The Editor's Commonplace Book (vol. 9)
The Editor's Commonplace Book [vol. 9] is an article written by Christopher Roden published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 9, june 1999).
This article is a notes-and-news style roundup gathering recent Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes mentions in the press, including auction reports, journalism, travel writing, and literary commentary. It shows how widely Conan Doyle's work continued to circulate in late-1990s cultural media, while also highlighting the Arthur Conan Doyle Society's role as a source for researchers and journalists.
The Editor's Commonplace Book
An Internet web site provides the first item: Conan Doyle's 'Tale of Mormonism Had Utah Faithful Seeing Scarlet', by Harold Schindler from The Salt Lake Tribune. It's a brief but interesting look at the background of Mormon reaction to A Study in Scarlet. http://207.179.44.6/archive/CENTENNIAL/CENT13-1.HTM
'John Carey's Books of the Century' (Sunday Times, 10 January 1999) turned its attention on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes himself, indeed, is really a magician, for all his appeal to reason. His feats of deduction are simply impossible. He identifies the manuscript of the Baskerville legend as early 18th century even before Dr Mortimer has taken it out of his pocket,' writes Carey, and the evidence he gives for his dating would hardly impress a palaeographer. The Holmes stories are full of such miracles. They feed our appetite for wonder, under the guise of science and rationality. The Hound of the Baskervilles dramatises our unsuccessful attempt to be rational, and nothing is more typically 20th century about it than that.'
'What would Sherlock Holmes think of General Pinochet?' asks A. N. Wilson (Elementary, my dear Pinochet', London: Evening Standard, 14 December 1998). We must all have been struck by the incongruity of a South American dictator skulking in Surrey among the golf-playing TV comedians.
'During my annual re-read of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I have been reminded that Pinochet is not the first of his kind.
'In the tale entitled Wistaria [sic] Lodge, a sinister figure called the Tiger of San Pedro is living in seclusion near Esher.
'Some of his victims try to take the law into their own hands— 'What does the law of England care for the rivers of blood shed years ago in San Pedro?'
'The tyrant realises that his former victims are out to get him and he murders one of them, a young liberal.
'Even Holmes can't pin the crime on him, but a few years later, he and Watson hear that the old rascal has himself been murdered... in Madrid.
'Doctor Watson adds: "We could not doubt that justice, if belated, had come at last".'
The Sotheby's auction of the Norman Rosenbaum Collection was noted by The Sunday Telegraph on 31 December 1998. Under the heading 'Conan Doyle's elementary error with Sherlock' it discussed one of the letters from the auction in which ACD expressed his views that Holmes was not fitted for dramatic representation:
- '... [[[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]'s] reasonings & deductions (which are the whole point of the character) would become an intolerable bore upon the stage. I would do both him and [ ] an ill service by dramatising him...'
In The New Statesman's Food Column ('Peasoupers', 13 November 1998), columnist Dee Wilson examines, amongst other things in a Sherlockian setting, that most British of pre-occupations, the good hearty breakfast':
- 'The most comforting and Novembry of all Baker Street meals is surely breakfast, often taken after a night of hard detecting and no sleep. Holmes and Watson settle with the newspapers and a crackling fire in front of a "well-polished, silver-plated coffeepot". Their basic fodder is toast and eggs, but Mrs Hudson lays on more elaborate fare under covered dishes-kidneys, say, or kedgeree. In The Naval Treaty, a story about a crucial document being stolen, she brings in "three covers", one containing ham and eggs and the second containing curried chicken. The third cover is lifted to reveal the missing naval treaty, to the shrieking amazement of Mr Percy Phelps. Holmes comments that "Mrs Hudson has risen to the occasion Her cuisine is a little limited, but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman."'
Ski (The Magazine of the Ski Life: March/April 1999) went 'Hot on the Trail of Sherlock Holmes', as its reporter followed ACD's ski-steps in the Davos area. A nicely written piece, drawing heavily on information which the ACD Society had been pleased to provide.
'Bent's Notes' in The Bookseller for 14 August 1998 noted Colin Dexter's appearance at the dinner of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, reprinting a report from The Sherlock Holmes Journal:
'The author compared his knowledge of police and forensic work with that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he was rather self-deprecating. 'Conan Doyle knew much more about the police and forensics than I do. My only close encounter with the police was one Christmas Eve, 15 years ago, when a car drove through my garden fence, across the lawn and out again. The policeman who finally came to investigate told me that his name was Detective Constable Watson. Not a very good start, was it?
'"The car had left clear tyre marks, and I am sure Holmes would have said, 'That's a Pirelli. Done about 18,000 miles. Probably driven by a left-handed Irishman.' DC Watson just said, 'Made a bit of a mess of your lawn, hasn't it?'
'"My wife said, 'Before you go, officer, here's a big, fat clue, and she gave him the number plate, which had fallen off the car. He said. 'Yes, that may be of some assistance.' A few weeks later he called to check that the insurance was going through all right. I said, 'What about the crook? Have you arrested him?' He said, 'No, we've called twice but each time he was Out.'"
'King Tut's curse was a killer bug', proclaimed a Sunday Times headline on 23 August 1998:
- The secret of the Pharaoh's Curse may have been solved. New research into the survival of infectious microbes could explain why Lord Carnarvon died in agony five months after he entered the ancient Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. He could have fallen victim to a highly virulent disease that had been lying dormant in the underground burial chamber for centuries.
- The scientist behind the research has shown for the first time how extraordinarily potent a cocktail of microscopic spores-capable of surviving for long periods outside a living host body-could become. His finding adds weight to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's conviction that the adventurer died because he breathed in deadly germs in Tutankhamen's burial chamber. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, suggested that spores might have been placed there deliberately by Egyptian priests to punish grave robbers.
ACD's comments (syndicated on the day following Lord Carnarvon's death on 5 April 1923) were as follows (taken from The Buffalo Express's report, 6 April 1923):
- KING TUT'S ELEMENTAL MAY HAVE
- CAUSED CARNARVON'S DEATH,
- CONAN DOYLE BELIEVES
- Egyptians knew more of these things than do moderns and there is evidence, Doyle says, of this force under spirit control.
- New York, April 5-Did avenging spirits cause the death of Lord Carnarvon for disturbing the tomb of Tutenkhamun?
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, exponent of spiritualism, asserted today that this was by no means an untenable theory — a theory which dispatches from Cairo assert is held by native Egyptians.
- With Marie Corelli, the English novelist, Sir Arthur said that the priests of old Egypt knew much more of the occult than we and that they might have placed a spiritual elemental in the tomb to strike down the man who disturbed the bones of their Pharaoh.
- But Egyptologists and scientists read insect bite and nothing more, and Sir Arthur himself was forced to admit that by now 'old King Tut's spirit may be far enough along not to care tuppence what happens to his bones.'
- Among the scoffers was a member of the department of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He declared that if the threats of the Pharaohs were efficacious, all the scientists who had worked in the Valley of the Kings would have been dead years ago.
- It might be a dangerous thing to dig into these old graves,' admitted Sir Arthur, who claims to have conversed with the souls of those departed. 'One does not know what elementals existed in those days and how long these elementals existed or what might be their force.
- 'The Egyptians knew a great deal more about these things than we do. If they could put those elementals on guard over half their dead bodies, they certainly would have done so.'
- Sir Arthur added: 'An elemental is a built up, artificial thing, an imbued force which may be brought into being by a spirit mind or by nature. It exists of itself for a specific purpose and is not procreated. We know very little about them, be we have had evidences of their existence especially in regard to the Egyptians.
- 'There was a mummy once in the British Museum which we believe was guarded by one of these elementals, for every one who came in contact with it came to grief. This was the mummy of a queen and even one of my dear friends, a journalist, who investigated the circumstances surrounding the happenings that befell the persons who handled the mummy, was himself stricken immediately with typhoid and died.
- 'The son of a friend of mine, Sir William Ingram, found a mummy while hunting in Somaliland. Inscribed on the mummy's breast were the words: 'May the person who unwraps me die rapidly and may his bones not be buried.' This young man in a few days was drowned in a water course, which rose with the spring freshets, and his body never was found.
- 'Therefore, I think it quite possible that Lord Carnarvon may have met his death through one of these elementals.
- I know the Egyptians knew a lot about spiritism, all the easterners did. We are in communication with them quite often. Wise old eastern spirits are our spiritual guides.
- 'In fact, I have such a spiritual guide myself. Through my wife, who is a medium, I often get advice from him on spiritual matters. I never consult him on material things. He says he often helps me without my knowing it. He lived 3,000 or 4,000 years ago in Arabia and was a man high in his country and, like most Eastern spirits, is highly developed.
- 'Still, we don't know whether the occult power of the Egyptians extended far enough to bring into being an elemental which could exist for several thousand years, although it is possible, since a spirit is eternal.'
- Then Sir Arthur, smiling added:
- 'You know, a great many people have dug into graves without anything happening to them, and I'm inclined to believe that by now old King Tut's spirit is far enough along not to care a tuppence what happens to his old bones.'
Michael Parkinson, in the Daily Telegraph for 1 March 1999, asked 'What inspired Conan Doyle cricket yarn?':
- Having established with the help of our readers that Joe Cover was the comic-book hero who perfected the high dropping full toss, which came out of the clouds to land on top of the stumps, the greater mystery remained. Where did he get the idea from? The best evidence suggested that Cover's creator was familiar with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, particularly a short story called 'Spedegue's Dropper'....
- .... But where did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle find his inspiration? Several readers have suggested that being a keen cricket fan — he once wrote a poem describing how he bowled out W.G. Grace-Sir Arthur would have been familiar with a book published in the Badminton series in the 1880s. The book, by A.G. Steel and the Hon R. H. Lyttelton, was regarded as a definitive treatise at the time and has since established itself as a classic of cricket literature.
- In it, the authors deal seriously with the high dropping full pitch. They write: 'It should be delivered as high as possible; there is no limit to the height this ball may go in the air, as the higher it ascends the more difficult it is to play. It should be bowled so that it reaches its highest point when it is almost directly over the head of the batsman and should pitch on the very top of the stumps.' They advise that this kind of ball might be excessively punished by an attacking batsman but is highly recommended against what they describe as 'pokey batsmen'.
- ... So we don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Lyttleton and Steel begat Tom Spedegue begat Joe Cover and that the fanciful imaginings of a comic-book hack in the Forties and Fifties had their origins in a coaching manual written more than fifty years before....
It only remains to confirm that ACD was, indeed, familier with the book by Steel and Lyttelton. A copy inscribed by him was sold at the Sotheby's auction on 17 December 1998 for £1,955 (excluding premium). The inscription?:
- To Denis Conan Doyle
- a young cricketer
- from Arthur Conan Doyle
- an old cricketer.
- You will find that A. G. Steel's article
- on bowling is the best ever written and should be read at least
- twice a year by every bowler.
With thanks to: Jack Adrian, Richard Dalby, Richard Lancelyn Green, and Doug Wrigglesworth.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
