Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
Daniel Stashower
Allen Lane, £18.99, 496pp
Buy it at BOL
Daniel Stashower begins this biography where the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have wished, with his posthumous life. Five days after his death, on July 8 1930, over 6,000 people crammed into the Albert Hall in the hope that the famous author would communicate with them from beyond the grave.
On the only empty chair in the hall was a card that read "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle". The medium Estelle Roberts, an old associate of Conan Doyle, took the stage and embarked on a long, inspired monologue. At the climax of her performance, she cried "He is here! He is here!" All eyes fixed on that chair. She had a message from Arthur, she said, but apparently it was for his family only. As she murmured confidentially to them, his widow reportedly smiled serenely.
Arthur Conan Doyle claimed that he would most like to be remembered for his promotion of spiritualism. Sometimes perplexedly, Stashower tries to do justice to his subject's strange priorities. He has spent time "dutifully slogging", as he puts it, through Conan Doyle's copious writings on ectoplasm, "spirit communications" and the like.
It is sometimes droll, sometimes mad stuff. What this book lacks is a way of seeing Conan Doyle's obsession as a symptom of his age. Stashower vividly retells Conan Doyle's early flirtations with spiritualism as a Southsea GP, having lost his Catholic faith; yet he only glimpses that Conan Doyle is not untypical. Indeed, the Society of Psychical Research, to which Conan Doyle was to belong, was a haven for leading late-Victorian intellectuals; with religious belief damaged beyond repair by science, reason had to find something beyond the merely material.
Conan Doyle was himself puzzled as to why any intelligent reader would prefer a detective tale dashed off in a few days to one of his historical novels, composed by sequestering himself with works of scholarship. Stashower does not plead for the literary merits of, say, The White Company (the heroic deeds of English bowmen in the 14th century) or Micah Clarke (the autobiography of a 17th-century Puritan soldier). Sherlock Holmes dogged Conan Doyle, partly because the tales of detection that he wrote for The Strand Magazine were so lucrative that he could not abandon them.
The great sleuth, sent toppling over the Reichenbach Falls, had to return (gloriously, in 1901, in The Hound of the Baskervilles). Yet Conan Doyle was also an indefatigable campaigner and polemicist, penning pamphlets about miscarriages of justice and endless letters to newspapers about improvements to the armed services. After travelling to South Africa, he produced his 500-page The Great Boer War. It was as an energetic apologist for British actions that he was awarded his knighthood in 1902; later he wrote a five-volume history of the first world war.
His life beyond writing was full of unlikely achievements. He travelled on a whaler to the Arctic and on a cargo ship down the west coast of Africa. He was a founding member and goalkeeper of Portsmouth Football Club and played cricket for the MCC, once bowling out WG Grace and writing a poem about the encounter. (Stashower skates over the sporting achievements.) He was a pioneer of downhill skiing. He went ballooning and flying, and was one of the first people in Britain to be fined for speeding in a car.
He was also a great befriender of other writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, JM Barrie, Bram Stoker. He had a "golden evening" with Oscar Wilde at the end of which he and Wilde agreed to write something for the editor who was paying for their dinner. Wilde's contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray; Conan Doyle promised more adventures for a detective called Holmes, who had appeared once, in A Study in Scarlet.
Stashower gives a strong sense of Conan Doyle's commercial acumen as a writer, and of the ways in which this shaped his output. He was to spend much of his earnings on the cause of spiritualism, dedicating the last two decades of his life to polemicising for the cause. Latterly, his credibility was damaged by his support for two Yorkshire schoolgirls who famously produced photographs of themselves with fairies: Conan Doyle saw not cutouts, but proof of a population "only separated from us by some difference of vibrations". He wondered whether "psychic spectacles" might reveal the world of fairies to everyone.
There are undeniably rich materials here, pacily narrated by Stashower, although done scant justice by his carelessness about providing sources. Yet it is difficult to see that this life adds anything new to, say, Martin Booth's equally full and readable account published in 1997. Conan Doyle's eccentric descendants have long since denied access to to the piles of manuscripts (especially letters) they still own. He seems to have known everyone who was anyone; if his papers ever become available, it really will be worth writing his biography again.
