The creator of Sherlock Holmes physically resembled the detective's alter ego, Dr Watson, more than he did the sharp-voiced, hatchet-faced Holmes - except that he was tall and massive, while Watson was middle-sized. In character, too, they seem to have had a good deal in common, and they shared a common experience as military doctors. Doyle was also bluff, earnest, conservative, decent, reliable - not moody, intuitive and sarcastic like Holmes. All his life, his ideal was the English gentleman and he embodied many of the type's best characteristics as well as its blimpishness. In several senses he was bigger than life-size, and this lively biography makes the best of this.
In fact, Doyle was not really English: his parents were both Irish by descent and he was born in Edinburgh in 1859. His father, Charles Doyle, was the son of a well-known illustrator, Richard Doyle, and he married the daughter of his landlady. They had ten children, of whom seven survived - Conan Doyle was the second and most distinguished. His father originally had some career as a designer and surveyor, but alcoholism wrecked it, and later he was diagnosed as an epileptic and died in a lunatic asylum.
Wealthy uncles were responsible for sending young Conan Doyle to Stonyhurst, the famous Jesuit school, and then for a year to another Jesuit place in Austria. He loathed Stonyhurst all his life, but liked his Austrian interlude during which he learned to ski and play the tuba. From there he went on to study medicine at Edinburgh University, where one of his professors, Joseph Bell, used analytical methods which provided many clues for the personality and deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes. Before qualifying he made a voyage to the Arctic Circle in a whaler, as a kind of unofficial ship's doctor, and showed his boxing ability by flattening an obnoxious steward. Medicine, when he finally came to practice it, was an uphill struggle. Doyle worked mostly in provincial English towns, where at times he had to resort to the local pawnshops, and to supplement his income he took to writing stories. At first few of these were published, but he stuck steadily at it - Doyle did not give up easily - until his name began to appear regularly in print. Meanwhile, he married the sister of a patient, Louisa Hawkins, and continued to toil both at doctoring and literature. After taking an ophthalmology course, he set himself up in London as a specialist, but the venture was a disaster and writing became his mainstay. The Holmes stories began with short novels such as A Study in Scarlet and The Gang of Four, then slipped into the more familiar short format, and from the very first the public liked them. Doyle, who aimed at something higher than being a writer of detective stories, told his strongminded mother that he intended shortly to kill Holmes off, but was told: "You can't! You mustn't!" As the world knows, the Holmes-and-Watson series went on to fill several volumes and sells in millions today, while Doyle's more ambitious historical novels take second place and some of them are virtually forgotten.
The Brigadier Gerard books still appear in paperback from time to time, but how many people now read the chivalric romances The White Company and Sir Nigel, or Micah Clarke, set around the Monmouth rebellion in the 17th century? And Doyle's plays are entirely forgotten, though some were successful in their time and at least one of them made a useful vehicle for the talents of Henry Irving. He also wrote verse, a few examples of which got into period anthologies, but it merely shows him as an inferior Kipling.
Louisa developed consumption, which Doyle knew at once was a death sentence, and meanwhile he met and fell in love with a fellow-Scot, Jean Leckie. The relationship was not adulterous - Doyle was scrupulous on that point - and curiously enough, both his and Jean's families approved of the relationship (as long as his formidable mother lived, Doyle consulted her on virtually everything). Eventually Louisa died, and they married and lived long and happily together - his last words, spoken on his deathbed, were: "You are wonderful!"
He insisted on enlisting in the Boer War and served through it as an army doctor, later writing a history of the war which is distinguished by its uncritical chauvinism. His later books on the first World War were equally naive and unobjective. Doyle disapproved of Home Rule for Ireland, though not rabidly or unthinkingly, and he even stood twice - unsuccesfully - as a Unionist candidate for Parliament.
Writing in the Freeman's Journal, he stated his attitude clearly: "The Empire is in no sense an English thing. Scots and Irish have combined in the building of it, and have an equal interest in its immense future." Yet he hated the prospect of a knighthood, and would have rejected the offer of one except for his domineering mother, who told him that to refuse it would be an insult to the King.
He took a diametrically opposite view on Ireland to his friend Roger Casement, but when Casement faced death for high treason, Doyle busied himself with campaigning for a reprieve. Revelations of Casement's homosexuality did not daunt him, at a time when it was considered the ultimate in perversity : he was convinced that his former friend was mad. Doyle organised a petition which was signed by Chesterton, Galsworthy, John Masefield and Jerome K. Jerome; Kipling and H.G. Wells refused to do so, and Shaw preferred to write a petition of his own. It was all, of course, in vain and Casement went to the gallows.
DOYLE lost a son in the first World War, which enhanced his leanings towards spiritualism, spirit messages, automatic writing and the rest (he had lost his Catholic faith quite early in life). His wife shared his beliefs, which at times led him into sheer folly and public derision - as when he endorsed the authenticity of some obviously faked photographs showing spirit presences and even fairies. It was a side of him which went rather oddly with his robust good sense and his love of sports, which included boxing, cricket and skiing. A more positive achievement was his unofficial detective work on behalf of Oscar Slater, a small-time criminal who had been wrongly jailed for the murder of an elderly woman.
Overall, he was an engaging character who, inside his limitations, generally stood for truth and decency and did not lack courage, moral or physical. The fact that he survives largely as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and by that excellent adventure story The Lost World, would have grieved him; Doyle was a serious literary man, an admirer of George Meredith's mannered, euphuistic novels, and he lectured frequently in America and other places on contemporary literature. He would have liked best to be remembered as a writer in the company of Barrie, Shaw, Stevenson - all of whom were his friends.
His model for the Holmes stories were partly Poe's detective tales and partly the popular French writer Emile Gaboriau, and he freely acknowledged his debt, especially to Poe. But the Master of Baker Street has a firm niche in literature, along with Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Wodehouse's Jeeves, and there is more artistry, psychology and descriptive power in the series than is often acknowledged. In that genre, at least, Doyle showed himself a genius and millions of people are grateful to him. Even though he was driven in exasperation into killing his best creation, Holmes still persists in coming back to life.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic