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CONAN DOYLE:
THE MAN WHO CREATED SHERLOCK HOLMES
by Andrew Lycett

A ground-breaking new biography of the man who created Sherlock Holmes, drawn from private archives and previously unseen material.

Acclaimed biographer Andrew Lycett was granted unique access to the private Richard Lancelyn Green collection of Conan Doyle letters and documents, which have allowed him to produce the most comprehensive and revealing portrait yet. He explores in depth the troubled childhood, the alcoholic father who Conan Doyle concealed in his own autobiography, and the fraught personal life.

A vital element in Conan Doyle's life is the story of an essentially upright man's struggle to reconcile his passion for a beautiful younger woman whilst caring for a wife dying of tuberculosis. Conan Doyle depicts for the first time the true extent of this crisis, and the lasting impact it had on his family.

Inner conflict was a constant feature of Conan Doyle's life. His training as a doctor and work as a GP in Portsmouth steeped him in the same scientific reasoning as Sherlock Holmes. At the same time, after rejecting his parents' Catholicism, he could not shake off his belief in another dimension to existence. The clash of Victorian rationalism and ardent spiritualism was to become one of the defining characteristics of Conan Doyle. Andrew Lycett explains for the first time the development from seances and the Society for Psychc Research to his famous advocation of the Cottingley Fairies and his final position as a full and committed spiritualist.

But there were many other aspects to Arthur Conan Doyle: the sportsman who played for the MCC, the doomed businessman, the campaigner, and the historical novelist who considered Sherlock Holmes among his lesser achievements.

It will always, however, be for Sherlock Holmes that he is best known, and Conan Doyle depicts the genesis of the great Baker Street sleuth.

Andrew Lycett was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read modern history. As a foreign reporter he specialised in Africa and the Middle East. He has been a full-time author since the early 1990s, and has written acclaimed biographies of Dylan Thomas, Ian Fleming, and Rudyard Kipling.

THE QUIZ

E-mail your answers to sirhenry@telus.net to arrive no later that 25 September.
No correspondence will be entered into. The judge's decision is final.

1. During his time with Dr Elliot at Ruyton-XI-Towns in Shropshire, Conan Doyle wrote an essay for a competition. What was it titled?

2. In which of Conan Doyle's novels does the character of Mrs Westmacott appear?

3. Who was Lady Sunshine and who gave her that name?

4. 'I am prepared to believe that England is full of even such children, and that those who love them may welcome an attempt to picture them as they are.' Where did Conan Doyle write those words?

5. Which Canadian Railway Company was responsible for transporting Conan Doyle west on his trip to Canada in 1914?

6. Who was the photographer with whom Conan Doyle worked to produce the frontispiece for the first Hodder & Stoughton edition of The Lost World?

7. Where did Conan Doyle write: 'As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce a good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy, and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own emotions—especially on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the heart, for example, which are such an index to a man's character, and so profoundly modify his life—what space do they fill in any man's autobiography?

8. Conan Doyle's collection of medical stories, Round the Red Lamp, was published by Methuen in 1894. He had prepared a suggestion for the book's dust jacket on which the title was different. What was the title Conan Doyle originally suggested?

9. In September 1905, Conan Doyle was in trouble with the law—and not for the first time. What was his offence?

10. Who was the butt of Conan Doyle's jokes when he said this during a speech in 1910?: 'The writers of romance have always a certain amount of grievance against explorers. It is the grievance that explorers are continually encroaching on the domain of the romance-writer. There has been a time when the world was full of blank spaces, in which a man of imagination might be able to give free scope to his fancy. But owing to the ill-directed energy of our guest and other gentlemen of similar tendencies, these spaces are rapidly being filled up; and the question is where the romance-writer is to turn when he wants to draw any vague and not too clearly defined region. Romance-writers are a class of people who very much dislike being hampered by facts.'

11. Where is the plaque with the following inscription:

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
AUTHOR
1859–1930
WORKED
AND WROTE HERE
IN 1891

12. In which of Conan Doyle's novels does the character of Violet Wright appear; and why was her presence unwelcome?