jean Leckie. After this marriage his literary production slowed down significantly. After some years he tried to resurrect his literary works and write a number of plays including Brigadier Gerard, The tragedy of the Korosko, The house of Temperley but neither of them did well. To make-up for his considerable financial losses, Conan Doyle set out to write a fourth play, but this time with Sherlock Holmes. At first he called it The Stonor case but later named it The speckled band, which was well known and achieved great successful. After the success of this play, Conan Doyle chose to retire from stage work and tried to concentrate more on fiction.

After a couple of years Conan Doyle produced his next creation, a science fiction, The lost world, the story of a delightfully outrageous Professor Challenger involved in a amusingly humorous adventure, with a number of other highly amiable characters, stranded in a mysterious region of South America, discovering prehistoric fauna and flora. In those days, the term ‘science fiction’ had not been originated, so when Conan Doyle wrote this story, in his mind it was a ‘boys’ book’. Another four novels about Professor Challenger’s adventures followed The lost world.

The second full-length Sherlock Holmes novel, The valley of fear, was serialized in The Strand Magazine in early 1914. But that novel failed to satisfy Conan Doyle’s readers as Sherlock Holmes’s character was absent in most part of the novel.

Conan Doyle foresaw a war with Germany, so he sent articles to the newspapers to have the military in standby and gave his views to the navy about some new untested warfare; but his intelligent forewarnings were judged to be “Jules Verne fantasies” by most naval experts. As soon as the war broke out, Conan Doyle was then 55, offered to enlist again. He was denied his wish once more, but set out to organize a civilian battalion of over a hundred volunteers. When the navy lost more than a thousand lives in a single day, his brilliant mind never at rest, Conan Doyle made suggestions to the War Office to provide ‘inflatable rubber belts’, and ‘inflatable life boats’. He also spoke of ‘body armour’ to protect soldiers on the front. Sir Winston Churchill wrote to him extending his gratitude for his ideas.

In 1914, another Sherlock Holmes novel The last bow was published. In this tale, Sherlock Holmes infiltrates and vanquishes a German spy-ring, a timely war propaganda story.

Sir Arthur gained interest in the world of science fiction and spiritualism. After 1918, because of his deepening involvement into the occult, Conan Doyle wrote very little fiction, writing arduously about spiritualism instead. In later years he spent over a quarter of a million pounds in the pursuit of his esoteric dreams. In 1926 his famous character Professor Challenger appeared again in The land of mist, a novel of psychic adventures followed by The disintegration machine and When the world screamed. After two years he compiled his last 12 stories about the exploits of his immortal detective character in The case book of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1929 he was diagnosed with Angina Pectoris. Bedridden from that time on, he managed to have one last quixotic adventure on a cold spring day in 1930. He rose from his bed, and unseen went into the garden. When he was found, he was lying on the ground, one hand clutching his heart, the other holding a single white snowdrop. Sir Arthur died on July 7, 1930. Sir Arthur was one of those many prominent and talented people who created history and left immortal masterpieces of there extraordinary intellectual and creative power that will remain fresh forever.

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