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Contents Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Epigraph Preface Introduction 1: The Empty Chair 2: The Cobbler’s Lapstone 3: The Great Northern Diver 4: A Man of Doubtful Antecedents 5: Three Pounds of Furniture and a Tin of Corned Beef 6: “You Have Been in Afghanistan, I Perceive” 7: A Traveler from Slattenmere 8: A Singularly Deep Young Man 9: Reams of Impossible Stuff 10: The Two Collaborators 11: The Tremendous Abyss 12: A Skeleton in the Garden 13: Mr. Irving Takes Paregoric 14: Duet with an Occasional Chorus 15: Thoughts He Dare Not Say 16: The Helpful Mud Bath 17: The Footprints of a Gigantic Hound 18: The Bondage of Honor 19: A Perfectly Impossible Person 20: The Ruthless Vegetarian 21: England on Her Knees 22: An Audible Voice 23: The Flail of the Lord 24: Is Conan Doyle Mad? 25: Away with the Fairies 26: Pheneas Speaks 27: The Ectoplasmic Man 28: A Packet of Salts and Three Bucketfuls of Water 29: The Case of the Missing Lady 30: The End of the World Epilogue: A Well-Remembered Voice Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Also by Daniel Stashower Copyright For Miss Corbett—one last Conan Doyle anecdote Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence. Collins, after all, is more real to his readers than Cuff; Poe is more real than Dupin; but Sir A. Conan Doyle, the eminent spiritualist of whom we read in Sunday papers, the author of a number of exciting stories which we read years ago and have forgotten, what has he to do with Holmes? —T. S. ELIOT PREFACE Not long ago, in the London showroom of a dealer in rare books, I asked to have a look at a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. No price was posted, but I knew that a “bright and unrubbed” copy could go for £600, so my interest was largely theoretical. The assistant manager—an indulgent, friendly sort of person—opened the glass display case and waited patiently as I fingered the brittle volume. After a moment, when I handed it back, she mentioned that there might be some other Conan Doyle material in the back room. If I could wait a moment while she helped another customer, she would check with the manager. After five minutes or so, when my scan of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves brought me as far as Thackeray, I happened to find myself outside the manager’s open door. “There’s a customer out front,” I heard the assistant say. “He’s interested in Conan Doyle.” “Oh, God,” came the answer. “It must be an American.” I freely confess to being an American. But I’m not entirely sure why an interest in Conan Doyle should reveal this to a rare book dealer. Was it because only an American could afford the prices he was asking? Or was it, as his tone suggested, that only an American, with an American’s suspect tastes in literature, would be interested in a second-rater like Conan Doyle? It was not the first time I’d had this reaction. Many times over the past five years I’ve presented myself at British book shops and auction houses as a collector of Conan Doyle material—always taking care to look under D for Doyle, but also C for Conan Doyle, the compound surname he preferred. The response is invariably polite, but it generally carries a quiet note of sympathy, as though I’d just confessed some exotic intestinal complaint. “Conan Doyle? Well, Sherlock Holmes was brilliant, but Doyle went a bit potty at the end, didn’t he? Fairies, ghosts, and that.” “Fairies, ghosts, and that” have been the millstone of Conan Doyle’s reputation for the better part of a century. Toward the end of his life, Conan Doyle came to believe that communication with dead souls was possible. His efforts to spread this message, which he considered the most important work of his life, proved to be his undoing. The British public watched with growing incredulity as he made one foray after another into the spirit realm. On any given day he might pronounce upon a ghostly photograph of fallen World War I soldiers, or speculate on a possible literary collaboration with the late Charles Dickens. In America, where such reports were less frequent, it was possible to remain sympathetic, if bemused. In Britain, the general public’s tolerance began to fray. “Poor Sherlock Holmes,” ran one headline, “Hopelessly Crazy?” The result was inevitable. Though Sherlock Holmes remains a colossus among cultural icons, Conan Doyle, once the most popular author of his generation, has been sharply downgraded. In Edinburgh, where Walter Scott is commemorated with a towering Gothic monument, Conan Doyle’s birthplace is marked by a statue of his fictional detective. The White Company and Sir Nigel, the books Conan Doyle regarded as his finest work, are seldom read. Conan Doyle’s portrait is not currently displayed at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Though such decisions owe something to the quality of the portraits involved, it seems curious that Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Daphne du Maurier are all on view while Conan Doyle remains in storage. Conan Doyle once declared that he would gladly sacrifice whatever literary reputation he enjoyed if it would bring about a greater acceptance of his spiritualist message. To a large extent, he made the sacrifice without achieving the objective. The critic Sherman Yellen, writing of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist novel The Land of Mist in 1965, offered a view shared by many: “The Land of Mist demonstrates that Conan Doyle had made his greatest sacrifice to his Spiritualist beliefs; he had relinquished his literary power to it.” Any writer who would address this delicate topic must first declare a position on the paranormal. I should admit, then, that I have never had any traffic with the spirit realm, that I am a supporter of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and that it has been some years since I believed in fairies. At the same time, I also belong to the Society for Psychical Research, I once shook hands with Uri Geller, and some of my closest friends claim to be psychic. I consider myself, then, a cordial disbeliever. None of which diminishes my regard for Conan Doyle in any way. Like most of his admirers, my introduction came through Sherlock Holmes. In fact, at the age of eleven I sported a deerstalker hat, carried a magnifying glass in my pocket, and was much given to declarations of “Brilliant deduction!” and “Elementary!”—which greatly endeared me to teachers, friends, and family. Some time later, as I was rereading The Valley of Fear for perhaps the ninth time, I noticed on the title page that the author had some twenty or thirty other books to his credit. I found a copy of The Lost World at my local library and never looked back. Sooner or later, though, every Conan Doyle fan bumps up against The Vital Message or The Edge of the Unknown or one of the author’s many other spiritualist works. Most readers simply shrug and look elsewhere, and only a very singular taste would prefer Conan Doyle’s two-volume History of Spiritualism to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In my own case, after dutifully slogging through The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, I found myself wondering about the author’s state of mind. As John Dickson Carr wrote in 1949, echoing the popular attitude of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries, “For a quarter of a century he had loomed thick-shouldered as the sturdy Briton, with no damned nonsense about him. What was wrong? What ailed the man?” The answer, like the man himself, was far more complicated than it first appeared. Yes, Conan Doyle lost a son in the First World War and, like so many others, sought consolation in the séance room. This was not, however, where his involvement began. Conan Doyle’s interest in the spirit realm took root some thirty years earlier, well before his son’s birth. This interest was by no means unique; the Society of Psychical Research was already a going concern when Conan Doyle joined in 1893, and its members included prominent scientists, philosophers, members of Parliament, and a future prime minister. For many years Conan Doyle was a mere dabbler in psychic research. He experimented with table-tipping and automatic writing as possible methods of contacting the spirits, and had a short-lived interest in mesmerism and thought transference. Only later, when the testimony of those closest to him erased his lingering doubts, did he become a zealous crusader. For many, he became the living embodiment of the spiritualist craze, rather than its most vocal proponent. His outspokenness, weighed against the cool logic of Sherlock Holmes, seemed to invite public scorn. “We who believe in the psychic revelation,” he wrote near the end of his life, “and who appreciate that a perception of these things is of the utmost importance, certainly have hurled ourselves against the obstinacy of our time. Possibly we have allowed some of our lives to be gnawed away in what for the moment seemed a vain and thankless quest.