Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“Waiting from month to month for the next adventure of Sherlock Holmes was agony!» exclaimed the poet laureate John Masefield. But that agony paled beside the pain readers felt during what is now the Great Hiatus, the decade between 1893 and 1903 when Arthur Conan Doyle stopped writing about his beloved detective.

Doyle was proud of the popularity of his Sherlock Holmes stories, of course, and pleased with their financial success. But after writing two dozen tales in less than two years, the strain of dreaming up new plots had become wearing. In 1893, readers learned of Holmes’s apparent death in a story entitled “The Final Problem”. Summing up the sentiments of millions, one fan described the moment as “life’s darkest hour”.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, the second of ten children. His mother, Mary Foley Doyle, counted the kings of France and Britain among her ancestors. His father, Charles, also gave Arthur a family legacy to be proud of. Charles was the son of the most popular cartoonist in London, and his brothers were all extremely successful. However, Charles was the unfortunate exception. Never much of a provider, he slipped further and further into alcoholism and was finally consigned to a nursing home in 1879.

The responsibility for Arthur’s education fell to his mother and his godfather, Michael Conan. They settled upon Hodder House, a preparatory school for Stonyhurst, and a respected Jesuit college. There the young Doyle put his energies into sport and academic work, yet still produced good exam results, and when he left in 1874 he received an invitation to study in Austria. The year abroad proved a refreshing one for Doyle. He returned ready to find a career that would help support his mother, brother and five sisters. “We’ll aim high,” he wrote to his mother. In 1876 he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine.

The course, Doyle later lamented, was “one long weary grind at botany, anatomy, chemistry and physiology» with little practical application. The great exception were the classes taught by Dr Joseph Bell, who, after observing a patient for a few minutes, was able to identify not only his ailment but his profession as well. Bell later served as the model for Doyle’s exceptionally observant sleuth.

To counter the boredom of medical school, Doyle learned to create diversions, and he did so with characteristic enthusiasm. He continued the writing he had begun at Stonyhurst, and in 1879 he saw his first story in print. In addition, he sailed on two voyages as a ship’s doctor even before he earned his medical degree in 1881.

In 1882 Doyle set himself up as a private practitioner in a sparsely furnished house in Plymouth. Undaunted by his lack of money or patients, he plunged into the life of the community with gusto. In 1885 he married a local woman, Louse Hawkins.

Encouraged by the publication of one of his stories in 1884,

Doyle continued to write fiction and completed his first novel,

‘The Firm of Girdlestone’, in 1886. That same year, he sold a

Novella introducing a wily detective named Sherlock Holmes.

By 1890 Doyle was being wined and dined by some of the most prominent editors in London. By 1991, after the publication of ‘The Sign of Four’, Doyle and his detective were household names. At the same time, however, Doyle did not feel successful. In fact, he was so discouraged by the initial response to ‘A Study in Scarlet’ that, in 1888, he decided to give up writing and take up a new branch of medicine.

After studying ophthalmology in Vienna, Doyle decided to practice as an eye specialist in London. Once again he sat, day after day, in a consulting room devoid of patients. And once again he put his idle hours to good use. With an advance from ‘The Strand’ magazine, Doyle wrote the first six of the Sherlock Holmes adventures.

When the Boer War began and Great Britain sent forces to protect its colonies and claims in South Africa in 1899, Doyle was immediately stirred to action. He was, as one biographer explains, “thrilled to see what he had so often described - the clash of two armies.” He was equally eager to serve the Crown. Rejected for combat duty because of age, Doyle went to war as a surgeon, treating war casualties under horrendous conditions.

After returning from South Africa, Doyle wrote another great Holmes adventure, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, and his fans went wild. Eager readers besieged libraries; printers, working round the clock, couldn’t keep up with the public’s demand for the tale.

Still, Doyle did not consent to bring Holmes back for another two years. Then, in 1903, an american publisher offered him $5,000 for one story. «Very well», Doyle replied, and he never again abandoned Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Doyle wrote 32 more adventures, a play based on The Speckled Band, and another novel, ‘The Valley of Fear’, before he died in 1930. He also began to take on Holmes’s work in real life, serving as a consulting detective for Scotland Yard.

At the beginning of 1916, Doyle launched what amounted to a crusade for spiritualism. In addition to writing seven books and countless articles on the subject, he addressed audiences all over the world. Eventually the strain caught up with him. On July 6, 1930, the last of a series of heart attacks seized him. When he awoke the next morning, he insisted on being moved from his bed to an armchair, where he died at the age of 71, upright as always.

When Sherlock Holmes thought the end was near at the Reichenbach Fall, he remarked rather cheerfully: “I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain... The air of London is sweeter for my presence.”

The same could be said of Arthur Conan Doyle: the air of London - indeed, the world - is much sweeter for his presence.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16