Holmes’ Doyle by Sir Shane Leslie

Conan Doyle, by Pierre Nordon. Holt, $7.95

WITH SUCH FULL BIOGRAPHIES already written about Conan Doyle by Hesketh Pearson and Dickson Carr, it seems surplus to add to the number. However, a_ professor at the University of Nantes has rewritten all that preceded him and added much gleaned over the years since. Readers who require Professor Nordon’s settled views will be happier reading his deep erudition as expressed in French. It is immensely difficult to make a French academician of any kind talk or write in English. Hesketh Pearson and Dickson Carr make far easier and no doubt less erudite reading. Professor Nordon has _ penetrated archives and garnered unpublished material. His book must be read for the correspondence from Winston Churchill, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. Footnotes bearing the illuminating word “unpublished” place him ahead of his predecessors. Those who remember the arrival of Sherlock Holmes in the Nineties enjoyed his adventures as much as Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines. These stories were equally and totally successful, but out of them all only one single character (which Haggard and Stevenson lacked) took a place with some of Dickens or Scott —perhaps even to live longer than any of them. In the mid-Nineties English families omitted the name of Oscar at the font, but by the end of the century no male member of a Holmes family could escape being nicknamed “Sherlock.” No writer became more weary of his weanling than Doyle of Sherlock Holmes. In vain he dropped him. In vain he killed him. An adoring and paying public demanded his return in stories even unto sixty times. Biographers have now to decide the difference between author and creation, between the detective and the myth. Doyle and Holmes have become each other. In vain Doyle wrote novels of historical fiction to make the literary Valhalla he desired. Nordon writes heavily concerning all of them, but the tomb of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in all coming years will be surcharged with the features and character of Sherlock as he described him. The public would rejoice to find him in Madame Tussaud’s and Westminster Abbey. SIR ARTHUR was a British prophet in his way. However much described as a typical Englishman, he was deeply Irish—hence his fierce public essays in the causes of justice and chivalry. His patriotism led him to warn the English of what Germany was plotting and he inadvertently gave the enemy some striking hints, such as the effect of surrounding an island with the then little-known submarine. He was several years ahead, as the Germans confessed, in suggesting economic warfare. The Celtic soul in Doyle finally burst forth into a:crusade for spiritualism all over Canada, America, and Australia. For years he had studied Myers, Crookes, Lodge, Wallace—the few scientists who accepted psychical science. So ended a strong, tumultuous and mixed life, leaving his best friends and followers, and perhaps even himself, not knowing where he was. But the English knew where Sherlock would stand forever.

SL

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Sir Shane Leslie

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Conan Doyle, by Pierre Nordon. Holt, $7.95

WITH SUCH FULL BIOGRAPHIES already written about Conan Doyle by Hesketh Pearson and Dickson Carr, it seems surplus to add to the number. However, a_ professor at the University of Nantes has rewritten all that preceded him and added much gleaned over the years since. Readers who require Professor Nordon’s settled views will be happier reading his deep erudition as expressed in French. It is immensely difficult to make a French academician of any kind talk or write in English. Hesketh Pearson and Dickson Carr make far easier and no doubt less erudite reading. Professor Nordon has _ penetrated archives and garnered unpublished material. His book must be read for the correspondence from Winston Churchill, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. Footnotes bearing the illuminating word “unpublished” place him ahead of his predecessors. Those who remember the arrival of Sherlock Holmes in the Nineties enjoyed his adventures as much as Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines. These stories were equally and totally successful, but out of them all only one single character (which Haggard and Stevenson lacked) took a place with some of Dickens or Scott —perhaps even to live longer than any of them. In the mid-Nineties English families omitted the name of Oscar at the font, but by the end of the century no male member of a Holmes family could escape being nicknamed “Sherlock.” No writer became more weary of his weanling than Doyle of Sherlock Holmes. In vain he dropped him. In vain he killed him. An adoring and paying public demanded his return in stories even unto sixty times. Biographers have now to decide the difference between author and creation, between the detective and the myth. Doyle and Holmes have become each other. In vain Doyle wrote novels of historical fiction to make the literary Valhalla he desired. Nordon writes heavily concerning all of them, but the tomb of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in all coming years will be surcharged with the features and character of Sherlock as he described him. The public would rejoice to find him in Madame Tussaud’s and Westminster Abbey. SIR ARTHUR was a British prophet in his way. However much described as a typical Englishman, he was deeply Irish—hence his fierce public essays in the causes of justice and chivalry. His patriotism led him to warn the English of what Germany was plotting and he inadvertently gave the enemy some striking hints, such as the effect of surrounding an island with the then little-known submarine. He was several years ahead, as the Germans confessed, in suggesting economic warfare. The Celtic soul in Doyle finally burst forth into a:crusade for spiritualism all over Canada, America, and Australia. For years he had studied Myers, Crookes, Lodge, Wallace—the few scientists who accepted psychical science. So ended a strong, tumultuous and mixed life, leaving his best friends and followers, and perhaps even himself, not knowing where he was. But the English knew where Sherlock would stand forever.