Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

The man who created Sherlock Holmes

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Doyle and spiritualist William Thomas Stead were duped into believing Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, both claiming that the Zancigs used telepathy. In Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used, under the title Our Secrets!!

Doyle's two-volume book The History of Spiritualism was published in Leslie Curnow, a spiritualist, contributed much research to the book. Campbell Swinton pointed to the evidence of fraud in mediumship and Doyle's non-scientific approach to the subject. Richard Milner , an American historian of science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of , creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years.

Milner says that Doyle had a motive—namely, revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics—and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax. Doyle commissioned a newly-built home from Joseph Henry Ball, an architect friend, in , and played an active part of the design process.

Doyle was staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel during March and made his most ambitious foray into architecture: In , on a family trip to the Jasper National Park in Canada, he designed a golf course and ancillary buildings for a hotel. The plans were realised in full, but neither the golf course nor the buildings have survived. In , Doyle laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist temple in Camden, London. Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough , East Sussex, on 7 July He died of a heart attack at the age of His last words were directed toward his wife: He was first buried on 11 July in Windlesham rose garden.

He was later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest , Hampshire. A statue honours Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the rugby player, see Conan Doyle rugby union. Detective fiction fantasy science fiction historical novels non-fiction.

Arthur Conan Doyle bibliography. Biography portal Children's literature portal Poetry portal Sherlock Holmes portal. The same source points out that in he was describing himself on the brass nameplate outside his house, and on his doctoral thesis, as "A.

The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

Conan Doyle" Stashower Sherlock Holmes Handbook 2nd ed. Retrieved 11 February Sherlock Holmes for Dummies. Retrieved 30 December Archived from the original on 2 February Retrieved 13 January Some sources say there were nine children, some say ten. It seems three died in childhood.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A Life in Letters , Wordsworth Editions, p. A Life in Letters. The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics. The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle. In time, he would reject the Catholic religion and become an agnostic. Retrieved 9 January The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Retrieved 2 February Retrieved 24 May Diary of an Arctic Adventure.

Retrieved 6 November The Adventures of Conan Doyle. Retrieved 21 October An Introduction to the Detective Story.

Retrieved 4 January Archived from the original on 7 June Retrieved 6 June Full-Time at The Dell. Retrieved 17 January Retrieved 2 March Retrieved 23 July The New York Times. Thomas Dunne Books, Archived from the original on 3 October Retrieved 2 October Reflections on Writers and Their Times". Retrieved 13 March Conan Doyle and the Mysterious World of Light, — Archived from the original on 3 July Retrieved 28 May Voices and Visions from Within.

The Illustrated History of Magic. Is Spiritualism Based On Fraud?

Doyle and Others Drastically Examined. The Doctor Looks at Spiritualism. Retrieved 12 June Secrets of the Psychics: The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Archived from the original on 12 April Retrieved 19 November The Committee For Skeptical Inquiry. Retrieved 5 December The Secret Life of Houdini: After an early career as a foreign correspondent specializing in Africa and the Middle East, he now writes biographies.

Comprehensive and authoritative, it is undoubtedly the best account of Doyle to date, and the best we are likely to get. Using previously unseen archives, Lycett gives us Conan Doyle as a late Victorian and definitive Edwardian, battling with the uncertainties of his own age, weary of the uncertainties of the next one. Lycett's brilliant piece of detective work on the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories now allows us to judge his literary worth against that of his peers and properly to set him in the context of his times The first [biography] to incorporate private family papers that became available only after the death of the author's last surviving offspring We see Conan Doyle's flaws as clearly as his virtues Despite its wealth of detail, the book moves quickly.

The most detailed map yet published. This title is temporarily out of stock, please check back soon. He is quoted as having said, "Why should I invent such a character, when I already have him in the form of Sherlock Holmes.

The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett

Gossip has it, that the King was such an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, that he had put the author's name on his Honours List to encourage him to write new stories. Writing, looking after Louisa, seeing Jean Leckie as discreetly as possible, playing golf, driving fast cars, floating in the sky in hot air balloons, flying in early archaic and rather frightening airplanes, spending time on "muscle development," as body-building used to be called, kept Conan Doyle active but not really contented.

His lingering deep desire for public service made him go for a second attempt at politics in the spring of He lost the election once more. After Louisa died in his arms on the 4th of July , Conan Doyle slipped into a debilitating state of depression lasting many months. He extricated himself from his misery by trying to help someone in a worse condition than he was. Playing Sherlock Holmes, he got in touch with Scotland Yard to point out a case of miscarriage of justice.

It involved a young man called George Edalji who had been convicted of having slashed a number of horses and cows. Conan Doyle had observed that Edalji's eyesight was so poor that it was proof the convict couldn't possibly have done the awful deed. The Case of Oscar Slater , which he wrote in , gives a detailed summary of that affair.

Finally, after nine years of clandestine courtship, Conan Doyle and Jean Leckie got married very publicly in front of guests, on September 18, With his two children with Louisa, they all moved to a new home called "Windlesham", in Sussex. He would spend the rest of his life living in that lovely house while keeping a small flat in London. Arthur Conan Doyle was so happy to share many of his wife's activities that his literary output slowed down considerably after his marriage. Neither of them did well. That one closed after three months. To make-up for his considerable financial losses, Conan Doyle set out to write a fourth play, but this time with Sherlock Holmes.

One of the difficulties of the production was the casting of the snake. The author insisted upon a live reptile, whereas the actors and the crew begged for an artificial one. Conan Doyle won, but later wrote admitting his mistake: After the success of The Speckled Band , Conan Doyle chose to retire from "stage work," "Not because it doesn't interest me, but because it interests me too much," he said.

The birth of his two sons, Denis in and that of Adrian in , also contributed to keep the author from concentrating on fiction. A last child, their daughter Jean, was born in A couple of years went by before the author's next creation, the delightfully outrageous Professor Challenger, whose own wife called "a perfectly impossible person. It involved the Professor in a delightfully humorous adventure, with a number of other highly personable characters, stranded in a mysterious region of South America, discovering prehistoric fauna and flora.

This series stands out as a masterpiece of the genre authors have had no qualms to "borrow" from. But Conan Doyle's readers were not quite satisfied, for Sherlock Holmes was absent during a great part of the novel. In May , Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle sailed for New York, a city the author found unfavourably changed since his first visit twenty years earlier. Canada, where they spent a short time, the couple found enchanting. They returned home a month later, probably because for a long time Conan Doyle had been convinced of a coming war with Germany.

He had sent articles to newspapers about organizing "Military readiness," many years before World War I broke out. In he wrote to the Fortnightly Review, expressing his views about new untested warfare: He foresaw the possibility of a "Blockade" by enemy submersible ships, long before anyone in the British navy did. The only solution he added would be to build a Channel Tunnel. But this intelligent man's warnings were judged to be "Jules Verne fantasies" by most naval experts. As soon as the war broke-out, Conan Doyle then fifty-five, offered to enlist again.

He was denied his wish once more but set out to organize a civilian battalion of over a hundred volunteers. When the navy lost more than a thousand lives in a single day, his brilliant mind never at rest, Conan Doyle made suggestions to the War Office to provide "inflatable rubber belts," and "inflatable life boats. Most government officials found him irritating at best.

One of the exceptions was Winston Churchill, who wrote to thank him for his ideas. While writing a book, which was to be called The British Campaign in France and Flanders , the author was given permission to visit the British and French fronts in A while later, the Australian High Command invited him to observe their position on the river Somme.

Witnessing the Battle of St. Quentin made Conan Doyle say he would never be able to forget the horrors of the "tangle of mutilated horses, their necks rising and sinking," lying amidst the blood soaked remains of fallen soldiers. In late , the author made up for the lacklustre reception of his second Sherlock Holmes novel, with the publication of His Last Bow.

In this tale, Sherlock Holmes infiltrates and vanquishes a German spy-ring, a timely war propaganda story. Two years later, Conan Doyle's acute sense of justice was awakened again and made him rise to the defence of Sir Roger Casement, an Irish diplomat accused of being "the foulest traitor who ever drew breath. Now, the "traitor" was found guilty of having tried to get Germany's support for the Irish independence movement.

Conan Doyle almost succeeded in sparing the convicted man's life, on grounds of insanity, had it not been for the discovery of Casement's diary. It chronicled in detail his homosexuality, which at the time was also a criminal offense.

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Conan Doyle's feelings about homosexuality were more liberal than the norm, which may have been the reason why, he later was not elevated to sit in the House of Lords. The toll of the war was cruel on Conan Doyle.

He lost his son, his brother, his two brothers-in-law and his two nephews. After the death of his son and the horrors of World War I, Conan Doyle progressively became attracted to spiritualism and the occult.

The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

While researching the topic of fairies he came across some pictures belonging to a family in Cottingley, rural Yorkshire. These images seemed to show several diminutive fairies dancing in the presence of two teenage girls. The pictures seemed not to have been tampered with. Conan Doyle championed the photos and eventually included them in his book, The Coming of Fairies.

He was compulsive in his new passion for the occult and pursued it with the same dogged energy he had shown in all his endeavours when he was younger.

As a result, the Press mocked him and the Clergy disapproved of him. But nothing deterred him.

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His wife, reputed to be such a level-headed woman, came to share his beliefs and developed the talent of "trance-writing. After , because of his deepening involvement into the occult, Conan Doyle wrote very little fiction, writing arduously about Spiritualism instead. Their subsequent trips to America, Australia and to Africa, accompanied by their three children, were also on psychic crusades.

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