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The mystery of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - here and beyond
His life of contradictions ended in attempts to contact the dead.
By Vikram Johri, Special to the Times
Published November 18, 2007
The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
By Andrew Lycett
Free Press, 416 pages, $30 - - - Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street sleuth who, along with his sidekick, Dr. Watson, solved many an intractable mystery. Many readers know less about other facets of Doyle's personality, notably his late-life interest in the occult - areas biographer Andrew Lycett explores in The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes. Born into a modest Irish family in Edinburgh in 1859, Doyle nevertheless attended tony Stonyhurst College before studying medicine at Edinburgh University. Lycett draws a frank portrait of Doyle's childhood, describing his father's drunkenness and Arthur's lonely jottings in school. Doyle trained to be a physician and practiced for a while. But his indefatigable energy - he was a noted cricket, tennis and golf player - prompted him to indulge his creative side, and by the late 1880s he had established his name as a writer. Doyle's unfortunate marital situation is tackled with grace by Lycett. Married to the sister of a patient, Doyle never experienced bliss with Louise Hawkins. In 1893, she contracted tuberculosis and was mostly bedridden for the rest of her life. Other accounts of this marriage have tended to be sympathetic to Doyle; Lycett, however, is unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt. He narrates Doyle's growing closeness with Jean Leckie, an attractive young woman whom he met in 1897 and married shortly after Louise's death. The book chronicles the paradox of a rationalist giving in to belief in seances and table rapping, especially after the death of Doyle's beloved son Kingsley at the end of World War I. Lycett's book is a remarkable resurrection of a life that is fascinating for the many contradictions it juggled. Vikram Johri, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is a writer in New Delhi.
[Last modified November 15, 2007, 16:31:34]
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