The impression left by Lycett’s biography that many of Conan Doyle’s exploits, like most of his non-Sherlockian efforts, deserve the obscurity into which they have fallen is only confirmed by the other book extracted from the new archival material.
But to the extent that this account of Conan Doyle’s later years holds much appeal, it lies in watching him gradually exhaust his biographer’s sympathy. The knighted and prosperous Conan Doyle wrote a few more valuable books, including the still-exciting dino-adventure, “The Lost World,” and performed some good deeds as when he used his Sherlockian sleuthing skills to exonerate a half-Indian man who’d been unjustly imprisoned (the incident that inspired Julian Barnes’s novel “Arthur and George”). Yet not long after a popular outcry and pots of American money led to Holmes’s resurrection, a sense of anticlimax besets Lycett’s story. This intersection with the zeitgeist makes Conan Doyle significant and interesting. Both Conan Doyle and Holmes, in their ways, personified the Victorian ethos that sent forth reason to make sense of a confusing and newly godless world, in the process allowing some old Romantic coloring to seep back in. Lycett’s elegant explanation is that, strange as it sounds, Conan Doyle regarded spiritualism as “a natural extension of science.” This insight sets up a curious twinning effect. Séances, spirit photos and other weird phenomena that Holmes (and many of the rest of us) would dismiss as mumbo jumbo proved an endless fascination. Photograph by Herbert Barraud/Getty Images (1934)īut “the central paradox of Arthur’s life,” as Lycett puts it, is that this trained doctor and inventor of the superrational Sherlock Holmes somehow fell completely in thrall to spiritualism. If Conan Doyle was right, and there are good reasons for caring about him that owe nothing to any moody, brilliant, resolutely unkillable superdetectives, we’re likely to find them here.Ĭredit. Mining an enormous trove of the author’s freshly released letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts and more, two new books depict his life in thorough and unprecedented detail. With the catalog of Sherlockiana growing by the year (lately, he’s starred in novels by Michael Chabon and Caleb Carr, to say nothing of television and the movies), Conan Doyle now gets his best chance yet to wrest some attention from his spotlight-hogging creation. In the topsy-turvy afterlife of reputation and esteem, Holmes is the one doing the killing.
Holmes seemed so real, so magnificently lifelike, that some readers thought he really existed, and even now a few like to say that Conan Doyle was merely the literary agent for Dr. In one of the sweeter ironies of modern fiction, the character who’d been marked for death would come to overshadow not just his creator’s other work but the creator himself. He had written “The Final Problem,” the story in which Sherlock Holmes takes a fatal plunge while grappling with the villainous Professor Moriarty, and was pleased to have freed himself and his readers to concentrate on his weightier, more serious work.
“Killed Holmes,” reads a complacent entry in Arthur Conan Doyle’s journal for 1893.
0 kommentar(er)
