The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle - Hardcover

Miller, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312378971 ISBN 13: 9780312378974

Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

As the creator of Sherlock Holmes, “the world’s most famous man who never was,” Arthur Conan Doyle remains one of our favorite writers; his work is read with affection—and sometimes obsession—the world over. Doctor, writer, spiritualist: his life was no less fascinating than his fiction.
            Conan Doyle grew up in relative poverty in Edinburgh, with the mental illness of his artistically gifted but alcoholic father casting a shadow over his early life. He struggled both as a young doctor and in his early attempts to sell short stories, having only limited success until Sherlock Holmes became a publishing phenomenon and propelled him to worldwide fame. 
            While he enjoyed the celebrity Holmes brought him, he also felt that the stories damaged his literary reputation. Beyond his writing, Conan Doyle led a full life, participating in the Boer War, falling in love with another woman while his wife was dying of tuberculosis, campaigning against injustice, and converting to Spiritualism, a move that would bewilder his friends and fans.
            During his lifetime Conan Doyle wrote more than fifteen hundred letters to members of his family, most notably his mother, revealing his innermost thoughts, fears and hopes; and Russell Miller is the first biographer to have been granted unlimited access to Conan Doyle’s private correspondence. The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle also makes use of the writer’s personal papers, unseen for many years, and is the first book to draw fully on the Richard Lancelyn Green archive, the world’s most comprehensive collection of Conan Doyle material.
            Told with panache, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle is an unprecedentedly full portrait of an enduringly popular figure.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Russell Miller is a prize-winning journalist and the author of eight previous books. His oral histories of D-Day, Nothing Less Than Victory, and the Special Operations Executive, Behind the Lines, were widely acclaimed. His most recent book was Codename Tricycle: The True Story of the Second World War’s Most Extraordinary Double Agent. He lives in Britain.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle

PART I

THE DOCTOR

 

 

CHAPTER I

FAMILY PRIDE AND FAMILY SHAME

 

 

IT IS A PECULIAR IRONY that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthplace in Edinburgh's Old Town, long since demolished, is not today marked with a statue of the writer himself but by a statue of his most famous creation - Sherlock Holmes, the character Conan Doyle came to believe was largely responsible for destroying his reputation as a serious literary figure. Perhaps it is understandable; after all, Holmes is the most famous man who never lived.

His aquiline profile, with deerstalker and pipe, is instantly recognisable, even in countries where people have the greatest difficulty pronouncing his name. It is picked out in ceramic tiles on the walls of Baker Street Underground station in London. It has featured on cigarette cards, tea towels, board games, dinner services, postage stamps, beer bottles, chewing gum, mouthwashes, computer games, Beecham's Pills and packets of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut corn flakes. Only Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus rival Sherlock Holmes for worldwide recognition.

He remains one of the few household names in English fiction, arguably the most famous character in literature after Hamlet, and one with whom the public has an extraordinarily intimate acquaintance. Everyone knows his catchphrase 'Elementary, my dear Watson!', although few are aware it is nowhere to be found in the stories. His eccentricities - pinning correspondence to the mantelshelf with a jackknife and keeping tobacco in the heel of a Turkish slipper, for example - are common knowledge. He is a valuable asset to the British touristindustry, known to 87 per cent of visitors to Britain, and is one of London's major attractions - indeed, Japanese and Russians often cite him as their main reason for visiting the city. Misguided souls still write to him at his Baker Street 'consulting rooms' in the hope that his genius may solve their problems, even though - had he ever existed - he would be long since dead.

Of course, to Sherlockians he is a real person. Holmes inspires a cult-like devotion among his fans which borders on the mystical. There are more than 400 Sherlock Holmes societies around the world which meet regularly to worship at the metaphorical shrine of the great detective. Members view late-nineteenth-century London, with its swirling fog and hansom cabs, as sacred territory. They study what they describe as 'the Canon' with forensic ardour, investigate the minutiae of Holmes's 'life', debate obscure textual conundrums, analyse the many glaring errors and inconsistencies in the stories, and dress up as characters. Apart from the holy books of the great religions, few texts can have been examined as microscopically as the Holmes canon. Thanks to Sherlockian 'scholarship', for example, we can know - if we care to - how many times Holmes is recorded as smiling (103).

More has been written about Holmes than any other fictional character - much more than Conan Doyle wrote himself - by those seeking to understand his enduring grip on public imagination as generation after generation fell under his spell. The fifty-four short stories and four novels have been translated into almost every living language, including Esperanto, have never been out of print and have been plagiarised, serialised, analysed and dramatised for screen, radio, television, stage and even a ballet.

Essential to every story is the symbiosis between the mercurial, eccentric, brilliant but bloodless detective and the affable and unflappable Doctor Watson, Holmes's 'rather stupid friend', as Conan Doyle once unkindly described him. Watson is the frequent butt of Holmes's sarcasm when he makes a simplistic deduction ('Excellent, Watson! You scintillate today') and cruelty (After all you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications'), but his loyalty never wavers. He is not rewarded until the very last series when, in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs', he is wounded and Holmes reveals his true feelings: 'My friend's wiry arms wereround me and he was leading me to a chair. "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake say you are not hurt." It was worth a wound - it was worth many wounds - to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.'

Watson was the perfect foil for Holmes: their partnership has inspired more imitations than any other duo in literature and established an entire genre of detective fiction that endures today. Conan Doyle had no notion at the start that in Sherlock Holmes he was creating a colossus among cultural icons, yet when that realisation dawned it gave him no pleasure at all.

 

 

Doyle is a quintessentially Irish name, ranking twelfth in the list of the most common Irish surnames, said to be derived from the Gaelic Dubh-Ghaill ('dark foreigner'), the label the indigenous Celts gave to the Vikings who began settling in Ireland more than 1,000 years ago. The family of Arthur Conan Doyle, however, variously asserted its origins elsewhere. Conan Doyle himself first believed his ancestors came from Ulster, but he later took the view that the Irish Doyles were a cadet branch of the Staffordshire Doyles, who had taken part in the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. In yet another version, the Doyles traced their roots to Pont d'Oilly near Rouen in France, and to the coat of arms adopted in the twelfth century by the Anglo-Norman family of d'Oilly which had participated in the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. An Alexander d'Oilly was indeed granted lands in County Wexford in 1333 by Edward III. Others within the family liked to boast that their earliest known ancestor was Foulkes D'Oyley, a comrade in arms of Richard Coeur de Lion.

Whatever their ancient origins, Doyles do not figure prominently in the early historical records of Ireland. In 1313 a Hercules Doyle was tried and hanged for burning down the manor of Fermoy and in 1642 a James Doyle of County Meath was accused of high treason. It wasnot until the eighteenth century that the Doyles began to make their mark on history with the emergence of six major generals - four of them baronets - a bishop, and the extraordinary dynasty founded by the painter and caricaturist John Doyle, born in Dublin in 1797, which would make significant contributions to the worlds of art and literature and become the only family in British history to warrant five separate entries in the Dictionary of National Biography within the space of three generations.

John Doyle's family had been impoverished by centuries of punitive laws against Roman Catholics and was finally dispossessed of its last small estate, in County Wexford, in 1762. The family fortunes plummeted; at the time of John's birth his father, James, was listed as a tailor living at 15 St Andrew Street. John's brother, James, would enter the priesthood and both his sisters became nuns, but John remained 'in the world', largely because he demonstrated, very early in life, a precocious artistic talent. He won his first medal at the age of 8 and studied at the Royal Dublin Society Drawing School, where he became a private pupil of the Italian landscape painter Gaspare Gabrielli, then based in Dublin, and the miniaturist John Comerford. The young John Doyle specialised in painting horses, an animal much loved, then as now, by the Irish, and in 1814, at the age of 17, he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312378971
• ISBN 13: 9780312378974
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 516
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar