July 23, 2005
The process of eliminating Holmes
A psychological tale on Conan Doyle is fanciful fun, says Nicholas Utechin
In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in the novelette A Study in Scarlet, but it was met with indifference. He published a second, longer Holmes story, The Sign of Four, in 1889, but it wasn’t until he reinvented Holmes in short story form, for The Strand Magazine, that a legend was born. By Christmas 1892 Doyle was arguably, as the voiceover claims on this week’s occasionally overwrought drama, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, “the most famous writer in the world”.
Doyle was happily married to Louisa (“Touie”) and they had two children. What could go wrong? A lot; and David Pirie, the scriptwriter, entwines a number of historical strings in Doyle’s life from 1893 onwards into a fanciful noose for his subject’s neck. Pirie has explored Doyle’s background before, writing the BBC series Murder Rooms — The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes. Here, he goes for psychological broke.
“People won’t stop talking about Sherlock Holmes!” says Doyle, believably portrayed by Douglas Henshall. “He takes my mind from better things,” Doyle wrote to his mother. “If I don’t finish him,” Pirie has him say more melodramatically, “he could finish me.” Visiting Switzerland in mid-1893, he saw the Reichenbach Falls and knew where to end Holmes’s life. Then Touie contracted tuberculosis, from which she died 13 years later. On October 10, Doyle’s father died in a mental hospital near Dumfries. He was an alcoholic and the Doyle scholar Owen Dudley Edwards declared on a radio programme I produced that he had probably beaten his wife. It is believed, but not proved, that Arthur signed the committal papers and blamed himself thereafter. Yes, 1893 was a bad year.
And so to The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. After his father’s death, Doyle visits a medium and meets a young woman called Jean Leckie (they did not meet until 1897, as it happens). Touie’s illness precluded sexual relations, and it is believed that Arthur fell deeply in love with Jean. What certainly never happened, but is the central plotline here, is that Doyle had a nervous breakdown caused by all these heavy pressures. His Strand editor, Greenhough Smith, assigns a writer called Selden (marvellously played by Tim McInnerny) to write a “biographical memoir” of Doyle and there follow plot twists involving Selden, which cannot be revealed.
Nearly 120 years after Holmes’s creation, and 75 years after Doyle’s death, there remains a stream of Sherlockian books, journals, multifarious societies and a belief at the BBC that scarcely a year should go by without resuscitating Holmes or Doyle in some form. This newest exercise does it for both of them, and though it is historically tendentious, it is rattling fun.
• The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, Wednesday, BBC Two, 9pm; Nicholas Utechin is the editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, see www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk for details