Books

One hundred twenty years ago this month, a little novel called A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in London. Its principal characters were Sherlock Holmes, who styled himself "the world's first consulting detective," and Holmes' recently acquired roommate, John H. Watson, a pensioned-off army doctor who was recuperating from a bullet wound he got in Afghanistan.

A Study in Scarlet was a modest success among Beeton's readers and the first evidence that its author, Arthur Conan Doyle, M.D., might someday achieve his fond goal: to shut down his financially struggling medical practice and win glory and fortune as a full-time literary man.

At the time, he had no plan to write more about the eccentric genius detective and his medical sidekick. They were to be a one-shot thing, just a way to break into print and earn a little money. The young Conan Doyle's ambition was higher than his whodunit. He wanted to write "real literature," especially fat historical novels in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, not mere entertainments for the masses.

Over his long career, Conan Doyle indeed would write his historical novels, a few almost as good as Scott's. He would write real history as well, and journalism about medicine and politics and war and sports, and science fiction and horror stories, and bad poetry and dozens of propaganda pamphlets and thousands of letters to various editors.

He would be a sportsman, an enthusiast of cricket and automobiles and motorcycles and photography, a champion of almost everything "progressive" or new. He would have two wives and five children. In his later years, he would become a crackpot evangelist for spiritualism, the fad religion of his time, and a gullible defender of fraudulent mediums. He would lecture to huge crowds worldwide.

But, to his chagrin, it always was more Holmes and Watson that his public really wanted. It was the detective, not the "serious" novelist, that drew the crowds to the lecture halls.

Despite his jealousy of Holmes, Conan Doyle was no fool. Owning the detective was like having an oil well in the backyard. Whenever in want of cash, Conan Doyle need only dash off another batch of Holmes adventures and the money would flow. So, over four decades, he wrote four novels and 56 short stories about the residents of 221B Baker St.

Nevertheless, while enjoying the cash that Holmes generated, Conan Doyle's resentment of him never went away. The creator even tried to destroy his creation. In 1893, in a story called "The Final Problem," Holmes supposedly plunges into the abyss of the Reichenbach Falls in a death grip with the Napoleon of crime, Professor Moriarty.

The day he finished writing that story, Conan Doyle wrote in his notebook: "Killed Holmes."

Soon afterward, he wrote to his mother: "If I had not killed Sherlock Holmes I verily believe that he would have killed me."

His mother was distressed. The world went into mourning.

Fortunately for Conan Doyle and for us, Holmes didn't stay dead. And, if the author's shade still exists in that spiritual netherworld in which he believed, we hope he's grateful. For despite his many other accomplishments, it's almost entirely because of Holmes that we care about Arthur Conan Doyle today. Several biographies of varying thoroughness and style have appeared since his death in 1930. Two new ones, together totaling more than 1,100 pages, are new in the stores in time for Christmas.

The livelier one, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, is what its title says: a biography told mainly through the subject's correspondence, from boyhood to death, interspersed with short explanatory and supplemental narratives written by the authors. One of them, Jon Lellenberg, is the Conan Doyle estate's representative in the United States; Daniel Stashower is an award-winning mystery writer; Charles Foley is Conan Doyle's great-nephew and the present administrator of his estate. All are members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the great club of Holmes devotees founded in 1934. (The Irregulars have spawned Sherlockian societies around the world, including the Diogenes Club of Dallas.)

Perhaps because of their obvious love for their subject and concern for his image and personal reputation, it's easy to suspect Messrs. Lellenberg, Stashower and Foley of overprotection in their choice of letters. Conan Doyle wrote to hundreds of people. Why are most of the letters in the book to and from his mother? And the authors, in their own narratives, glide too slickly over some of the more controversial aspects of his life. The extent of his spiritualist fanaticism, for instance, and the nature of his premarital relationship with his second wife, Jean Leckie.

But Conan Doyle was, even in private correspondence, such a lively and engaging writer, and his voice so firm and clear, that even the most tepid Sherlockian will traverse this book's nearly 700 pages with pleasure.

Which can't be said of Andrew Lycett's The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes.

Mr. Lycett, whose previous work includes biographies of such diverse literary figures as Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming, tries hard, too hard, maybe, to produce the definitive life of Conan Doyle. He apparently has scrutinized every extant Doylean letter, note, publishing contract, hotel bill, steamship itinerary and newspaper clipping. Much of this material is important, of course, some is interesting, but huge heaps are irrelevant and boring.

Mr. Lycett lines up thousands of such details and marches them down 400 dense, lifeless pages. So it's with guilty joy that the long-suffering reader, in the book's final line, beholds Conan Doyle, dressed in evening clothes, in his coffin at last.

The truth is, Sherlock Holmes remains astronomically more fascinating than the man who made him. And the most satisfying way to celebrate this 120th anniversary of his first appearance is: Take down your copy of the canon and reread "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." It's the world's greatest story of Christmas crime.

Author and journalist Bryan Woolley, a devout fan of Sherlock Holmes for 60 years, is member of the Diogenes Club of Dallas.

Jon Lellenberg,

Daniel Stashower

and Charles Foley

(Penguin Press, $37.95)

The Life and Times

of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Andrew Lycett

(Free Press, $30)

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