Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

He still lives.

Just as Conan Doyle had to kill first the Irishman in him and later the Catholic, so that the Scottish-born English gentlemen and knight of letters could fully flower, so must the Irish girl die that the Englishman and his Scottish amanuensis-the two presentable sides of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-may fully live again, reborn through a woman’s love. It is one of the noblest and most moving self-sacrifices in all of fiction-and for Conan Doyle, one of the most daring selfportraits in all literature.

Christopher Redmond grew up in Kingston, Ontario, graduating from Queen’s University. He received his MA from the University of Waterloo, where he is currently director of internal communications, editing the university’s daily news bulletin. Redmond is the author of In Bed with Sherlock Holmes ; Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes ; and A Sherlock Holmes Handbook . He was formerly editor of Canadian Holmes , the journal of The Bootmakers of Toronto, Canada’s Sherlock Holmes society, and now operates the Web site Sherlockian.Net. Redmond is a member of several Sherlockian societies, including the Baker Street Irregulars of New York.

Arthur Conan Doyle-the creator of Sherlock Holmes and so many other characters and achievements-lived, from his birth in 1859 to his death in 1930, precisely 25,978 days. A little arithmetic shows that the exact middle of his life came on December 14, 1894, a winter day that saw him, at the age of thirty-five, aboard a ship in the North Atlantic, returning home from his first visit to North America.

Conan Doyle was British through and through, but nevertheless he loved America and visited the continent four times, and enthusiasts can trace many of his steps on this side of the water, and imagine how he felt as he saw views that we still can see today.

At thirty-five, Conan Doyle presumably considered himself a young man still, even if now carrying the responsibilities of middle age including two children and a wife, the former Louise Hawkins, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Young though he might still be, it was because of his considerable achievements already that he had been invited to come to North America to tour and lecture. He had managed to acquire an education-something not to be taken for granted by a youngster growing up in poverty in smoky Edinburgh, capital of Scotland-and then a medical training. After a few false starts in his medical practice, he had managed to earn a respectable income from it, in the Southsea suburb of Portsmouth, England’s largest Channel port. He succeeded there sufficiently, supplementing his medical income with occasional modest payments for magazine stories and newspaper articles, to become a principal source of financial support for his extended family, and be able to start a family of his own. He had married Louise in 1885, and initially they had lived in Southsea and then in South Norwood, a modest suburb of London, but Louise fell ill and they spent time at a number of resorts in the hope of finding a climate that would bolster her health.

Eventually, he abandoned medicine for writing as a career. He had produced scores of short stories in a number of magazines by then, some intended for boys and some for adults. By the time he sailed for America in 1894 he had published seventeen books of fiction, in fact, including three historical novels of which he was particularly proud. Most important, of course, he had invented his Great Detective, and had presented him to an increasingly enthusiastic public in two novels and twenty-four short stories. That little industry he had just brought to an end, however, against the advice of the author’s friends and family. The detective was not only wearing out his welcome with his creator, but taking time and attention away from what Conan Doyle considered his more important work, particularly his historical fiction. In December 1893 he published the short story called The Final Problem , in which he invented an arch-enemy for Holmes, one Professor Moriarty, and disposed of them both at an encounter in the Swiss Alps.

With Holmes making no more demands on him, ACD moved on to other projects. He and his ailing wife spent the fall of 1893 to the summer of 1894 in Switzerland, at Davos, which was not yet a ski resort, but was considered to have a splendid climate for lung patients. He spent time with her and their new acquaintances there, enjoyed winter sports and had skis shipped to him from Norway, and worked diligently at his desk. This period accounts for his semi-autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters , and it was also at this time that he created one of the three great characters of his literary career, Brigadier Gerard, a picaresque cavalry officer in Napoleon’s service.

In every sense, he was in the middle of his work and the middle of his life. That was the position when an invitation came from Major James Burton Pond in New York, who was in the business of bringing celebrity speakers to platforms across the United States. An earlier generation had welcomed educational lecturers, but by the 1890s the biggest audiences turned out for speakers who could be entertaining as well as improving, and Pond was the top of his profession, acting as manager to the likes of Henry Ward Beecher and Mark Twain. (He surely did not imagine that a device that had been demonstrated earlier in 1894 by Thomas Edison, a gadget that could throw an image of a moving photograph onto a wall, would soon almost entirely replace lecturing as a form of entertainment.)

Major Pond thought there would be a receptive public for Arthur Conan Doyle, and made him an offer of fixed fees for some lectures and a percentage of the box office for others. ACD agreed to go on tour from the beginning of October until the first of December. (In the end he stayed a few days extra.) He landed in New York on October 2, accompanied by twenty-one-year-old Innes Doyle, taking leave from the British Army to be his older and famous brother’s traveling companion throughout the tour.

Conan Doyle stepped off his ship into a land that perhaps was stranger to him than he realized. His idea of America had been shaped largely by his childhood reading, including the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and the historical works of Francis Parkman; and as soon as he had the opportunity, he headed north to what he liked to call “Parkman Land,” the territory in and around the Adirondacks where the French and Indian War had been fought. In this region nearly every name was magic to him: Fort Edward, Bloody Pond, Ticonderoga. Now he was able to compare the genuine terrain with the descriptions he had already drawn in his novel The Refugees , much of it set in this borderland between America and Canada. “It was very much as I had pictured it,” he reported later, “but the trees were not as large as I thought.”

For a few days he was able to indulge himself as a tourist. He had hoped to do one other thing early in his American trip: pay a respectful visit to Boston and shake hands with Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great old man of American literature, whose name he had borrowed for his own detective. But Oliver Wendell Holmes died on October 7, 1894, at the age of eighty-five, while ACD was deep in the northern woods, staying at a six-bedroom hunting lodge near Saranac Lake made available by a friend of a friend. By the time he emerged from Parkman Land and was able to visit Boston, the best he could do was to place a wreath on Holmes’s grave.