Conan Doyle

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

For readers who are exploring the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the
first time, this book by literary biographer and critic Michael Coren
has much to recommend it. It is highly readable, sympathetic, and much
shorter than some earlier studies of the man best remembered as the
creator of Sherlock Holmes. It quotes extensively from Doyle’s
published works, and explores at some length his social and political
activism and spiritualism, which Doyle described as “far the most
important thing in my life.”

Readers familiar with Doyle’s life, however, may be disappointed. A
letter about Doyle’s views on Zionism is perhaps previously
unpublished, but there is nothing much here that one hasn’t seen in
other biographies. The documentation is shamefully inadequate: the
sources of most of the quotations are not specifically given; half of
the footnotes refer to Doyle’s published work, mostly his
autobiography, which is quoted often and at length; there is no
bibliographical list of Doyle’s works. Photographs are inaccurately
labeled; one picture is of the “Branger brothers,” but no such men
are mentioned in the text. There are errors both typographical and
factual. The name of a major character in one of Doyle’s novels is
twice cited incorrectly, as is the name of an important spiritualist of
the time. “His Last Bow,” Coren writes, “differs from all the
other Holmes stories in that it is narrated in the third person.” Not
so. The Mazarin Stone is also written that way.

Coren writes almost with contempt of the many people world-wide who
enjoy playing “the game” that the Holmes stories are history, and
who write pseudo-academic papers to explain their many inconsistencies.
He goes so far as to describe them as “Sherlockian monomaniacs,” and
says that such a “peculiar creature” is “to be pitied.” In a
bizarre aside, he even speculates on their sexuality. He does have high
praise for some of the Sherlock Holmes stories, although he virtually
ignores Doyle’s other short fiction. But then, as he writes in his
preface, “This is a biographical study of Conan Doyle rather than an
orthodox literary biography.”