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The Doctor and the
Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
by Martin Booth
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography: "I
have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded."
In the years since his death, Doyle has been almost uniquely identified with his most
famous character, Sherlock Holmes, who remains among the world's most identifiable
figures, fictional or real. Doyle was much more than the author of the Holmes stories, but
his very success with the series has clouded nearly every attempt to address his life.
Martin Booth's The Doctor and the Detective redresses the balance. It's the first
full-fledged biography of Doyle, the first one not distorted by the lens of his Holmes
stories. Through Doyle, it offers an entertaining vision of the Victorian values that
underlie the stories, and it also illuminates the "variety and romance" of the
author's life: as a military doctor, a war correspondent, a spiritualist, a cricket
player, and a worker for social justice.
Booth begins with Doyle's grandfather, political cartoonist
John Doyle, whom he sees as the pivotal fount of the family's artistic genius. He quickly
moves through a description of Doyle's Jesuit schooling and his early talent for spinning
stories. Later chapters examine his discovery of the short story through reading Edgar
Allan Poe, his struggles and successes as his family's first medical doctor, and his
eventual recognition of the need for a new kind of fiction with "a scientific
detective, who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the
criminal." But, as Booth shows, the publication of A Study in Scarlet in
November 1887 was not the defining event of Doyle's life. As the novella emerged and
developed a small following, he entered politics and championed the Irish Liberal Unionist
cause. That same year he began experimenting with telepathy and published his first letter
in the journal of the London Spiritualistic Alliance. This latter interest would do as
much as--if not more than--Holmes did to shape the rest of Doyle's rich life.
Doyle's papers, briefly available to scholars, were
subsequently withdrawn. Studies based on those papers have been tightly controlled by the
Doyle estate, so much of the most private material has never seen print. Despite that
obstacle, Booth has done an excellent job of sifting through all of the public information
about the author, his family, and his associates to assemble a highly readable, often
entertaining narrative. What emerges is a portrait of a powerful man who helped define the
character of popular literature in the 20th century. Booth's book will likely remain the
definitive biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle until the author's papers are released in
their entirety. |
