View source for Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr

{{Cargo_Research_Articles
 |date=1999-06-01
 |author=Douglas G. Greene
 |topic=Collaboration
 |summary=This article examines the friendship and literary partnership between Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, especially in relation to Carr's biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their joint Holmes pastiches, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. It argues that their shared romantic view of Conan Doyle shaped both The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, while also tracing the tensions and limits of their collaboration.
}}
''Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr'' is an article written by [[Douglas G. Greene]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999).

This article examines the friendship and literary partnership between [[Adrian Conan Doyle]] and [[John Dickson Carr]], especially in relation to [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s biography of [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] and their joint Holmes pastiches: [[The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes]]. It argues that their shared romantic view of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] shaped both ''The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'' and ''The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes'', while also tracing the tensions and limits of their collaboration.


== Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1999-vol9-p113-acd-and-jdc.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999, p. 113)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1999-vol9-p114-acd-and-jdc.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999, p. 114)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1999-vol9-p115-acd-and-jdc.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999, p. 115)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1999-vol9-p116-acd-and-jdc.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999, p. 116)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1999-vol9-p117-acd-and-jdc.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 9, june 1999, p. 117)]]

In some respects, it was fitting that [[Adrian Conan Doyle]] was introduced to [[John Dickson Carr]] during a 1944 BBC rehearsal of the radio dramatization of [[The Lost World]], [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]]'s novel of adventure, heroism and romance. It was fitting because both [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] and [[John Dickson Carr|John Carr]] looked at the world through spectacles tinged with the bright hues of romance, and both thought that [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] was the ideal chivalric hero. While [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] admired him for his detective stories, Adrian Doyle idolized all aspects of his father's life. It may also have been fitting, though in a different way, that it was during their early acquaintance that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] gave [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] a copy of Ellery Queen's anthology, ''The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes''. Though [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] first thought that [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was quite pleased with the book, [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s reaction soon became very different. He had apoplexy whenever anyone made fun of his father's creations in parodies, or copied them in pastiches, and by complicated legal manoeuvring forced the suppression of the anthology. 

[[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] showed fury at anyone who took his father's works with less than the proper reverence and shared a romanticized view of Sir Arthur's life with [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]. It was these characteristics that produced [[John Dickson Carr]]'s authorized, and still in many ways the standard, biography, ''The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'', as well as the collection of pastiches, [[The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes]], by [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] and [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] in collaboration. 

[[John Dickson Carr]], born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1906, was then at the height of his success as a detective-story novelist. He had moved to England in 1933, and after a brief return to the United States, at the order of the government early in the Second World War, he was again living in London in 1944, and writing radio-plays for the BBC. As a novelist, he combined supernatural atmosphere, fair-play detection, complex but lively narratives, uproarious comedy, and a fascination with locked-room murders'. In [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s works, murders take place in hermetically sealed rooms; bodies are found alone in buildings surrounded by unmarked sand or snow; people enter a house, or dive into a swimming pool, and vanish. And for most of the story. [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] suggests that only a vampire, witch, a ghost. or, in one novel, a 'hollow man' could have committed the crimes. 'Let there be a spice of terror, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] wrote, 'of dark skies and evil things. Striding through these stories, restoring reason and order to the world, are his great detectives, Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. 

By the end of the war, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] was no longer certain that order and reason could be restored to his world, at least not the kind of order he liked. He yearned after the world of romance, of New Arabian Nights adventures, of Baghdad-on-the-Thames in which romance might be hidden behind every London doorway. [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s characters looked for what he called Adventure in the Grand manner, where 'a slant-eyed adventuress, sables and all... suddenly slips into this [railway] compartment, whispers "Six of diamonds-north tower at midnight — beware of Orloff"." 

Like [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]], [[Adrian Conan Doyle]] saw himself as out of place in the modern world, though unlike [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] he tended to judge most things by issues of caste. In his book, Heaven Has Claws, he revealed a supercilious attitude toward those beneath him, those who could not be considered 'gentlemen'. Above all, Adrian wanted to live an adventurous life. He spent much of his time in Tangier, and shortly before he died he became, of all things, a race car driver. But fundamentally, his career was being the son of [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]]. He fostered a myth that his father was the scion of Plantagenet nobility, that he was one of the greatest writers the world had ever seen; and Adrian was always willing to sue anyone who threatened Sir Arthur's reputation at least as Adrian saw it. [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] admired overblown personalities such as [[Adrian Conan Doyle]]'s, and the two men became friends. They frequently visited at each other's homes, and, like the cavaliers manqué that they were, fenced with unbuttoned foils. When in his detective novels Below Suspicion and Patrick Butler for the Defence, [[John Dickson Carr]] created a character named Patrick Butler who had a very real streak of eighteenth-century gallantry', he based Butler on [[Adrian Conan Doyle]]. 

[[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] hated [[Hesketh Pearson]]'s biography, [[Conan Doyle: His Life and Art]], primarily because it depicted Sir Arthur as a common man-Adrian found that description to be a great insult — and after trying without success to interest the German biographer, Emil Ludwig, in writing a new biography, he turned to [[John Dickson Carr]] who, in 1947, became the authorized writer of the book that Adrian always called 'the great biography'. Adrian was certain that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] considered the task 'a sacred work' and that 'he looks upon Daddy as the No. 1 one man of the world' ([[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] to [[Denis Conan Doyle|Denis Doyle]], 17 April 1947). 

In reading over the correspondence between [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] and his brother Denis, some odd images emerge. Adrian took a proprietary interest in the biography, going through [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s typescript line by line, asking for the rewriting of an entire chapter, and even making changes in the proofs of the British edition without the writer's knowledge. Adrian did claim to his brother that 'I would not attempt to dictate to John', but he added (rather complacently) that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] was intelligent enough to realize that Adrian's suggestions were good. 

But there is no evidence that the biography would have been fundamentally different if Adrian had not been, in a sense, looking over [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s shoulder. Hating the post-war world, both [[John Dickson Carr]] and [[Adrian Conan Doyle]] saw [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] as the ideal romantic hero of the past, a chivalrous gentleman who fearlessly stood for what was right. 

''The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'' was a huge popular success— and it's not hard to understand why. [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s instinctive sympathy for his subject made him paint in bold colours, to recount Sir Arthur's life as a tale of adventure, filled with action and telling details. But the most important question is whether, in using [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] as, in a sense. an antidote to the increasing sterility of the mechanized post-war world, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] (and Adrian) distorted the picture, created a [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] who had never existed. I don't think so. [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was, indeed, a man of honour and chivalry, whose life could best be retold as an adventure story. His daughter, [[Dame Jean Conan Doyle]], said this of [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s biography: 'Of all the books, it conveys most clearly the personality, the nature of the man. It is the most accurate portrait in words.' 

The reviews were almost uniformly positive, and on those rare occasions when they weren't, [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] erupted in fury. When. for example, Harold Nicolson praised [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] for making an interesting book about a dull and worthy gentleman' (Daily Telegraph, + February 1949) who had an uninteresting mind', Adrian challenged Nicolson to meet him in France and, with weapons of his choosing, prove his manhood in the code duello. Nicolson ignored him. 

While working on the biography, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] and [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]] discussed in vague terms the possibility of writing new stories about Sherlock Holmes, but it was not until the two men met at the Sherlock Holmes exhibit in New York in 1952 that they began to work on the project which would ultimately be called The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Each story was to be based on one of the cases mentioned in passing, but never recorded in detail, in the original stories. 

According to publicity materials, the two men studied Sir Arthur's writing carefully, noting his word usage and even placement of commas, and together produced two pastiches: "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks' and 'The Adventure of the Gold Hunter'. The writing style of both stories makes it clear that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] did most of the actual composition. The first story was sold to Life for $10,000-where it appeared on December 24, 1952-and a contract was signed with Collier's for an additional eleven stories. 

[[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] joined [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] in Tangier to complete the stories, but he was never comfortable collaborating with another author, so the two men decided to divide up their tasks. [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] wrote 'The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle' and 'The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers', and [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] wrote 'The Adventure of the Black Baronet' (for which [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] had devised the plot), but as [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] began work on the sixth story, 'The Adventure of the Sealed Room', he suffered a complete collapse. His publisher euphemistically called it an illness', which it certainly was, but to be more specific [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] went off on a two-month drinking binge, leaving [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] to complete 'The Sealed Room' and to write alone the additional six stories. 

The small but extremely vocal world of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, centered around the Baker Street Irregulars, was not fond of [[Adrian Conan Doyle]]. His iron-fisted control of his father's estate, his threats to use the courts to stop the publication of unauthorized Holmesian pastiches meant that his own collection of pastiches would not be well-received. A day of infamy', thundered The Baker Street Journal when The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes appeared in book form. The book, the review went on, might better be called Sherlock Holmes Exploited. The general press, however, welcomed the book; Time said that 'by sticking strictly to the original ingredients and prose style, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] and [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] handle the job very well'. Anthony Boucher wrote that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]'s stories were some of the best pastiches of Holmes ever written, but that [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Adrian Doyle]]'s were some of the worst. 

The book, however, has had staying power. It went through more than seven U.S. printings in the original edition, and it has continued to be reprinted over and over during the past 45 years, most recently in a bargain-book edition for sale in Barnes & Noble bookstores. The stories that [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] was directly involved in are extremely imaginative, full of marvellous impossible crime gimmicks, but despite (supposedly) counting the commas in Sir Arthur's original stories, [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] was unable to mimic the Victorian prose. Adrian, however, was a better imitator, and his six stories occasionally have sentences that his father could have written; unfortunately, his father not only could have written, but also sometimes did write the plots, and each of Adrian's tales borrows a storyline from the originals. But writing exact pastiches is not possible, or perhaps even desirable, and from this vantage point, and having read the creations of more recent writers who have had Holmes and Watson meet Sigmund Freud, Teddy Roosevelt, or (for pity's sake) Tarzan and Dracula, I think that the [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]]-[[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] volume is one of the finest collections of non-canonical Holmes stories. 

The writing of [[The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes]] left [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] and [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]] estranged for over a year, until [[John Dickson Carr|Carr]] wrote to apologize for not completing his part of the project. By the end of 1954, they were again friends, with Adrian calling him dear old John a true brother-in-arms'. But they never again worked together. Nevertheless. their association for almost ten years had resulted in two remarkable works, ''The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'', whose depiction of Holmes's creator as a great romantic hero remains the starting point for all understanding of [[Adrian Conan Doyle|Doyle]], and [[The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes]], one of the most enjoyable attempts to recreate the great days of Baker Street when the game was always afoot. 








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