TCDE-Team at 23:49, 27 February 2026

2026-02-27T23:49:36Z

TCDE-Team: Created page with "{{Cargo_Reviews_Articles |Date=1995-01-01 |Book=Conan Doyle |BookAuthor=Michael Coren |Reviewer=Owen Dudley Edwards |Topics=Biography }} This review of the biography ''"Conan Doyle", by Michael Coren'' was written by Owen Dudley Edwards and collected in the article "The Quest Continues: Five Reviewers in search of a Biography" in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995). == Review == File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p37..."

2026-02-27T23:43:52Z

Created page with "{{Cargo_Reviews_Articles |Date=1995-01-01 |Book=Conan Doyle |BookAuthor=Michael Coren |Reviewer=Owen Dudley Edwards |Topics=Biography }} This review of the biography ''"Conan Doyle", by Michael Coren'' was written by Owen Dudley Edwards and collected in the article "The Quest Continues: Five Reviewers in search of a Biography" in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995). == Review == File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p37..."

New page

{{Cargo_Reviews_Articles
|Date=1995-01-01
|Book=Conan Doyle
|BookAuthor=Michael Coren
|Reviewer=Owen Dudley Edwards
|Topics=Biography
}}
This review of the biography ''"Conan Doyle", by Michael Coren'' was written by [[Owen Dudley Edwards]] and collected in the article "The Quest Continues: Five Reviewers in search of a Biography" in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995).

== Review ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p37-the-quest-continues2.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 37)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p38-the-quest-continues.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 38)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p39-the-quest-continues.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 39)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p40-the-quest-continues.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 40)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p41-the-quest-continues.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 41)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p42-the-quest-continues.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 6, 1995, p. 42)]]

: [[File:Bloomsbury-1995-arthur-conan-doyle-coren.jpg|100px]]
: '''Conan Doyle'''
: by Michael Coren
: Bloomsbury; 1995; 213pp; £18.99; ISBN: 0-7475-2192-1

'''Reviewed by Owen Dudley Edwards'''

'''Is anything known in favour of this book?'''

I was once giving the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns at a dinner in a Police Club in West Lothian and before the dinner found myself making small-talk with a Superintendent. He was a native of the Isle of Lewis, and, thinking he might help me with my enquiries into the different civilisations of these islands, asked him whether he found great difference between his birthplace and his workplace. He thought for a moment. 'Well,' he said, when they bring someone in for questioning, they always say, "is anything known against this man?" I always say, "is anything known in favour of this man?"'

Is anything known in favour of this book?

Michael Coren is the author of a fine biography of G. K. Chesterton, poor in its ending and thrown together, but profound and sensible for most of its length. Coren is a London-born Canadian Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism. In particular, his own love for and marriage to a Canadian Catholic woman informed and deepened his discussion of Chesterton's love and marriage, on which his is the best analysis. He examined Chesterton's anti-Semitic activities with dignity and honour, if without much originality, and he orchestrated well both the process of conversion and the Fleet Street milieu, clearly in each case with the wisdom of personal experience.

The link between Conan Doyle and Chesterton is a vital one, requiring thoughtful exploration from a scholar sensitive to their differences, sympathetic to both, capable of assessing implications of their mutual influences. The late W. W. Robson would have classified Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown as probably the only two detectives whose exploits are English literature.

One would concede Poe's Dupin stories as literature, but as part of Poe, not in any discrete category for Dupin. And Poe, Hammett, and Chandler are American literature. Robson might make a case for Sayers's Gaudy Night or Christie's The Moving Finger, but for each a case in spite of its detective content, not because of it.

Holmes had his other children in literature, such as Wodehouse's Jeeves, but not as detectives.

Conan Doyle as a cradle Catholic who left the faith, and Chesterton as a convert to it, crossed swords from time to time, notably in the last year of Conan Doyle's life with ACD's The Roman Catholic Church--a Rejoinder and GKC's The Thing. The controversy is intricate (a tangled skein becoming a study in scarlet), partly because Conan Doyle knew Catholicism better than Chesterton in some respects while Chesterton knew England better than Conan Doyle did in others. They were at opposite sides of the Boer War, on King Leopold's Congo, and on Spiritualism. They had their own duels with Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Joseph McCabe, and the suffragette movement, but seldom from the same bases.

So we might expect Michael Coren to shine particularly well on the great man's greatest, if least faithful, disciple among detective fictionists.

Alas, when he shines, it is under a bushel — far, far under.

Coren has never been user-friendly in his footnotes, but this time he is a danger to any future traffic. He evidently has some notes from the Chesterton MSS, probably from the days before their removal to the British Library. In any case he describes some fascinating, and sometimes unbelievable, points in ACD-GKC relations, and for proof we simply get 'G. K. Chesterton Papers, British Library'.

And for what?

Pp. 21-2 tell us there was more going on at the Edinburgh Medical School] than merely the chatter of bland teachers and the indifferent professors. There were some remarkable and amusing young men coming to Edinburgh.'

There follows the paragraph from Memories and Adventures about Crum Brown, Wyville Thomson, Balfour, and Turner, all of whom were teachers, though not bland, and professors, though not indifferent. Nor were they young:

: Each of these men would reappear in Conan Doyle's fiction, principally in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Conan Doyle himself once told G.K. Chesterton that no writer ever needed to go any further than a classroom, assembly hall or police station to find enough. characters to fill any number of novels.

Does anyone know any ACD characters deriving from Crum Brown, Wyville Thomson, Balfour or Turner? There may well be some: originals are always suggesting themselves. Reading for the first time Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth the other day, I wondered if the murderous medic. Henbane Dwining, was not an inspiration for his fellow-giggler Wilson Kemp in The Greek Interpreter'. But if Michael Coren knows something here, he should supply it. and if he is guessing, he should admit it, and parade his guesswork for our consideration as such.

As for what Conan Doyle told Chesterton, when, how, why, and whither did he tell it? To expect us to dive into the bran-tub of the still unsorted British Library (all change at St Pancras) Chesterton deposits comes badly from an author who so dislikes The Maracot Deep: it really seems the same process.

On pp. 27-8 ACD is credited with having decided while whaling-boat's doctor that he was already a believer in something I later identified as spiritualism' (ie., 1880, pretty early though not impossibly so-the National Library of Scotland MS 'The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe' might be cited as interest, if not belief, in spirits). This interesting revelation was given later during a debate over Roman Catholicism' with the Chesterton MSS, BL, again cited en masse. We really would have been enriched by this letter, and Mr Coren will not even give us its date. He is the Lord Mount-James of Conan Doyle apparatus criticus.

Next:

: In a letter to his fellow detective writer G.K. Chesterton he explained that although the Holmes stories could be improved by editing, the basic plot and dialogue could not be made better by him; he had given his all in his first effort and everything after that would be gratuitous and a waste of time.

At this point the want of dating is as injurious to Coren as it is to the rest of us. This is a most valuable confession: what we need to know is by what date did its author consider it still true? It was not true when he was writing The Lion's Mane', for instance. It is a wonderful find to have the Plato of detective fiction explain his method to his Aristotle (whose method may well have been remarkable in its similarity). But Coren has thrown away his great scoop by extracting a sentence without a word of context or indication of date or period.

If this is improvidence, the next stage is insanity Coren shows little sign of reading even the major texts, apart from the Holmes cycle, and those from there he often summarises under the apparent delusion that if he finds reading so difficult, nobody else may have been capable of it at all. As to Irene Adler, his interest in *her Jewish-sounding surname' could be constructive, given his own Jewish origins. That she is listed in Holmes's index alongside 'a Hebrew Rabbi', identified by the invaluable Richard Lancelyn Green as one of two successive Chief Rabbis named Adler, makes it clear that ACD did mean her to be Jewish and chose the name as one his contemporary audience would associate with professional observant Judaism. Being of clerical education, he used the local head cleric as symbolic of the sect. Coren has used The Oxford Sherlock Holmes on occasion (he has preferred its text in a few quoted extracts), but it is too much like work for him actually to turn to its notes. Nevertheless, he has something of value to contribute, however indolently:

: If the choice is deliberate, and it often was with Conan Doyle, it may represent the author's growing interest in Jews and Judaism, as evidenced by his meetings with Jewish intellectuals and spiritualists in Vienna and Jewish writers and thinkers in London. G.K. Chesterton wrote to him at the time about Jewish issues-this was before Chesterton went through his unsavoury period of affected anti-Semitism-and implied in his letter that Conan Doyle had referred to the name Adler being of Jewish descent in a previous note. Chesterton, as Coren knows better than any of us, was born in 1874, and was therefore 17 at the time': in other words ACD was consulting with this utterly unknown boy at the very commencement of his own career as detective short-story writer. So Michael Coren has unearthed one of the greatest unrecorded literary collaborations of all time.

Or else by at the time' he means during the next fifteen years'.

On p. 77, the unknown collaboration gets a further, though wholly undated, addition:

: He told G.K. Chesterton that a good story, long or short, was all about rhythm and without a natural ability to control a story, tempered and refined with training, no writer could entertain people for very long.

May God forgive Michael Coren! How had this partnership emerged? How far was ACD tutor to the young GKC? How much was it occasioned by specific events at the time of its inception? As a major Chesterton scholar, Coren must see the significance of this data. How can he demean himself, his subjects, and us, by throwing it at us uncontextualised?

By page 81 we are in Davos in 1893 with Louise Conan Doyle endangered by tuberculosis:

: She looked a little better. Maybe she was a little better. Did she feel better? No, not quite yet. Give it time. He did. She was laughing at his jokes more now, amused by the mimicking of Jerome, Wilde, Chesterton-he pushed his stomach out for that one...

Chesterton was not yet twenty, and while he may have given some signs of the future famous stomach, he had many inches to go before his identification was asserted by girth above all. Did Conan Doyle even know him in 1893? If those letters do in some instances date from then or previously, was the correspondence supported by meeting? When and how? But the passage suggests that we are once again in a street-Carr named Dickson: the fictionalisation of Conan Doyle conversation has been resumed. Dickson Carr at least had the excuse that he normally wrote fiction in any case, and that his biography of ACD simply testified to his inability to deal with fact. But Coren is before the world as a biographer, not as an official fictionist progressing his prose from Mills to Boon.

The next bit of Chestertoniana (or are all these from the same letter?) is disguised, but the usual footnote to the undigested mass in the B.L. identifies it:

: He once told a friend that if it had been possible he would much rather have made his living by his ability with his fists, holding a bat or kicking a ball than by wielding a pen.

P. 137 and subsequent footnote indicate ACD writing to GKC about the Oscar Slater case, particularly about Scotland Yard tipping off Glasgow that the innocent Slater, against whom they had nothing, they were confident was an active criminal'. Does this mean both men were involved in the case, in itself another proof for Coren that his admired Chesterton was sympathetic to the case of a wrongfully accused Jew? Or was ACD unsuccessfully trying to recruit GKC to the cause of Slater? In the famous words of the Ballade by one of Chesterton's circle, 'We do not Know because we are not Told'. But Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown to the rescue is surely worth chasing? No, not quite yet, as Coren would say.

Page 136 has Conan Doyle writing against the crimes of King Leopold in the Congo:

: Figures as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Hilaire Belloc wrote letters of congratulations and support but also wondered what could be done and how.

It was my understanding that, tragically, Belloc and the Chestertons decided the exposure of slavery in the Congo was a fraud, got up by anti-Catholic conspirators against Belgium. It is one of the great stains on them, and particularly distressing to a Roman Catholic such as the present writer, that such great polemicists were so far gone in apologetics that they would even try to deny crimes if committed by Catholics. It was a classic denial of Jesus's teaching on people with the beam in their own eye speaking only of the mote in their brothers' eyes-denial which in the circumstances was yet further proof of it. If Coren has evidence that Belloc, anti-Dreyfusard to the bitter end (his own), responded at complete odds with his friends the Chestertons whom on Catholic questions he firmly directed (they still being but fellow-travellers), then why does Coren not produce it? Or has he simply noted that Belloc wrote to Conan Doyle, but will not even bother to work out which side of the controversy Belloc adopted? Cecil Chesterton was all for hanging Casement in 1916 because of his testimony against Leopold, and tried to hang E.D. Morel on the same grounds.

Finally, G.K. Chesterton is quoted-but without any indication as to where-stating that ACD's hostility to social injustice 'gave him a saintly quality'. Once again, it would be wonderful to have the context. Was the process for canonisation discontinued later when Chesterton found Conan Doyle too hostile to what Chesterton did not consider social injustice? Some adventures of Sherlock Holmes make Father Brown lose his innocence.

There was a comparable innocence in my friend the Superintendent asking what was known in favour of the man brought in for questioning. But on this basis of this little investigation, I think the Superintendent's methods also showed the wisdom of the serpent.

{{footer_acd_society_article}}
{{footer_periodicals}}
{{footer_review_articles}}

Review:Conan Doyle (Coren's Biography)/Owen Dudley Edwards - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 23:49, 27 February 2026