Conan Doyle Talks (article 10 june 1894)
Conan Doyle Talks is an article published in the Buffalo Sunday Morning News on 10 june 1894.
Conan Doyle Talks
He Gives Sherlock Holmes' Theory of the Whitechapel Murders.
STORY OF DOYLE'S LIFE.
He Was a Great Spinner of Yarns When a Schoolboy — The Original of Sherlock Holmes — An Advance Notice.
Big is a little word since it has been loosely applied to such frail men as the late Mr. John Lawrence Sullivan of Bos ton and our own Jas. H. Connolly. When you put the coat on Conan Doyle it is a very tight fit. He's huge and husky, to use a bit of our college slang. He came striding up to me the other day across the dimly lit lobby of the Reform Club, and at the moment I thought he looked like our great detective Tommy Byrnes. But Conan Doyle is too blonde and too big. He has a well-knit athletic body, supported by a pair of powerful legs and towering an inch above six feet in height. He weighs about 225 pounds and it's all bone and muscle. His head is large and well covered with light brown hair. He wears a heavy blonde mustache and his large gray eyes are both kindly, keen and Celtic. Imagine this man a little stooped at the shoulders as one must be who has leaned over a desk and drawn probably a million words from the fount of bis inspiration: light up his face with a kindly look; give him a deep voice as you think of him inclining his bead to speak to you, and let him now and then thrust his hands in his pockets and lift his chin to laugh heartily, for he likes to laugh, and you have a good idea of this greatest story teller in all England.
"I have come to take you in custody for the killing of Sherlock Holmes," I said, as soon as we were seated.
"Ah, but I did it in self-defense," he replied. "And if you knew the provocation you would agree with me that it was justifiable homicide. When I invented this character I had no idea he would give me so much trouble. But when Holmes' Adventures began to appear in the Strand Magazine, its circulation went up by leaps and bounds until it reached the phenomenal figure of 400,000. No sooner had one story appeared than I was set upon for another, and such considerable sums of money were offered by the publisher, indicating a popular demand so imperative and so flattering, that I was tempted repeatedly from other work which I greatly desired to finish. I went on from one case to another until, as you know, there are now two volumes of "The Memoirs and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." At last I killed him, and if I had not done so I almost think he would have killed me."
Certainly there are few authors who could afford to dispense with so profitable a friend as poor Holmes had been to Conan Doyle.
I asked him if he would tell me something about Holmes and himself for the American papers. He did not like the idea of talking for publication and told me so. flatly but politely. I assured him, how- ever, that the interview was the inevitable penalty of all enduring fame in the States, and he consented on condition that it was not to be published in England.
Three days later we were sitting together in his study at South Norwood, a beyond the the southern edge of the great city. The door yard is a pretty garden of flowers and and evergreens. Across the road in front and back of the house there are open fields, delightfully green and sown over with dandelion blossoms.
"I live here," he said, "because there's a cricket field near by and I'm very fond of that game-play it a good bit, and football, too.
"And I should think you must have sparred a little at one time or another," I remarked, looking at him with the professional and scientific air of the late Mr. Holmes.
"You are right; I have boxed a good deal," he replied, "but not lately."
"I was at Mitre Square in Whitechapel last night," I said. "and the query occurred to me whether Holmes had a theory regarding those remarkable murders."
"I am not in the least degree either a sharp or an observant man myself. I try to get inside the skin of a sharp man and see how things would strike him. I remember going to the Scotland Yard Museum and looking at the letter which was received from the police and and which purported to come from the Ripper. Of course it may have been a hoax, but there were reasons to think it genuine, and in any case it was as well to find out who wrote it. It was written in red ink in a clerkly hand. I tried to think how Holmes might have deduced the writer of that letter. The most obvious point was who had been in that the letter was written by some one America. It began, 'Dear Boss,' and contained the phrase, 'Fix it up,' and several others which are not usual with Britishers. Then we have the quality of the paper and the handwriting, which indicates that the letters were not written by a toller. It was good paper and a round, easy, clerkly hand. He was, therefore, a man accustomed to the use of a pen. Having determined that much we can not avoid the inference that there must be somewhere letters which this man had written over his own name, or documents or accounts that could be readily traced to him. Oddly enough the police did not, as far as I know, think of that, and so they failed to accomplish anything. Holmes' plan would have been to produce the letters in facsimile and on each plate indicate briefly the peculiarities of the handwriting. Then publish these facsimiles in the leading newspapers of Great Britain and America, and in connection with them offer a reward to any one who could show a letter or any specimen of the same handwriting. Such a course would have enlisted millions of people as detectives in the case."
Dr. Joseph Bell of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where Conan Doyle studied medicine, is the man from whom the interesting characteristics of Sherlock Holmes were borrowed. With a keen faculty of observation and analysis he has been able to perform many wonderful feats of deduction which now and then have given furtherance to the ends of justice, even in the pious old city of Edinburgh. He has made a study of trifles in their relation to important facts, and be can give a fairly correct estimate of their value offhand. After a first glance at an absolute stranger,
for instance, be has been known to give a pretty accurate outline of his history, discoursing somewhat as follows: "This man's accent tells us that he comes from Lanark. He was once a shoemaker, as a glance at his palm will show, and afterwards became a soldier in the cavalry service, as is obvious from his stride. The knees of his trousers and his right forefinger show you that he is now earning his living as a tailor."
Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. He was the son of Charles Doyle, an arti artist of wide repute whose pictures were valued for a certain Poesque quality of imagination. The author of the "Refugees" is the first Doyle on record who has not turned to the art of the brush for a livelihood, but but one who has thoughtfully observed his father's painting will not be surprised that his son is gifted with the nobler art of letters. I could not resist the feeling that the aims of his father could have been more surely set forth in poetry than in painting. He had indeed carried bis art into the realm of poetry and romance, and so his son was born under new sky. Richard Doyle, the uncle of Conan Doyle, was on the art staff of Punch and designed the cover which it wears to-day.
The ingenuity of the small boy, which often expresses itself in an amazing capacity for devilment, took the direction of story-telling in the case of Conan Doyle. At a time when most boys would have contented themselves with the fantastic masonry of alphabet blocks. he was stories with his limited vocabulary. "My was building companions used to tease me for stories day and night," said he, said he, "and it was only necessary to bribe me with as only a tart to set me going."
"He went to Stonyhurst College when a boy of 9 and remained there seven years. After a term of study in Germany he went to Edinburgh and took the regular course in medicine. It did not cure him of his literary tendencies, however. There was no remedy for them, but be found some relief in trying his hand at a short story. "I sent it to Chamber's Journal,"
he told me, "and I suppose its return would have utterly discouraged me. But they kept it and sent me a check for £3."
He then secured the post of surgeon on a whaling ship bound from Peterhead to the Arctic seas, where he passed his majority, near the 81st degree of north latitude, and had some exciting adventures with the rifle and the harpoon. The head of a Polar bear killed by him on this voyage adorns his book case. He qualified in medicine on his return and shipped again as surgeon bound for the west coast of Africa. He finally settled in Southsea, Wales, and began the practice of medicine with only £3 in 3 in his pocket. Meanwhile he continued to write stories, but never earned more than £50 a year by their sale. "Habakuk Jephson's Statement," a short story written while he was at Southsea, appeared in the Cornhill, anonymously according to the law of that distinguished periodical, and was credited to Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he conceived the character of Holmes, whose adventures were to be harmonized with a correct science of deduction. The study in scarlet was produced and there was such an immense call for it as a shilling book that eventually a new edition was issued at three shillings and six pence. Dr. Doyle received £25 for the story.
"I had entertained the notion for a long time,"
said he, "that historical novel could be made successful without the conventional plot, but simply through the interest that could be created in a string of characteristic scenes and incidents. 'Micah Clarke' was written agreeably with this pan. Then I went back to Holmes again and wrote 'The Sign of Four.' The 'White Company' followed, presenting a picture of what to me is the most interesting period of English history."
While this work was progressing the Doctor came to London, where he made a special study of eye surgery, intending to limit his practice to the treatment of that organ. But orders began to pour in upon him for stories, and it soon became evident that be would have to shift out of his practice, and he did. The "Refugees" followed, and when he came to London to give himself wholly to a new profession his fame had gone before him and and had crossed the sea and was on the tongues of men in the remotest outposts of Britannia.
"I am coming to America in October,"
he told me as I was about to go. "It has been reported that I am to lecture about Sherlock Holmes. I shall deliver some lectures there, but shall have nothing to say about my own work. My public utterances will be confined to these two topics: 'George Meredith and His Work,' and 'The Younger Influences in English Literature."
