Doyle, Arthur Conan

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DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN (1859–1930), British writer.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most widely known writers in the world, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22 May 1859. Doyle was a man of three nations: Irish by descent, Scottish by birth, and English by allegiance.

Beginning in 1870, Doyle was educated at the Roman Catholic school Stonyhurst. In 1875, Doyle went to a Jesuit school at Feldkirch in Austria. Having decided to become a doctor, the following year in 1876 Doyle enrolled at Edinburgh University, from which he received his Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1881. In 1882, he announced to his family that he had abandoned Catholicism. An adventurer, Doyle traveled to the Arctic in 1880 and to West Africa in 1881. In 1885 he was awarded his doctoral degree from Edinburgh University, having written his dissertation about syphilis.

During the time he was launching his medical career, Doyle began writing. An early story was published in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine in 1883. By 1891, Doyle had decided to leave medicine and devote himself full time to writing.

Doyle's achievements as a writer are marked by the range of forms in which he wrote. These include detective novels and stories, stories of medical life, histories, poems, historical novels, science fiction novels, writings about spiritualism, tales of terror and horror, and texts about contemporary events. In addition, he published an autobiography, Memories and Adventures, in 1924.

Doyle is renowned for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle modeled Holmes on one of his professors at Edinburgh University, Joseph Bell. Doyle was fascinated by the way Bell exercised logical observation to deduce the illnesses and diseases of his patients. Ultimately, Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels about the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, most of them narrated by his friend Dr. John H. Watson, with whom he shared rooms at the immortal address 221B Baker Street.

These writings about Sherlock Holmes span the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods. Holmes first appears in the novel A Study in Scarlet in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual. The three other novels about Holmes are The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Valley of Fear (1915). The short stories about Holmes begin with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the Strand Magazine in July 1891. Holmes's decadent qualities, such as his cocaine use, become muted in the middle-class Strand. These Strand short stories were collected in five volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Although many of these stories focus on crime (murder, theft, blackmail, terrorism, espionage, counterfeiting), not all these narratives do involve overt criminality. Rather, they concern transgressive behavior, which may or may not be strictly illegal or criminal, albeit amoral or immoral. For example, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (December 1891), Neville St. Clair impersonates a beggar even though he lives in the suburbs with his family, impelled because he is attracted by the transgression itself.

While engrossing, these tales are not escapist. Through them, Conan Doyle addresses many cultural agendas. Because Holmes is not part of the official police force but rather a private consulting detective, his methods may involve procedures that are illegal. The stories imply that law and justice are not mutually compatible. Holmes bests men such as Lestrade from Scotland Yard, raising the question of the ability of the official force to maintain order.

Multiple cultural situations are probed in these narratives. For example, the issue of gender relations is very prominent. Often, nefarious men as in "The Speckled Band" or "The Copper Beeches" try to cheat women out of their income or property, resorting to imprisoning or murdering women. Doyle questions privileged male authority at a time when women were securing educational, legal, and marital reforms.

Hence, many of these stories police masculinity and male behavior, as in "The Three Students." The damaged male body in many of these stories, such as "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Crooked Man," The Sign of Four, or Watson's own shifting wound, symbolically reveals Doyle's concern with masculinity in crisis. This crisis had repercussions for the British Empire. Although Doyle supported British imperial campaigns such as the Boer War (1899–1902), it is noteworthy that criminality often originates in a colonized region only to devolve to England, as in The Sign of Four.

In many of these narratives, England is menaced by foreign nations and nationals. The threat of international espionage, a major concern as British imperial power waned, appears in many stories, such as "The Naval Treaty," "The Second Stain," or "The Bruce-Partington Plans." Fear of Germany is evident in "The Engineer's Thumb." Organized crime or global terrorist societies are a focus in such tales as "The Five Orange Pips," "The Red Circle," or The Valley of Fear. Despite Doyle's assertions of admiration for America, Americans are deceiving or deadly in several stories, including "The Yellow Face," "The Noble Bachelor," "The Dancing Men," and A Study in Scarlet. As "The Dancing Men" demonstrates, Holmes does not always succeed.

Doyle's other writings comprise a variety of literary forms. He strongly aspired to be an historical novelist in the vein of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Kingsley. Some of these efforts include The White Company (1891), set in the fourteenth century; its prequel Sir Nigel (1906); and Micah Clarke (1889), about the attempt by the Duke of Monmouth to seize the English throne in 1685. Despite Doyle's belief in these novels, they do not endure as do the Sherlock Holmes texts.

In another literary form, Doyle wrote adventure tales verging on science fiction, such as The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926). Doyle dealt with the Napoleonic era in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1903). He authored dazzling short stories of terror and horror, collected in such volumes as Round the Fire Stories (1908) and Danger! And Other Stories (1918). Doyle's tales about medicine in Round the Red Lamp (1894) are exceptional. The Great Boer War (1900) shows Doyle's engagement with contemporary issues. His Collected Poems appeared in 1922. As a committed spiritualist, Doyle wrote a number of volumes about the movement, such as The New Revelation (1918), The Coming of the Fairies (1922), and The History of Spiritualism (1926).

Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his services as a doctor during the Boer War (not for authoring the Sherlock Holmes stories). Illustrious and rich, Doyle died on 7 July 1930. While he is famous for the Sherlock Holmes narratives, Doyle's achievements in so many different literary forms render him one of the most important writers of his age.

See alsoCrime; Great Britain.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle. Edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. London, 1982.

——. "Filmed Interview" (c. 1929). Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective. (A&E Biography). New York, 1985.

——. Memories and Adventures. Edited by Richard Lancelyn Green. London, 1988.

——. Round the Fire Stories. San Francisco, 1991.

——. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by Harold Orel. New York, 1991.

——. The Horror of the Heights and Other Tales of Suspense. San Francisco, 1992.

——. The Oxford Sherlock Holmes. Edited by Owen Dudley Edwards, Richard Lancelyn Green, W. W. Robson, and Christopher Roden. 9 vols. Oxford, U.K., 1993.