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Summary
Summary
Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's name is recognized the world over, for decades the man himself has been overshadowed by his better understood creation, Sherlock Holmes, who has become one of literature's most enduring characters. Based on thousands of previously unavailable documents, Andrew Lycett, author of the critically acclaimed biography Dylan Thomas, offers the first definitive biography of the baffling Conan Doyle, finally making sense of a long-standing mystery: how the scientifically minded creator of the world's most rational detective himself succumbed to an avid belief in spiritualism, including communication with the dead.Conan Doyle was a man of many contradictions. Always romantic, energetic, idealistic and upstanding, he could also be selfish and fool-hardy. Lycett assembles the many threads of Conan Doyle's life, including the lasting impact of his domineering mother and his wayward, alcoholic father; his affair with a younger woman while his wife lay dying; and his nearly fanatical pursuit of scientific data to prove and explain various supernatural phenomena. Lycett reveals the evolution of Conan Doyle's nature and ideas against the backdrop of his intense personal life, wider society and the intellectual ferment of his age. In response to the dramatic scientific and social transformations at the turn of the century, he rejected traditional religious faith in favor of psychics and séances -- and in this way he embodied all of his late-Victorian, early-Edwardian era's ambivalence about the advance of science and the decline of religion.The first biographer to gain access to Conan Doyle's newly released personal archive -- which includes correspondence, diaries, original manuscripts and more -- Lycett combines assiduous research with penetrating insight to offer the most comprehensive, lucid and sympathetic portrait yet of Conan Doyle's personal journey from student to doctor, from world-famous author to ardent spiritualist.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lycett, biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas, turns his attention to the father of detective stories in this enjoyable if densely packed biography. From his early years in Edinburgh to his life at boarding school, Conan Doyle developed a love of storytelling and mythology. After finishing medical school, he turned to writing as a way to explore his paradoxical interest in spiritualism and science. While writing his first Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," published in 1886, Conan Doyle continued to practice medicine and tend to his growing family. Lycett shows that Conan Doyle often viewed his laconic detective's stories as inferior to his other work, which included everything from the social novel to a history of Britain's involvement in WWI. With his detailed descriptions of the Doyle family tree, Lycett often overwhelms the reader with names and dates, but fans won't be disappointed with his unearthing of the origins of the famous detective's name (fellow student Patrick Sherlock and Oliver Wendell Holmes) or Conan Doyle's associations with everyone from Oscar Wilde to Harry Houdini. Those looking for a close reading of the Holmes canon should look elsewhere, but fans of the in-depth literary biography will find this a satisfying read. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The life of Arthur Conan Doyle from the first biographer to be granted access to the Doyle archives. The leading problem in writing about the creator of Sherlock Holmes is that Doyle always considered the detective stories that brought him fame and fortune inferior to his other writing, especially the historical novels and military histories by which he hoped to be remembered. Lycett (Dylan Thomas: A New Life, 2004, etc.) may not find a compelling balance between what Doyle thought was important about his life and work and what most readers will think important, but he does an excellent job rooting the Holmes stories in the financial and legal realities of their author's life. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four were among many projects the Edinburgh-trained physician planned to start his literary career. The first two series of Holmes short stories were written to order for a particular market; and after killing his tiresomely superior hero off in 1894, Doyle resurrected him only when it suited the requirements of a story he had already planned (The Hound of the Baskervilles) or as a means to some ready cash (the last three volumes of short stories). Lycett's access to archival material sometimes threatens to overwhelm his portrait in minutiae, and his schematic portents (history, faith and family "were to battle for supremacy in Arthur's personality") are seldom persuasive. But his handling of newly available information on the uneasy triangle involving Doyle and his first and second wives; his checkered relationship with Harry Houdini, the debunker of spiritualism whom Doyle persistently and mistakenly claimed as an ally; and the tangled web of copyright lawsuits of film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes are all welcome. Not by any means a new Doyle, but a familiar one supported by a wealth of new detail. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* How did the man who created the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen end up an evangelist for spiritualism? As daunting a mystery as any ever faced by Sherlock Holmes, this conundrum finally yields to the acclaimed biographer of Kipling and Dylan Thomas. Lycett explains Doyle's peculiar life trajectory by probing a divided mind strongly committed to scientific rationalism, yet hungry for some metaphysics to fill the void created when he abandoned his childhood faith. One part of Doyle's psyche claimed literary prominence by transforming memories of an observant medical-school professor into the famous Baker Street sleuth. But submerged mental appetite pulled Doyle toward paranormal possibilities, such as the mind-over-matter powers of the sinister Swede dominating an obscure early tale. Thus, when the author decided to investigate spiritualism scientifically, he was linking two disparate passions. Lycett recognizes the pathos when Doyle distressed by the carnage of World War I abandons his objectivity and embraces spiritualism. That pathos discolors much of Doyle's later life, when he styled himself as a new Saint Paul and quarreled with a skeptical Houdini. Fortunately, Holmes remained untouched by his creator's spiritualist enthusiasms, even in stories Doyle penned late in life. A sophisticated and fascinating life study.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to be remembered for more than Sherlock Holmes. Too bad for him. "KILLED Holmes," reads a complacent entry in Arthur Conan Doyle's journal for 1893. 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. That was the idea, anyway. 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. 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. Watson, who actually wrote the tales. In the topsy-turvy afterlife of reputation and esteem, Holmes is the one doing the killing. 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. 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. 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. The title of Andrew Lycett's biography announces that, unlike some of his predecessors, he won't build a case for Conan Doyle's significance by diverting our gaze from the fun at 221B Baker Street. In "The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," Lycett, a former foreign correspondent (and biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming) gives a scrupulous, authoritative account of how an undistinguished doctor from Portsmouth climbed to the pinnacle of late-Victorian literary fame. Born to an Irish family in Scotland in 1859, Conan Doyle derived what Lycett calls his "fantasist" streak from his mother, who had a genius for telling stories, and from a childhood devouring Poe's mysteries, Verne's sci-fi adventures and Sir Walter Scott's historical romances - all genres he later explored. His reverence for fact and logic was rooted in his medical training at Edinburgh, where the most colorful bunch of professors this side of Hogwarts exposed him to their powers of deduction, zeal for forensics and enthusiasm for cocaine. But "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. 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. 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. 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. This intersection with the zeitgeist makes Conan Doyle significant and interesting. Yet not long after a popular outcry and pots of American money led to Holmes's resurrection, a sense of anti-climax besets Lycett's story. 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"). 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. One letter Lycett cites provides the strongest reason yet to suspect that Conan Doyle was sleeping with the woman who would become his second wife, even as tuberculosis was killing his first one. Other letters document his stingy, high-handed treatment of his children. Lycett doesn't stint on the details of Conan Doyle's growing political and cultural conservatism, his puffy gentleman's vanity (which frequently smacks of Gilbert and Sullivan) or his reinvention as the globe-trotting St. Paul of spiritualism, which left him "in danger of becoming a bore." Well before his death in 1930 that danger seemed amply realized. 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. Jon Lellenberg (the American agent of the Conan Doyle estate), Daniel Stashower (author of a 1999 biography, "Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle") and Charles Foley (Conan Doyle's great-nephew and the estate's present executor) have assembled a 706-page volume of correspondence, "Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters." Marketing concerns presumably steered them away from a fitter if less salable title - like, say, "A Massive Document Dump for the Conan Doyle Completist." "Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as any of his own adventure tales," the editors write in their introduction. If that was the case - and based on Lycett's dogged research, I have my doubts - they've picked a funny way of showing it. Some of the letters are compelling, especially Conan Doyle's vivid account of working at a field hospital in the Boer War. But the book is hobbled by the fact that an overwhelming majority of his letters are addressed to his mother, forcing the editors to rely on extensive patching to make the narrative cohere. Worse, these missives tend to be either cloying ("the Mam" had long apron strings) or boring, touching bottom when he devotes an entire 148-word paragraph to the stained-glass windows in his new house. The sheer imposing weight of the book and the editors' indulgence of their subject make you think that here, at last, is Conan Doyle as Conan Doyle would want to be seen: a man of many parts whose diverse and lofty interests (including two campaigns for Parliament) merely happened to extend, now and then, to the odd detective yarn. The approach backfires. After endless pages of financial updates, cricket scores and assorted effusions to Mam, you begin to feel that a wiser man would have spent less time complaining about the shadow cast by Sherlock Holmes and more time feverishly thanking the literary gods for its existence. For in its absence, who would notice, let alone publish, humdrum notes like these? Conan Doyle might have been annoyed to hear it, but "The Hound of the Baskervilles" or "A Scandal in Bohemia" and all those other deathless stories are the finest tribute their author is likely to get, or deserve. The creator of the superrational Holmes regarded spiritualism as 'a natural extension of science.' Jeremy McCarter, the theater critic at New York magazine, is editing a collection of Henry Fairlie's writing.
Choice Review
Also author of Rudyard Kipling (1999), Dylan Thomas (2004), and Ian Fleming (1995), Lycett focuses here on the paradox of Doyle's life: the fact that he "[became] a spiritualist so soon after creating ... Sherlock Holmes." Accordingly, the book is liveliest when it takes up Doyle's interest in the paranormal (discussed by Kelvin Jones in Conan Doyle and the Spirits, 1999) and the Holmes stories (which have been thoroughly studied)--two strands that seldom meet comfortably in biographies of Doyle. Lycett betrays hostility to the academic discussion of fiction but rightfully doubts Doyle's claims to write serious "literature" (Holmes excepted). Lycett's Doyle is the quintessentially masculine Victorian--imperialist, reticent about personal feelings, unabashedly commercial in his writing, and only questionably devoted to domesticity. Hostility from the Doyle estate drove Lycett to unsatisfying conjecture and compromise, but he makes good use of letters and unpublished material. But in the end the book bogs down, strange given all the excitement Doyle's life could offer a biographer. An interesting afterword acknowledges some predecessors but omits mention of Daniel Stashower's Teller of Tales (1999)--a better read. Scholars still await a critical biography. Summing Up: Optional. Public libraries and comprehensive academic collections. B. Diemert Brescia University College
Library Journal Review
Released in the United Kingdom last year, this biography draws on thousands of previously unavailable documents-including correspondence, diaries, and original manuscripts-that Penguin published under the title Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters in November. In it, journalist-turned-biographer Lycett (Dylan Thomas: A New Life) presents a detailed, fact-filled portrait of Doyle (1859-1930), the prolific writer whose most lasting achievement was the creation of the character of Sherlock Holmes. For fans of Holmes and another of Doyle's famous characters, Professor Challenger (of The Lost World), this will be essential reading, though even this audience may be put off by Lycett's vast detailing of Doyle's large family, his later consuming interest in spiritualism, and his many pastimes and interests. Lycett at times seems disapproving of his subject, especially in his dwelling on Doyle's extramarital affair (with Jean Leckie, who became his second wife) and on his increasing obsession with spiritualism. Libraries should still keep John Dickson Carr's The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), one mystery master's appreciation of another. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries. (Introduction, family tree, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, and postscript not seen.)-Morris Hounion, NYC Coll. of Technology Lib. at CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. IX |
Family tree | p. XII |
Part 1 Taking In | |
1 Two Irish Families | p. 3 |
2 Early Years in Edinburgh 1859-1868 | p. 19 |
3 Stonyhurst and Feldkirch 1868-1876 | p. 29 |
4 Edinburgh University 1876-1881 | p. 48 |
5 On the Road-Ireland, West Africa and Plymouth 1881-1882 | p. 77 |
6 Bush Villas, Portsmouth 1882-1883 | p. 91 |
7 Marriage and A Study in Scarlet 1884-1886 | p. 106 |
8 Discovery of Spiritualism 1887-1888 | p. 133 |
9 Birth of a Daughter 1889-1890 | p. 154 |
Part 2 Cargo Stored | |
10 Vienna and London 1891-1892 | p. 171 |
11 Tennison Road, South Norwood 1892 | p. 194 |
12 Swiss Interlude 1893-1894 | p. 210 |
13 America, Egypt and Undershaw 1894-1897 | p. 221 |
14 Jean Leckie 1897 | p. 245 |
15 Boer War and Aftermath 1899-1901 | p. 259 |
16 The Hound of the Baskervilles to Louise's Death 1901-1906 | p. 281 |
Part 3 Giving Out | |
17 Edalji, Second Marriage and Windlesham 1907-1908 | p. 315 |
18 Pre-war: From Cornwall to Canada 1909-1914 | p. 342 |
19 First World War 1914-1918 | p. 378 |
20 Spiritualist Mission 1919-1924 | p. 400 |
21 Bignell Wood and Death 1925-1930 | p. 431 |
Afterword | p. 463 |
Acknowledgments | p. 475 |
Notes | p. 479 |
Select Bibliography | p. 505 |
Index | p. 511 |