THE MAN WHO HATED SHERLOCK HOLMES

Serious writers — the ones who actually occupied the commanding position Doyle envied — recognized that Holmes was extraordinary, though their wonder was tinged with condescension toward his creator. In Ulysses, James Joyce transmogrified the detective’s name into a loopy verb: “He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing him up.” George Bernard Shaw numbered Holmes among the three most famous men who ever lived (along with Jesus Christ and Houdini). T. S. Eliot remarked, “Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence” — and as for Arthur Conan Doyle, “what has he to do with Holmes?”

Most of the detective’s admirers agree. Near the author’s Edinburgh birthplace stands a statue of Holmes — and not Doyle. There have been more than twenty Holmes plays, well over a hundred Holmes movies, numerous television shows, a Broadway musical, and a ballet. John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Orson Welles collaborated on a recording of Holmes’s best stories. The detective’s face has appeared on a series of British postage stamps, and illustrations of his cases decorate the London Underground’s Baker Street station. At least fifty authors since Doyle’s death in 1930 have published additional Holmes cases, as though Doyle himself were incidental to the whole business.

Daniel Stashower, Doyle’s latest biographer, stops short of portraying his subject as “The Man Who Hated Sherlock Holmes.” But he does make it clear that Doyle thought little of Holmes — and accordingly, there is little of Holmes in Stashower’s Teller of Tales. Just as Holmes has a life apart from Doyle, so Doyle lived a remarkable life quite apart from his most famous creation. “I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded,” Doyle wrote, and this new biography proves the swagger justified.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born into a family of Irish descent and some distinction; his grandfather John Doyle had been the foremost political caricaturist of his time, and three of his uncles are mentioned in the Dictionary of National Biography: a historian, an artist, and the director of the National Gallery in Dublin. Doyle’s father, however, was a wreck — a surveyor whose alcoholism kept his family in poverty and who ended up in a madhouse. The boy’s wealthy uncles paid for his education at Jesuit schools in England and Austria, where he excelled in sports.

He then went on to study medicine at Edinburgh University, where he came under the influence of Dr. Joseph Bell, the model for Holmes, a surgeon who astonished his students with uncanny displays of observation and deduction. But the craving for adventure and the need for money prompted Doyle to interrupt his medical studies and sign aboard an Arctic whaler as a twenty-year-old ship’s surgeon.

His medical duties were not demanding, and, wanting to do what the real men did, he volunteered to help hunt for seals and whales. Once, off on his own, he fell into the frigid water. Desperately reaching up for the seal carcass he had been skinning, he pulled himself slowly back onto the ice; but as he was inching his way up, the seal was sliding down, and if it too fell into the water, he knew he would die. Doyle just made it to safety, and the brush with death, he was convinced, made a man of him.

After a seven-month voyage, he returned to Edinburgh and got his degree before enlisting for another stint as ship’s doctor, this time aboard a steamer on the Liverpool-West Africa route. After three months — and a bout with malaria, a crocodile hunt, a near miss with a shark, and a fire on the ship — he returned to look for prospects closer to home.

His prominent London uncles offered their assistance; they knew the best Roman Catholic families, and the right introductions would be invaluable for a doctor just establishing his practice. But Doyle had abandoned the Catholic faith, and he would struggle for nine years to make a success of his medical career.

His real gifts, however, lay elsewhere. Between patients and after hours, he began to write: stories of the Arctic and Africa; a novel about an Edinburgh medical student, The Firm of Girdlestone; the first Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887); a novel about seventeenth-century Puritans, Micah Clarke (1888); a chivalric romance, The White Company (1891); another Holmes novella, The Sign of the Four, which he knocked off in a month, stealing the time from his writing of The White Company.

Then in 1891 he hit upon the idea of doing a series of short stories about Sherlock Holmes. He quickly turned out one story after another for a popular new magazine, the Strand, and collected the first dozen in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Acclaim and money greeted his efforts; he gave up medicine to devote himself to writing — and not about Holmes. Historical fiction, “less remunerative but . . . more ambitious from a literary point of view,” was his higher calling, and in short order he produced a novel about the Huguenots and another about Napoleon, which enjoyed nothing like his Holmes success.

So, when in 1893 the Strand offered him £1,000 for twelve more Holmes stories, Doyle took on the job. But in the last of those stories, he deliberately signaled the end of his patience, sending Holmes plunging to his death off the Reichenbach Falls in the grip of the dastardly Professor Moriarty.

England mourned, often angrily. Holmes devotees wore black bands on their sleeves; twenty thousand readers canceled their subscriptions to the Strand; a celebrated cartoon portrayed a teary boy reading the last Holmes story in bed, devastated by “Life’s Darkest Moment”; a distraught lady attacked Doyle in the street with her handbag.

The author maintained that the detective’s death had been “justifiable homicide,” and he turned his hand to projects he considered more worthy. In time, however, he relented: Holmes surfaced again in 1902, with The Hound of the Baskervilles (set prior to the detective’s death), and the novel’s immense popularity induced the Strand and the American Collier’s Weekly to offer Doyle extravagant sums for more. Resurrection swiftly followed, and by the time Doyle was finished with Holmes in 1927, he had written four novels and fifty-six short stories starring the detective.

Sitting alone in a room and imagining the exploits of daring men, the author longed to be a daring man himself. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he tried to enlist, wanting to set an example, as he believed he had “perhaps the strongest influence over young men, especially athletic sporting men, of any one in England (bar Kipling).” The Army told him he was too old and too fat to fight, but he went as a doctor, heroically battling the South African typhoid epidemic under frightful conditions.

“It was difficult to associate him with the author of Sherlock Holmes,” a newspaper account declared of the impassioned Dr. Doyle, and his passion stayed with him after his return home. He published a best-selling history of the Boer War, and, in a sixty-thousand-word pamphlet written in a single week, he defended the British Army from charges of bar-barism. He even stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a pro-war Liberal Unionist, and he was knighted in 1902 for his wartime service. Tempted to spurn the honor, which “big men” like Kipling had no use for, Doyle finally gave in to his mother’s insistence that he accept.

Such meekness was an anomaly. Another bid for a seat in Parliament ended in defeat, but not ingloriously. In 1906, Doyle discovered the plight of George Edalji, a young Indian lawyer from the Midlands convicted of mutilating livestock and of forging threatening letters to himself and his family. Certain of Edalji’s innocence, Doyle wrote numerous letters to the newspapers, followed by a fervid pamphlet. Thanks to his involvement, the case soon became a national scandal. The papers all said it was as though Sherlock Holmes had rushed to Edalji’s side. In the end, a special government commission cleared Edalji of the animal mutilations but not of the forgeries, much to Doyle’s dismay.

In 1909, Doyle wrote The Crime of the Congo, again at white heat, assailing the horrors that the imperial regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II inflicted in Africa — “the greatest crime which has ever been committed in the history of the world.” Roger Casement, a British diplomat, Irish-born, who had spent twenty years in the Congo, goaded Doyle into action, and their cause became a bond of affection between the two men.

But in 1916, Casement was found guilty of soliciting German help for the Irish uprising and was sentenced to death. Doyle was sure that so good a man as Casement could never have committed treason unless he had gone insane, and on that ground he launched a campaign seeking leniency for his friend. Casement was hanged all the same, and Doyle’s defense of Casement probably cost him a place in the House of Lords.

There were plenty of other projects that engaged Doyle — from divorce law reform to an English Channel tunnel — but the public role that he is best known for is his apostleship of spiritualism. The creator of the reasoning mechanism that is Sherlock Holmes came to believe in spooks and fairies, and the widespread public response was not unexpected: Sherlock Holmes had gone barking mad.

As early as 1887, Conan Doyle displayed an interest in spiritualism, and he joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1893. He attended seances, investigated reports of ghostly activity, and was persuaded that the dead can communicate with the living. It was not until 1917, however, that he announced his conviction publicly. The timing was crucial: Everyone had lost loved ones in the Great War; Doyle’s nephew, his wife’s brother, his sister’s husband were killed in combat, and his son Kingsley, weakened by battle wounds, would die of influenza; the dead were constantly in every British citizen’s thoughts. Witnessing the losses and the grief, Doyle wrote,

I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.

There were, of course, charlatans who preyed on that affliction. But not even repeated revelations of flummery could disenchant Doyle. Stashower does his best to treat his subject’s convictions respectfully, but he cannot resist the conclusion that they were colored by self-delusion and even dishonesty.

Self-delusion did the most harm. Doyle’s credulity could be embarrassing, even to other spiritualists. In 1922, he wrote The Coming of the Fairies, in which he recounted the discovery two girls had made that there were fairies living near their Yorkshire village; the girls had even taken photographs, which Doyle pronounced irrefutable proof.

Stashower reproduces one of the photographs in his book, and it proves only that Doyle was far gone. In 1997, Doyle and the girls were dramatized in the movie Fairy Tale, a self-proclaimed “true story” starring Peter O’Toole. But, in fact, the women who in their girlhood had taken the pictures admitted their fraud in 1982, saying that they hadn’t disclosed the truth to Doyle because they had felt sorry for him: He was old and had lost his son, and he seemed to find comfort in the fantasies. A few days before his death of heart failure in 1930, he wrote, “The reader will judge that I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.”

“Conan Doyle Dies of Sherlock Holmes Fame,” a New York newspaper headline read. Fatal though it might have been to Conan Doyle, Holmes’s fame is itself undying, and one wishes Stashower had paused in Teller of Tales to consider why. For Holmes is a very strange hero — not the sort of man a reader would want to be or can really even imagine being. He is principally a hero of disinterested and all but disembodied mind. As Dr. Watson puts it in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes is “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.” In Holmes’s own words, “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”

Holmes’s mind is furnished like nobody else’s. He has set about learning everything that might bear upon his profession, and he knows all there is to know about 140 types of tobacco ash (“It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are rolled in Rotterdam”), tattoos (“That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China”), human ears (“In last year’s Anthropological Journal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject”), perfumes, footprints, and the way a man’s work affects the shape of his hand.

Yet what Holmes doesn’t know is as remarkable as what he does. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson is staggered to find Holmes has never heard of Copernicus. After Watson explains to him how the planets revolve around the sun, Holmes states that, now he has learned that happy fact, he will promptly forget it: The brain has only so much room, and he remembers strictly the facts he needs.

In later stories, however, he unrolls a formidable erudition that has no apparent connection to his work. He bends Watson’s ear with talk of miracle plays, medieval pottery, Stradivarius violins — he is a violinist and composer — Buddhism, and the warships of the future. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” he casually delivers a two-hour disquisition on Cornish archaeology.

The aspects of character that attend Holmes’s genius are both fascinating and repellent. He treats his own body with noble indifference, working himself to exhaustion, sometimes not eating for days when he is on the chase: “The faculties become refined when you starve them.” And Holmes’s mental faculties oversee the development of the moral ones. Virtue operates from the head down, and Holmes always keeps a cool head under fire.

With such strengths, however, come notable weaknesses. Holmes is prone to boredom, and when he gets bored he injects himself with a seven-percent solution of cocaine. Watson deplores this indulgence, but understands the need for it: Holmes’s drug use is “a protest against the monotony of existence when cases are scanty and the papers uninteresting.” Things that interest most people hold no appeal for Holmes. Love, indeed sexual desire of any form, is a distraction Holmes will have no part of. At the end of The Sign of the Four, when Watson tells him he is going to marry Holmes’s client, Miss Mary Morstan, the detective lets out “a most dismal groan.” He acknowledges that Miss Morstan is a charming young woman, but “love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things.”

Holmes is not Doyle’s only macrocephalic and great-hearted hero. Professor George Challenger, who appears in such science fiction as The Lost World (1912) and The Poison Belt (1913), has the biggest head that Ned Malone — Challenger’s Watson — has ever seen, and force of mind gives Challenger, like Holmes, an enviable vitality. Boldness of thought makes them daring in action, and it is such action that Doyle ultimately esteems over intelligence. Watson describes himself “tingling with that half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure” that he always feels when he joins Holmes on an adventure. Holmes and Challenger wield the intellect, while the reader gawks, as at feats of strength.

Doyle created heroes who made thinking seem as exciting as anything a man can do. And yet, for all the brain-power on display, Doyle’s thinking heroes rarely give the reader anything to think about. Indeed, the real point of the adventures is to give the reader anything to think about. Indeed, the real point of the adventures is to give the reader a break from thinking. In the preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, the final volume of Holmes stories, Doyle hopes he has given his audience “that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.”

And whatever claims Doyle might make for the seriousness of his “higher work,” it really is pitched at the same level as the Holmes stories. Doyle’s own favorite among his many books, The White Company, is the story of a fourteenth-century youth who is raised in a monastery but who leaves it to find out where in the world he really belongs. The book is a long testimonial to duty, honor, country, glory, and romantic love — all of which wither at Doyle’s touch. Action abounds, yet no life stirs. It is at last merely a boy’s book with pretensions, an exercise in the higher puerility, and a leaden one, at that.

It would scald Arthur Conan Doyle to hear it, but inventing Sherlock Holmes was the best thing he did. Holmes is an institution: the thinking hero modern readers have instead of Socrates. That might sound like more bad news for modern times, but it is not, in fact, entirely so. After one has forgotten who killed whom or who stole what and how and why — and when one reads the Holmes canon end to end, the adventures rapidly become a blur — Holmes lives, a glowing intelligence devoted to a noble purpose.

“In a modest way I have combated evil,” Holmes avers, and Doyle’s problem was to find actions and themes big enough for his character. The Hound of the Baskervilles is his triumph, with its discovery that some apparently supernatural evil is of human devising after all, raising the question whether that makes the world less frightening or more.

Perhaps it is Holmes’s experience of the world’s evil that changes him. When Watson first meets Holmes, the doctor notes that the detective has absolutely no reading knowledge of philosophy and no practical knowledge of gardening; when Holmes retires to a small farm in Sussex years later, “his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.” If only Watson had thought to ask his friend what he spent his leisure thinking about — then he might have had a real tale to tell.

Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Florida.