Arthur Conan Doyle

by Read Listen Learn

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is one of very few writers who invented a character more famous than he is. Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes: many people have read a story about him, where he solves a crime that the police find impossible to understand. Our grandparents watched film stars of the 1940s and ‘50s in movies made about his most interesting cases, just as we have watched ones produced in the last few years. If you read stories to help improve your English, you might even find some of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous cases, re-written in easier language. Only Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan are, perhaps, the same: characters who are better-known than their inventors. But the man who made Sherlock Holmes was also very interesting.

We all know that Sherlock Holmes used cocaine, gave poison to his dog, and played the violin very badly. If we saw him in the street, we would know him immediately because of his strange clothes and pipe. And, of course, he was often with his best friend, Dr. Watson. But he could also look so different that even Watson couldn’t recognise him.

But did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle also became a detective and solved a couple of very famous cases where people were in prison for crimes that they did not do? He also believed in fairies and ghosts, played cricket and football almost as well as a professional (and golf rather badly), had an affair with a young lady but would not touch her until his very sick wife died many years later, and was a very unsuccessful doctor. He hated Sherlock Holmes too and killed him in one of his stories – but had to bring him back to life ten years later because people were so angry that their hero was dead.

Arthur began life in 1859 in Scotland, although his father was half English and half Irish. When he was only five, he and his brothers and sisters had to stay with relatives because his father, a famous and intelligent artist, had lost all their money because of his heavy drinking. Three years later, they were together again and lived in great poverty until Arthur was sent to an expensive school by some rich uncles. He studied there for many years and finished his schooling in Austria. From 1876 to ’80, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then got a couple of jobs on ships as their doctor. In this way, he travelled to the icy cold of Greenland hunting whales and to West Africa.

In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle started his own medical practice with a friend but they got on so badly that he left and began one on his own. He married Louise Hawkins – always called Touie – and loved her very deeply. She gave him two children but became very ill with tuberculosis and, over many years, slowly died in front of him. In the meantime, Arthur tried very hard to make a success of being a doctor. He even went back to Vienna, where he had studied as a schoolboy, to specialise in ophthalmology – or diseases of the eyes. However, when he returned to England, he did not get even one patient. Perhaps, this was lucky, as Conan Doyle said himself: he spent his days working out complicated detective stories and writing them down.

His medical studies were not wasted though. The character of Sherlock Holmes was based on a professor of his at the University of Edinburgh, who was famous for his great skill as an observer. His name was Joseph Bell and he became one of the first forensic scientists, helping the police to solve many difficult cases. Robert Louis Stevenson, another famous writer who had studied to become a doctor at Edinburgh University recognised his famous teacher when he read one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and wrote to him to say so!

So, during the long and empty days when no patient knocked on his door, Conan Doyle wrote detective stories, some of them about Sherlock Holmes, and started to get a reputation as a writer and to become rather rich.

This did not stop him from working as a doctor and serving his country. He went out to South Africa and treated soldiers and sick civilians in the war there that Britain was fighting against the Dutch Boer farmers. He found time to write about Britain’s side in the war, as the country was criticised in many foreign newspapers as a cruel power. When the King made him Sir Arthur, Conan Doyle never imagined it was because of his popularity as a writer but because of the books he had written showing Britain’s reasons for fighting the war.

In the meantime, Conan Doyle was getting really bored with Holmes. He wanted to spend more time on his historical novels, which he thought were his serious work (but which nobody ever reads today). Although his mother told him again and again not to do it, he wrote a death scene for Holmes, where he fell off a mountain while he was fighting his most dangerous enemy, Professor Moriarty. A few years later, because his readers could not forget Holmes, he had to write a story and bring him back from the dead. He never stopped hating the character though.

By now, Touie, his loving wife, was very ill and for months she could not get out of bed. Conan Doyle tried everything to save her and blamed himself for not curing her. At the same time though, he had met a lively young lady, Jean Leckie, and started taking her to concerts. He had to be very careful because nobody could see them together in public, while he was married. Conan Doyle was a famous writer and he was not living in a time when married men could take younger ladies to restaurants or concerts. He really did not know what to do: he could not sleep with another woman while his wife was so seriously ill at home and could not stop seeing Jean. In the end, the couple decided that they would continue to see each other but would not even kiss. They used to meet at his mother’s house.

This arrangement was more than just a coincidence. Conan Doyle’s father had died in 1897 in a mental hospital. His drinking had pushed him into madness. But his mother was, of course, still married to him. She needed to make money to raise her children and rented rooms to people. One of her lodgers was Dr. Brian Waller. She slowly made a close friendship with him and even lived very near him for thirty years on his land – but she did not live with him in his house. We will never know exactly what their relationship was, but Conan Doyle, who often spoke about his mother and the fight she had to bring him up, never liked to mention Waller. However, he found himself in a very similar situation with Jean Leckie.

The year after Touie died in 1906, Conan Doyle finally kissed Jean and asked her to marry him. They later had three children and lived very happily together.

While Conan Doyle was married to Jean, he became very interested in the supernatural. This interest grew when Touie died, then his son was killed in the First World War, and his much-loved mother followed him in 1920. Conan Doyle believed more and more strongly as time went on that he could contact them. He was not the sort of man to keep quiet about his beliefs and spoke about them often in public. He got to know Harry Houdini and was sure that his tricks were impossible unless he was helped by the supernatural (although the famous magician tried to persuade him that they were only tricks). The newspapers laughed at Conan Doyle – even more when he said that he believed a photograph actually showed fairies. Many years after his death, it was proved a fake, but the great author argued long and hard that it was real. Of course, people thought he was mad.

Perhaps most interesting though was Conan Doyle’s decision to help a quiet lawyer who had gone to prison for butchering horses. The man wrote to him as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps thinking that a writer who could imagine the detective’s crimes and their solutions could also solve his. He was half Indian and the writer believed the police were too ready to think him guilty. Conan Doyle travelled to the village where the lawyer lived with his parents, and questioned the population and the police. He even stayed with the head of the police in the area and had a serious argument with him. He spoke to politicians, lawyers and judges. In short, he would not stop! He became the character in real life that he had written about in his novels and short stories. Eventually, the lawyer was set free. But this was not before Conan Doyle had forced the government to set up a court of appeal for people who had not done the terrible things they had gone to prison for. It is a part of the British legal system today.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930. He is now remembered mainly for Sherlock Holmes, the character he hated, but he lived a rich and surprising life himself too.