THOMAS QUINN July 22 2005
The sky was slate grey and threatening sleet on that fateful day I made my rendezvous with the gentleman in question. We sat huddled in a small shelter, keeping warm away from the wind that came at us across the Irish Sea. It was a bleak location.
At first, things went well between us. He seemed cheered by the prospect of having someone to talk to and, though there was a nervousness about the way he twitched his moustache – he wasn't used to wearing one, he said – I thought we had the makings of a good friendship. Until, that is, he revealed the truth about what happened between him and my dear friend, Sherlock Holmes.
Okay, this isn't quite how my interview with Dougie Henshall went, although it might have been, had I been some latter-day Dr Watson. Henshall, the man in the unwelcome walrus moustache – "I'll be taking this off as soon as we're finished," he grumbles in his undiluted Glaswegian – is, of course, a twenty-first-century actor rather than a Victorian man of letters.
We meet in this oddly remote location – like two refugees from Baskerville Hall – during filming of his first drama in Scotland since 1997's remarkable Orphans. This time, he is in period costume to portray one of our most famous literary sons.
The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes And Arthur Conan Doyle, on BBC2 next week, explores why the Scots writer took the remarkable decision to kill off the world's most popular fictional character by having him plunge from the top of the Reichenbach Falls.
Henshall fondly remembers reading the author's short stories as a schoolboy and, on accepting the role, decided to leaf once more through his mysteries. "It's great writing, it really draws you in," he says. "I think Conan Doyle deserves a wee bit more respect than he gets. It's funny though: Dickens is held up and so is Edgar Allen Poe, the only other short-story writer who comes close to Conan Doyle. But neither of them was superseded by his characters, whereas Sherlock Holmes certainly did supersede Conan Doyle."
What Henshall discovered about Conan Doyle came as a surprise to him. Like most, compared with Sherlock, he had only a sketchy idea of the author and not all of it was flattering. Late in his life, Conan Doyle spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof for the existence of fairies and the supernatural.
However, Henshall believes the author's earlier years reveal a character with his feet far more firmly on the ground than an interest in mediums and sprites would suggest. "He was very much a doer," he says. "Fun to be around, a big sportsman, a gregarious man and good company.
"He went through a real, wide experience of life from an early age. Did you know he went on a whaling ship as a doctor and then later signed up to serve as a doctor in the Boer War? He wanted to fight but failed the medical. He writes that Sherlock Holmes abhors a dull, everyday existence and I think that was inherent in Conan Doyle himself."
A short drive from where we are sitting is Hunterston House – a substantial if somewhat dilapidated Scottish Victorian manor which lies, sadly, in the brooding shadow of the local twentieth-century nuclear power plant. There, Tim McInnerney – who co-starred with Bobby Carlyle in last year's James VI tour de force, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot – is currently finishing off a scene as Doyle's would-be biographer Selden, in which he interrogates Dr Joseph Bell (a fine cameo by Brian Cox) about the author's early years.
Bell was the forensics expert and medical school mentor widely credited as the inspiration behind the sleuth. It is a classic encounter, the type Holmes himself might have had with a chief suspect. Which is appropriate, as Conan Doyle is as great a mystery as anything his famous creation ever investigated.
In his day, he was the most popular and successful writer in the world. By the time he came to write the third series of Holmes stories he was paid the equivalent in today's money of £1m – the kind of advance only a Dan Brown or a Jeffrey Archer could demand.
Yet, from the beginning, Conan Doyle was uncomfortable with the nature of his following and in particular with the fact his fictional creation was deemed to be greater than he himself.
So just what made Holmes such a well-loved fictional figure? And who or what inspired Doyle to invent him in the first place? For dramatist David Pirie, who wrote The Strange Case, Conan Doyle is far more complex than he at first seems. Pirie is clearly the driving force behind this new film: he has long been fascinated by his fellow Scot's life and works. He first discovered them in a second-hand book shop in his home town of St Andrews when he bought a faded 1950s copy he still has on his desk to this day.
More recently, Pirie went on to pen the successful BBC drama series The Murder Rooms, featuring a young Conan Doyle and his relationship with Dr Joseph Bell.
This new drama – something of a companion piece to that series – delves deeper into the writer's psyche than ever before.
"That same year, Conan Doyle's father died, at around the same time he decided to kill off Holmes," he says. "It's impossible to say which came first but there's good evidence he knew his father was dying and that the two things are linked."
Pirie's script explores just what Conan Doyle's father meant to the writer, his complex family relationships, which were largely hidden from public view, his problems with celebrity and how it all coloured his work. Pirie believes that, after the death of his father, Conan Doyle wanted to kill off Holmes to make a clean break from the past. Charles Doyle had made a modest living as a designer with Edinburgh council, but his drink problems came close to putting the family on the breadline.
While Bell is the best-known mentor who helped fill the gap left in Conan Doyle's life by his father, there is a third patriarch in the story.
Dr Bryan Waller was previously thought to be merely a helpful friend. But, according to Pirie, recent research shows that with Charles Doyle admitted to an asylum, Waller effectively became the new head of the family.
Pirie speculates how Conan Doyle might have felt about Waller's influence, especially with his mother, Mary Doyle, played in the drama by Sinead Cusack. "We have no evidence to suggest Waller and Arthur's mother were lovers but the implication is there." For Pirie, these three men must all have brought their own influence to bear upon Conan Doyle as he invented Holmes. The sleuth is, he points out, a patriarchal figure: cool and always ready with the answers. Dr Watson isn't so much his equal as his loyal surrogate son.
"The death of his father awakened a lot of guilt he'd been feeling about the fact he was in an asylum," Pirie argues. "His reaction appears to have been killing off Holmes."
But Conan Doyle's strife at that time was not limited to dealing with the demise of a parent – Holmes's grisly end also coincided with another devastating blow in his private life: his wife, Louise, falling ill with tuberculosis.
She struggled with the disease for several years, during which Conan Doyle met and fell in love with Jean Leckie. The two enjoyed an intimate but strictly platonic relationship – until his first wife died, after which they were married in 1907. "Conan Doyle was a man of honour," says Henshall, "and he was a man very much of his time. So he wouldn't dream of cheating on his wife – and yet he cared so deeply for her, he couldn't not have her in his life."
Pirie's film is clearly an attempt to capture all these conflicting emotions in Conan Doyle's life – while also proving to be a narrative with a clever twist of its own. But it is also part of an ongoing fascination with Holmes and the man who created him.
So what, I wondered, is the reason for the lasting appeal of the man in the deerstalker hat?
Pirie says: "Bram Stoker always blamed Dracula on a meal of undressed crabs and a bad dream, and Mary Shelley blamed Frankenstein on a bad dream. Those characters eclipsed their creators and I think there is a connection between these gothic archetypes because they draw on huge unconscious power.
"Holmes does the same thing. He is not a nightmare figure but he is someone who even today almost half the population assume is a real historical figure."