Arthur Conan Doyle

Partway through his writing career, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous literary creation, the ultra-rational detective Sherlock Holmes. The sleuth was taking attention from his more important works of literature, Doyle thought then.

Eventually he gave in to public pressure and brought Holmes back to life. But he also came around to thinking his greatest work for humankind was in a field altogether different from literature: the supernatural.

I don't know how Doyle would take the news today, more than a century later, that he is known almost exclusively for the fictional exploits of that one character who refused to stay dead.

Yet the birth of this literary phenomenon had been quite inauspicious. Sherlock Holmes and James Watson originally appeared in Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), published in a Christmas annual magazine and then in book form, but it was not particularly noted. A similar fate befell a sequel, The Sign of the Four (also known as The Sign of Four, 1890), which expanded the Holmes universe to include the Baker Street Irregulars.

Strand magazine
The Strand

It was Doyle's short stories, published in The Strand Magazine starting in 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) that started a popular following.

But already Doyle was tiring of turning out the consulting detective's exploits. Before, during and after writing Holmes fictions, he had been producing non-Holmes stories and novels. He especially considered his historical romances to be more worthy literary works from which his popular mysteries were distracting him. When he completed The White Company (1891), set during the Hundred Years War, he thought he had created a masterwork for which he would be remembered. And he was right—to an extent—as the thick novel was indeed well read into the middle of the twentieth century.

So his next collection of stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), ended with the tale "The Final Problem", in which Holmes is killed.

His boldest works

Doyle spent the next years writing his supposed great works, some of which actually were quite good. His play, A Story of Waterloo (1894), was a big success on stage. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1903) is a collection of stories written over the past decade satirizing a vainglorious soldier in Napoleon's army. Sir Nigel (1906) is a sort of prequel to The White Company and Doyle thought it surpassed the earlier novel, though it proved less successful.

His boldest works of this period, though, were not fiction. During the war between the British and the Boers in South Africa, he volunteered for service at a hospital, prepared for front-line service and ended up fighting epidemics in the war zone. As a result of his experience with ignorant British military leaders, he wrote articles calling for reforms to how Britain waged war. He also produced an objective evaluation of the campaign in a well-received pamphlet and a book, The Great Boer War (1900, revised and enlarged up to 1902). He was knighted in 1902, probably as a result of his work on the war.

Doyle also advocated against several miscarriages of justice, including the wrongful murder conviction of a German Jew in Glasgow that led Doyle to publish The Case of Oscar Slater (1912), calling for a pardon. His long booklet, The Crime of the Congo (1909), exposed murder and exploitation by Belgian colonialists in the African state.

Two Doyle plays based on the Sherlock Holmes stories were hits at home and in America. But the public was still thirsty for new stories and the demand could not be withstood. Doyle didn't exactly resurrect Holmes immediately but presented a case that took place before the detective's death. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) was a sensation serialized in The Strand and published as a book. It has become known as Doyle's greatest novel and been adapted for numerous films and television shows.

Holmes was brought back from apparent death for good in the 1903 story new "The Empty House" and he continued his detecting in other works later collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905).

These were followed by another novel, The Valley of Fear (1915), which only partly involves Holmes, and another collection of stories, His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917). The latter once again was meant to include, but did not, the final published cases of Sherlock Holmes. Another twelve stories appeared and were published together as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Sherlock's top challenger

All this time the prolific Doyle continued to produce high-quality fiction, although seldom to the acclaim reserved for his Holmes stories. The closest he came to creating an equally memorable character may be in his Challenger novels and stories.

Professor George Edward Challenger makes his first appearance in The Lost World (1912), a scientist as driven and intelligent as Holmes but different in almost every other way: flamboyant, impulsive, aggressive, disrespectful of manners—a bellowing bull of a man. He leads an expedition into the Amazon basin to discover a surviving prehistoric environment. Here, we have the founding of a sub-genre of science fiction, providing material for movies and television adaptations ever since.

Other Challenger works expanded the character's standing in speculative fiction, though an altogether different area of Doyle's interest began to affect this as well as all his writing.

Arthur Conan Doyle photo in later life
Doyle in later life

In his later life, after all his fictional work extolling rationality and his careful analytical nonfiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became a great follower of the irrational. Personal tragedies led him to seek the counsel of mediums and he became a convert to the supernatural—which he clung to despite the debunking of the charlatan mediums of his day by his friend Harry Houdini and others.

At the most ridiculous extreme, as shown in The Coming of the Fairies (1921), he supported the claims of two young girls who became famous for supposedly photographing fairies frolicking in the Cottingley woods.

His spiritualist work he considered his most important. "From the moment that I had understood the overwhelming importance of [the reality of the afterlife] and realized how utterly it must change and chasten the whole thought of the world when it is wholeheartedly accepted, I felt...that all other work which I had ever done, or could ever do, was nothing compared to this," he wrote.

The world must not have accepted this, wholeheartedly or otherwise, for Doyle's involvement in the paranormal has become his least achievement—dismissed with embarrassment, if mentioned at all. And at the top of his many real achievements, the world still places his creation of Sherlock Holmes.

— Eric

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