The Black Doctor (article 1998)
'The Black Doctor' is an article written by Robert Barnard published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 8, 1998).
This article argues that The Black Doctor is especially important for the calm, unusually unprejudiced way Conan Doyle handles race, romance, and social acceptance in a late Victorian setting. It also praises the story's dramatic construction and courtroom scene, presenting it as a strong example of Conan Doyle's professional mastery outside the Sherlock Holmes stories.
'The Black Doctor'
For the general reader, Conan Doyle and mystery means Conan Doyle and Holmes. The crime fiction that does not contain Holmes. has aroused no great interest, though one or two of the stories have excited controversy among Sherlockians. Perhaps their main interest, from a literary point of view, is why they were not written as Holmes. stories (which would, after all, have made them much more profitable). 'The Lost Special' and 'The Man With the Watches' are problems that are expounded but not dramatised, and it may be conjectured that Conan Doyle saw no way of making them either involving or dramatic, even if he were to involve Holmes and Watson. 'The Sealed Room' and 'The Black Doctor' involve not mystery that the attentive reader cannot solve by guesswork quite early on, and it may be that in the case of these stories Conan Doyle could see no way of wrapping them up that would disguise the obviousness of the problems.
Holmes did not exercise his mind on the obvious, nor on matters of pure adventure such as 'The Brazilian Cat' (though 'The Engineer's Thumb' comes close to being that). No, Conan Doyle's claim that 'I would not write a Holmes story without a worthy plot and without a problem which interested my own mind' is nothing but the truth. These stories could not have attained that special Holmesian distinction which has never been matched or even approached by any subsequent crime writer.
That is not to say that they do not have interest of other kinds. 'The Black Doctor' is a touching and involving story, with a hint of happy-ever-after at the end that would have been firmly stamped on by Holmes. It gets its special interest from the matter-of-fact way in which it deals with race. Of course, we often go wildly wrong about the Victorians and race: we congratulate ourselves on having Members of Parliament from the 'ethnic minorities', yet we forget that the Victorians were ahead of us-and made no great fuss about it. The first thing that surprises us in the George Edalji case is that a Parsee could be a Church of England clergyman in the rural England of 1900.
Nevertheless, the truth is that in late Victorian popular literature those same minorities were treated in a particularly beastly way, and the treatment continued well into the 1930s. So Conan Doyle's handling of his subject matter in this story is particularly welcome because it is so free from prejudice or hysteria. Though it is something of a disappointment that the Black Doctor is Argentinian, and apparently of Spanish extraction, Conan Doyle clearly intends to imply a highly mixed ancestry, with the man's dark skin and European features. His account of the initial opposition to the man giving way to general acceptance and admiration is beautifully matter-of-fact, and prepares the way for the introduction of romance, which Conan Doyle manages entirely without shuffling or apology. They fell in love, they decided to get married-that's it really, he seems to say. What other popular writers of the time would treat the matter thus?
The story had had a predecessor in this respect, of course. But "The Yellow Face' is one of the feeblest of the vintage Holmes stories, and the tone there is much more high-pitched. In that story we get the feeling that Conan Doyle knows he is treading on sensitive territory, and this leads to an unfortunate air of apology (‘a man, strikingly handsome and intelligent, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent'). In 'The Black Doctor' Conan Doylee puts no foot wrong.
It is an admirably dramatised story too, with the courtroom scene as dramatic as such scenes should be but seldom are. And the mechanics of the story (timings, minor characters, comings and goings, etc.) are set out succinctly and clearly in a way that marks off a master of the genre from a talented journeyman such as a Ngaio Marsh. All in all the story has that sureness of touch, that engagingness, that confidence-arousing certainty which is the true mark of the professional writer of popular literature. But then, in that field Conan Doyle was our greatest professional, just as Dickens was in his.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
