The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Scription to the Magazine, Londoners Wore by Daniel Stashower

uscript pages a day in the throes of inspiration, "Aye, sir." "Not long discharged?" "No, sir." "A his sentences were always constructed, never Highland regiment?" "Aye, sir." "Stationed at dashed. The right word obsessed him. . . . 'The Barbados?" "Aye, sir." It was a small step from difference between the almost right word and there to Sherlock's "Yon have been in the riglit word is really a large matter-'tis the Afghanistan, I perceive." difference between the lightning-bug and the Published in The Strand starting in 1891, lightning.' " the adventures of Sherlock Holmes became We love to linger in this "gigantic child- the Star Trek of their clay, and Conan Doyle hood." Certainly it was lit by lightning. But this grew "suddenly, colossally famous" for some- book is aptly titled. These were dangerous thing he considered far less noteworthy than waters. Almost nobody got out alive. his other writings. So popular were the detec- -Benjamin Cheever tive stories that, when the author killed off his celebrated character in 1893 (temporarily, as it TELLER OF TALES: clevelopecl), 20,000 people canceled their sub- The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. scription to the magazine, Londoners wore By Daniel Stashower. Henry Holt. 412 pp. black mourning bands, and members of the $32.50 Royal Family were said to be distraught. Conan On a summer night in 1930, some 6,000 Doyle expressed only relief. "If I had not killed well-dressed Londoners crowded into Royal [Holmes]," he said in a speech to the Author's Albert Hall. They had come to see and hear Club, "he would certainly have killed me.'' the renowned Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never got his fondest wish-to Conan Doyle, for who111 a chair waited on the be viewed as a writer of the first rank. stage. One technicality set this hastily arranged Stashower makes a case for The White public appearance apart from countless others: Co112pany (1891) and other historical novels, Conan Doyle had died five days before. Seeing but doesn't pretend to share his subject's no sign of their man, skeptics began stealing enthusiasm for the occult writings. Many fine out of the hall. The emcee-a psychic of dubi- minds took up spiritualism at that time. W. B. 011s gifts-shouted, "He is here! He is here!" Yeats traveled far down the path of ghosts and Everyone stopped, and all eyes locked hungri- fairies, and, like Conan Doyle, had a wife who ly on the empty chair. practiced automatic writing. But where Yeats's Conan Doyle's latest biographer, himself a traffic in the supernatural yielded superb writer of detective novels, tackles the hardest poems such as "Lapis Lazuli," Conan Doyle's part of his job first: How could a writer of such resulted in a silly book about Atlantis. intelligence and principle, a gifted physician, Stashower has turned out an unselfcon- explorer, athlete, war veteran, husband, and scions, easy read-affectionate and fair-mind- father-how could this man have believed in ed, genially short on the naughty bits now spooks and fairies? A "cordial disbeliever," endemic to the genre. He hides a prodigious Stashower argues for "sympathy rather than amount of work beneath the surface, so that derision." After reading this account, few reacl- what the reader sees is not webbed feet pad- ers are likely to rush out to buy Conan Doyle's clling strenuously but a swan serenely floating. Coming of the Fairies (1922), but they will Conan Doyle and his brilliant detective both understand that there was more to his life than would have liked this book. Sherlock Holmes. -A. 1. I-lewat Born in Edinburgh in 1859, Conan Doyle grew up poor, the second son of an artistic, WALKER EVAAE. high-strung alcoholic father, and the lively, By James R. Mellow. Basic. 654 pp. $40 educated mother who111 he adored. He got a By 1956, when this biography ends, the 11110- decent (if detested) Jesuit education, and stud- tographer Walker Evans (1903-75) had done ied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. his most important work. In his last years, he One of his professors, Joseph Bell, had an spent too little time looking into a vie\ifinder uncanny ability to deduce an entire life story and too much time looking into a bottle. Still, from particulars of accent, clothing, and man- these final two decades of his life, for which the ner. "Well, my man," Bell would say to a plain- publisher appends a chronology, might have clothed stranger, "you've served in the army.'' given a perspective to Evans's achievements

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