Walking down a London street, Arthur Conan Doyle’s eye is caught by a stranger, his face in shadow. When the man turns, Conan Doyle sees he is grotesquely mutilated: one ear ripped clean away, his face wet with blood. An instant later, the man – if he existed at all – is gone. At the height of his literary success, the creator of Sherlock Holmes is left doubting his own sanity.
For Conan Doyle, as depicted in a new BBC drama, such moments of Gothic horror were all too common. In The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle, the bestselling author – played by Douglas Henshall – is a troubled man, at war with the fictional detective who made his name. Set in the 1890s, it describes a time in Conan Doyle’s life when the pressures of success, coupled with deep personal trauma, threatened to destroy him.
The source of much of Conan Doyle’s anguish was his relationship with his father, Charles Doyle, an alcoholic and epileptic. While Arthur was a boy, his father was kept shut away in the attic of the family home in Edinburgh. Later, Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, unable to cope with her husband’s behaviour, arranged for him to be locked up in an asylum.
‘In those days, there was no sensitive treatment of alcoholism,’ Henshall explains. ‘You were stuck in a sanitorium: an asylum, essentially. Arthur and his mother found themselves in a terrible position. This man was ruining their lives, but should they have released him from the asylum or not? In the end, they were both complicit in him being kept in there.’
When Charles finally died in 1893, Arthur – 34 and already a successful writer – was racked with grief and guilt. Soon afterwards he endured another bitter blow: his wife, Louise, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Conan Doyle, a qualified doctor, would nurse his consumptive wife for the next 13 years.
Later, Conan Doyle took an extraordinary step. With his wife dying, he decided to kill off the detective with whom he was indelibly, but annoyingly, associated. As he wrote to his mother: ‘I am weary of his name.’ He despatched Sherlock Homes to his death at the end of that year, in a short story called The Final Problem, in which Holmes plunges down a Swiss waterfall locked in a lethal combat with his old enemy Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of crime’.
Holmes fans were devastated. Mourners wore black armbands, while Conan Doyle himself was threatened and insulted. Unperturbed, he maintained that Holmes’s demise was justifiable homicide.
But why did Conan Doyle kill off the detective who brought him fame and fortune? ‘The history behind it was difficult to bear,’ says Henshall. ‘He associated Holmes with his father, and the guilt he felt about him became wrapped up in his writing. Also, Holmes was a cocaine addict. When his father died he wanted to get away from that.’
For Henshall, playing Arthur Conan Doyle brought back memories of his own family; not struggles with an ailing father, he says, but Conan Doyle’s closeness to his mother, the formidable Mary (played in the drama by Sinead Cusack). ‘Conan Doyle’s relationship with his mother was very important,’ Henshall insists. ‘I was brought up in a female household, with two sisters and a strong-willed mother, so, from that point of view, I can relate to him.’
Henshall, 39, was very close to his mother, who died eight years ago. Talking about her death publicly for the first time, the notoriously private actor softens. ‘She had a massive coronary while watching a documentary about Terry Thomas [the gap-toothed comedy actor]. You could say she died laughing. It took the ambulance men 15 minutes to get her heart started again. I was on stage in London at the time, and got home from a party to find she was in hospital. I knew it was serious.’
Rushing to Glasgow, Henshall joined his family at her bedside. ‘She was on life-support for 36 hours, but she didn’t regain consciousness,’ he says quietly, ‘Too much damage had been done in that 15 minutes. Then the doctors took out the tubes and turned off the machine that was keeping her heart going. It was quite nice, actually – as much as something like that can be. It brought us together.’
The gap left by his mother is evident. ‘She knew me back to front,’ he says wryly. ‘Mothers do, don’t they? Someone said to me, “Of course your mother knows how to push your buttons. She’s the one who sewed them on.” And that’s right.’ Had he been her favourite child? ‘I was the youngest, blonde-haired and blue-eyed. I was cursed from day one,’ he jokes. ‘I was certainly her favourite son.’
Playing Conan Doyle brought back memories of watching old Sherlock Holmes films as a child. ‘My mother was a huge Basil Rathbone fan.’ he remembers. ‘I loved him and Jeremy Brett [who played Holmes for television in the 1980s and 1990s]. But I’d never read the books until this. The stories were fantastic and I read them just for pleasure. I didn’t know much about Conan Doyle, to may shame, as I ought to have done. He was an extraordinary man.’
We meet at Ardgowan, an impressive stately home outside Glasgow. With its opulent rooms and air of genteel decay, it provides the perfect location for filming. Henshall, attired as a Victorian gentleman, also looks the part, complete with a prominent ginger moustache.
Growing up in Barrhead, near Glasgow, he first became with acting though the Scottish Youth Theatre. ‘It looked like great fun, but I never quite had the courage to audition. Then, a girl I had a massive crush on told me I’d look good on stage. I was easily flattered. I thought, “My God, maybe.” I auditioned, and realised she’d been very clever: they badly needed more guys. However, it got me in.’ And did it get him the girl? ‘It didn’t get me the girl – but it got me a career.’ At 18, abandoning his dreams of becoming a sports journalist, Henshall headed South to train at the Mountview drama school in north London. Still, success seemed a distant prospect. ‘I never went into this business because I wanted to be famous. The idea of success didn’t seem possible really.’ In fact, Henshall’s star has soared rapidly. His first big break was working with Dennis Potter in the acclaimed Lipstick On Your Collar, and since then he has starred in the Channel 4 drama Psychos. Currently on stage in Death Of A Salesman in London, playing Willy Loman’s troubled son Biff, Henshall seems tailor-made for moody, misunderstood heroes who set female hearts a aflutter.
Briefly married in his 20’s Henshall had a short but high-profile relationship with the model Sophie Dahl, whom he met during a radio production of Romeo and Juliet. His private life today remains – as he likes it – private. ‘When he was suggested for Arthur Conan Doyle, I thought he was perfect,’ confirms the drama’s writer, David Pirie. ‘he conveys a sense of physical and mental turmoil – Conan Doyle’s inner world, the stuff he doesn’t want to show.’
But how much of The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle is true? The BBC calls it a ‘fictional exploration’ – and, as the drama unfolds and a mysterious biographer arrives to solve the riddles of Conan Doyle’s life, it is clear that art is taking over from life.
Nonetheless, its themes are rooted in reality. As he grew older Conan Doyle became increasingly drawn to spiritualism. He attended séances, trying in vain to make contact with his dead father. Ironically, the man who, through the creation of Sherlock Holmes, displayed such breathtaking logic, preferred a far more ethereal approach in his own life. His spiritualist involvement was widely mocked when he endorsed pictures of fairies cavorting in an English garden – the photographs were soon exposed as fakes.
Conan Doyle’s relationship with Jean Leckie, a young Scotswoman, 14 years his junior, whom he met in 1897, is based on fact. He fell in love with a passion exceeding anything he had felt for his wife. But he still cared for the invalid Louise, pledging to nurse, cherish and be faithful to her until her death. His relationship with Jean remained platonic. Little wonder if, as David Pirie suggests, the author’s mind became unhinged.
Pirie believes that Conan Doyle suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. ‘I find 1899 a very interesting year in his life,’ he says. ‘He had been living in Louise’s sick room for years, while obviously madly in love with Jean. His books weren’t very successful at this point, and his reading public desperately wanted him to bring back Sherlock Holmes. The whole thing became untethered. There was no public breakdown; life continued solidly in the proper Victorian manner. But something was going on.’
By the following year, however, the crisis in Conan Doyle’s life was resolved. Aged 40, he determined to fight in the Boer War. Rejected as a soldier, he served as a doctor instead, tending injured British soldiers at Bloemfontein. Conan Doyle was shocked by the chaos and suffering of war, yet his own mental turmoil seems to have been relieved. By the time he returned, in 1900, his mind was calmer. The old haunting images, of bloodied faces and severed ears, were gone.
And, to the joy of his fans, he resurrected Holmes in The return of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound Of The Baskervilles, published the following year. The tale of the ghastly Dartmoor dog became a worldwide sensation and the most popular of all the Holmes books.
Louise died in 1906, and it was said Conan Doyle wept like a baby. A year later, he married Jean, the great love of his life. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘the sunshine of my Indian summer now deepens into a golden autumn’. As he neared his 50th birthday, the creator of Sherlock Holmes had faced his own demon