Reviews

• remarquable

  De loin, la meilleure biographie publiée à ce jour, qui s'appuie notamment sur la correspondance de Conan Doyle, peu exploitée jusqu'à ce livre.

• Well worth a read especially if you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes and/or Professor Challenger stories

  Conan Doyle was one of the literary lions of his age, and was a founding father of modern science fiction.

• Fascinating book. Well written. Thank you.

  Fascinating book. Well written. Thank you.

• Pure Reason And Its Underside

  I've always had a passing interest in Sherlock Holmes, based mainly on a couple of the stories read many years ago and their film versions forever cropping up late at night on old movie channels. Recently on a whim I picked up a boxed set of the original literature and, while working out in my home gym, slogged through CD audio readings of every one of the stories and novels in which Sherlock Holmes had appeared. With this experience, my passing interest morphed into active fascination, and I finally understood the worldwide and century-long preoccupation with in this remarkable character. What Holmes represents for us is nothing less than the personification of pure reason. In every one of his mysteries, he starts out with a bareboned pattern of seemingly trivial facts and from these derives the most complex and heretofore hidden realities. Logical deduction is his only method. Expounding once on his own craft, Holmes boasts that had he never heard of the Atlantic Ocean, he could in time deduce its existence by examining a single drop of rainwater on the window of his modest flat in Victorian London. Often he solves his cases without even leaving the confines this flat. He sits, smokes his pipe, plays his violin, and thinks. Then he arrives at his conclusions, which at least in the published stories, are invariably accurate to the last detail. What a mind! Brimming with renewed interest in Sherlock Holmes, I wanted to learn something about the British writer who had created him. Like many readers over the years, I was assuming that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had produced something of a self-portrait in his famous fictional character. After a bit of hasty Googling, however, I learned that Conan Doyle had in fact created more of an anti-self in Sherlock Homes. In contrast to Holmes the consummate rationalist, Conan Doyle was not only a spiritualist, but one who gravitated to the dodgier strata of the supernatural realm. He believed, for example, that fairies were real and had been photographed by two little English girls in 1917. Learning about this side of Conan Doyle disappointed me at first, but then I realized there was a weird psychological conundrum here that might be of some additional interest in its own right. I cast around for a biography and came up with this one by American writer Daniel Stashower. It was a pretty good choice. Conan Doyle had a troubled family background. He came from a family of successful artists, and his father too, Charles Doyle, was an illustrator of some talent, but he suffered from debilitating alcoholism and depression. He was committed to a nursing home when Arthur was still a teenager, and eventually died in a lunatic asylum. Luckily for Arthur, his mother was a strong woman who took charge of him. Their wealthy Catholic relatives provided limited support, but they were largely on their own because the extended family was embarrassed by Charles' condition and soon angered by young Arthur himself when he renounced formal religion at an early age. He was resourceful, however, and mustering what family help he still could, he got himself into Edinburgh Medical School. Upon finishing his training there and already exhibiting a taste for adventure, he signed on as ship's surgeon with a whaling vessel. It doesn't appear he did much doctoring on board, but he participated actively and with some gusto in the dangerous and bloody business of hunting whales. Upon returning home, he set himself up in medical practice in a town on the southern coast of England. The practice was at best marginally successful and left him plenty of free time to develop the writing skill he had already discovered in himself. It wasn't long before he was able to start supplementing his meager doctor's income with fees received from magazines for his short stories. Sherlock Holmes first appeared in a novella published in 1886, along with the faithful and plodding Dr. Watson, who was probably closer to being a true alter ego for Conan Doyle than was Holmes. From there, Conan Doyle was on a fast roll for the rest of his life because Sherlock Holmes immediately struck a powerful and enduring chord with the British and eventually American publics. Conan Doyle was to become rich and immensely famous on the strength mainly of this one fictional creation. Biographer Stashower paints a fond portrait of Conan Doyle. We see him as generous, kind, loyal, energetic and brave. People were forever bringing legal cases to him in the belief that he actually was Sherlock Holmes, and he took up several public crusades in support of individuals whom he considered victims of injustice in the courts. He was married twice and had five children. He fell in love with the second wife, Jean, while still married to the first, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Yet he continued to dote on Louisa, the first wife, and protected her by keeping the other relationship distant and platonic until Louisa finally after many years succumbed to her disease. He was a loving and devoted father. He was physically robust, adept at cricket and boxing, and was a pioneer of the then-obscure sport of "ski-running", which soon became popularized as "skiing" in part because of the worldwide publicity surrounding his enthusiasm for it. He considered himself a dedicated subject of the British Crown. When the second Boer War broke out in 1899, he dutifully tried to enlist as a foot soldier in the belief that he would be setting a good example for the young men of his country. When he was turned down because of his age and weight, too high on both scores, he took another tack and managed to sign on with a hospital unit bound for the war zone. Functioning as a battlefield doctor, he performed heroically under appalling conditions as typhus and other diseases ravaged British troops along with combat injuries from what turned into a surprisingly ugly, bloody and protracted conflict. Upon returning home, he applied his pen to writing a history of the war, explicating for a skeptical public the cause he believed their nation had justly defended. Even though members of the royal family were rumored to be fans of Sherlock Holmes, it was not this but his service as a propagandist that earned him the knighthood he was awarded in 1902. For all of Conan Doyle's admirable qualities, there is a sad and disturbing underside to his life story. For one thing, his own literary renown was galling to him, because it was based mainly Sherlock Holmes rather than what he regarded as his real artistic contributions. He was a prolific writer, capable of pumping out 10 to fifteen thousand words a day when in his groove. He was most proud of his voluminous historical romances, and also produced factual histories, plays, poetry, and science fiction. Some of this achieved moderate success in his lifetime, but literary critics were always lukewarm. Little of it is taken seriously today, and much of it is forgotten. So frustrated did he become with his own professional dependence on Holmes, that he took the drastic step of killing him off in one of the stories, only to have to revive him sometime later when he realized the firestorm he had set off among devoted followers. Conan Doyle also had a family and an upper class lifestyle to support, and the famous detective was his only reliable meal-ticket. If Conan Doyle revealed a streak of pathological naiveté in assessing his own talents, we can observe this streak growing into a dark river in his obsession with the occult. Not only was he open about his beliefs, he became a crusading champion for spiritualism and went so far as to found an organization he called the Church of Spiritualism in London. He promoted numerous psychics and mediums, and he exhibited an increasingly brittle and condescending attitude towards skeptics. Even though he came to call spiritualism his religion, he insisted his belief was not based on faith, because he "knew" the truth about psychic activity. Mr. Stashower treats all this with delicacy. He likes and respects his subject, and obviously did not want his biography to degenerate into a debunking exercise. Still, Conan Doyle believed not only in ghosts, but in fairies, and no biographer of the man can avoid coming to grips with this issue. Maintaining admirable objectivity, Mr. Stashower at no point openly opines on it, but in true Holmsean fashion, he lets the dry facts unfold for themselves. Virtually every one of the psychics Conan Doyle chose to stake his reputation on was at some point conclusively exposed as a fraud or else voluntarily came clean by explaining the magician's stagecraft by which he or she had deceived audiences or séance circles. The famous young fairy photographers, for example, both lived into old age, and finally in the 1980's admitted to reporters that they had faked the fairy tableaus with magazine cutouts and cardboard. The both said they had been amazed at the time that anyone, especially a person of Sir Arthur's renown, could have taken them seriously. They were ten and sixteen years old at the time and obviously less innocent than Conan Doyle was at fifty-eight. The cultural influence of Sherlock Holmes has only accelerated over the years. Today there is a TV show teleporting Holmes and Watson into modern day London, and still another casting Watson as woman. These shows air side-by-side with garish dramas about vampires, witches and zombies, revealing a simultaneous public thirst for rationalism and it's opposite. Conan Doyle's life is of interest today because it prefigures this modern tension. It would be asking too much of Mr. Stashower to explain the weird psychological roots of all this, but he does a good job of laying out the facts of the case for us to make of what we will.

• Superb condition

  The book was in pristine condition and looked brand new. Delivery was within a few days so excellent all round. Husband is thoroughly enjoying the book and cross referencing with others in his collection.

Purchase links