Teller of Tales

This is a very readable and engaging biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. While many people only think of him in association with the stories of Sherlock Holmes, in fact Conan Doyle (his compound last name) was a multi-faceted man who grew up in poverty, became a medical doctor, served on a whaling ship in the Arctic, and worked in an Army hospital during the Boer War. He began his literary career writing stories for magazines, and one of these stories concerned a detective named Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes stories became popular, although Conan Doyle did not consider them serious literature and would come to consider the demand for this character as pulling him away from his efforts at more important works. Conan Doyle lost many close relatives during WWI. Perhaps as a result of this he developed a deep interest in spiritualism, and this interest gradually began to absorb his life as he left off literary pursuits to advocate for spiritualist research via press and podium. This advocacy led many to lose their esteem for the creator of Sherlock Holmes since they assumed that Conan Doyle and Sherlock must be one and the same in personality and temperament. I was interested to learn that Conan Doyle wrote his detective stories by determining the ending, and then working back toward it. Thus his character's "brilliant observations" and deductions were always carefully planned by knowledge of the solution before it was apparent to the reader. While Sherlock's powers of observation and deduction came to represent a paradigm of rational scientific proof, in reality they were an illusion working back from given solutions. In the same way, Conan Doyle would advocate for spiritualism by pleading for people to restrain their skepticism, and believe in order to know. Seen in this way, the contrast between his flinty-eyed detective and the real-life Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism seems less dramatic. Overall, this book read like a novel and was a good balance between Conan Doyle's whole life story and the part of it that involved Sherlock Holmes.

Years ago I read the biographies of Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr and Charles Higham, and even tried to get beyond Sherlock Holmes by reading as much as I could of Conan Doyle's other fiction. Therefore I thought I knew something about Conan Doyle as a writer and as a person, but Stashower's fine book was still a revelation to me; it's not an exaggeration to say that I found new insights into Sir Arthur on nearly every page.Stashower has done his research, but he is also unafraid to use Conan Doyle's semiautobiographical fiction, not to mention his poetry, to provide windows into the inner Sir Arthur that Sir Arthur's own autobiography carefully conceals.Sir Arthur, of course, created a character that (along with Tarzan) is one of the immortal icons of adventure fiction, a character as popular today as he was when his short stories first hit the STRAND Magazine like a thunderbolt. One thing everyone knows about Conan Doyle is how deeply he resented the fame of Sherlock Holmes, but even here Stashower has some startling information to relate.He is particularly good on the last couple of decades of Sir Arthur's life, when his seemingly mindless advocacy of even the most infantile and transparently fradulent aspects of Spiritualism, and his output of nearly a dozen unreadable religious tracts, left almost all of his readers convinced he had lost his mind. His endorsement of the authenticity of some photographs of fairies supposedly taken by two little girls (who had actually cut the tiny figures out of very familiar magazine ads for Fairy Soap!), and his calling in a psychic detective to "solve" the not-very-mysterious disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie, were the final straws for even his most tolerant fans.On top of it all Sir Arthur was a terrible judge of the relative merits of his own fiction, and anyone who attempts to read his entire fictional output, as I did some years ago and as Stashower obviously has, will see how sadly he frittered away and squandered his unique gifts as a "teller of tales."How could a man who created one of the immortal icons of rationality be in person so gullible, irrational, foolish and unworldly? Well, Stashower does as good a job of explaining the apparent paradox as anyone will probably be able to do. Highly recommended.

Poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Acclaimed for his creation of the supremely rational, preternaturally observant detective Sherlock Holmes, he spent many years in later life mocked for his belief in spiritualism, which he considered the "successor to traditional religious thought." Brave, headstrong, and reckless, Doyle was one of England's most vociferous believers in spirits, mediums, ectoplasm, messages from beyond the grave--and even fairies. He was a tireless lecturer on several continents, writing a raft of books on the subject and donating the royalties to various spiritualist organizations. His zeal may have been admired in some quarters, but it was almost universally derided, and in the last ten years of his life, it lost him most of his friends. What happened?Daniel Stashower's well-written and highly entertaining light portrait of Doyle's career gives some simple but compelling answers. Though Scottish, Doyle was raised a Catholic, but abandoned his faith for agnosticism very early on. Yet he apparently was a born believer, just waiting for a cause. His inventive and appealing Sherlock Holmes stories never struck him as particularly worthy or important and he longed to give the world something of value (he also tried his hand at plays and historical novels). And like many other British citizens during World War I, Doyle suffered heavy family losses and ached for connection with his personal dead.As Stashower relates with a brisk pace and gentle humor, warm-hearted Doyle's life reads as a succession of fiery causes. A formidable propagandist, Doyle would use his gifts as a writer and lecturer as well as his ever-growing celebrity to raise money and the public's consciousness time and time again. He fought human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo, supported the Boer War, argued for heightened British military preparedness before World War I, supported reforms in British divorce law, and injected himself into famous criminal trials he thought had been unjust. But spiritualism was his ultimate "holy crusade." Stashower minces no words in describing how Doyle was willing to accept or explain away even the most obvious frauds. He was noble and pathetic at the same time and Stashower makes us understand and sympathize with him, though we never see very far into Doyle's personality or his relationships. This is very much a biography of the public man, but given the subject's profound investment in publicizing what he held dear, that focus is appropriate and deeply satisfying.

Reading Stashower's monumental achievement on the life and times of A. Conan Doyle I was reminded of the great fiction writer himself. Not only is Stashower admiring of his subject, he is the first biographer of this subject to dazzle the reader with wit, genuine respect and research filled with clarity and integrity. Each chapter reads like a small novelette and not only does this book excite one to examine Doyle's works, but to see how his life made for the stuff of great fiction writing.