Like many a lad, I drank in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories like so many bottles of soda pop without knowing anything about their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t really matter because Holmes and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed so lifelike that many readers believed that he really existed.
In the years since, I have come across occasional references to Doyle in connection with his fascination with spiritualism, but only recently got the full measure of the man in two seemingly different but rather similar books – The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a biography by Andrew Lycett, and Arthur and George, a novel by Julian Barnes.
Both similarly portray Doyle as a likeable medical doctor of middling competence who became a prolific, enormously popular and wealthy writer, historian, fantasist and propagandist for Britannia and his myriad pet causes who in the waning years of Victorian England dove into the deep end of the spiritualism pool head first. Once in those charlatan-filled waters, Doyle did not cast aside the deductive logic of his own medical training that his famous detective used to such great effect as to apply it (with little success) to the fuzzy pseudo-religious belief that the dead can be contacted by mediums who are able to inform them about the afterlife.
Long story short: Doyle was as prim as any proper Victorian gentleman, but he was a bit of a kook.
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