The gay detective

Was Wilde an inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes? The two writers, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, met in the Langham Hotel, in London, in 1889, at the invitation of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, editor of Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Both agreed to write a novel for the magazine. Doyle eventually produced the second Holmes outing, The Sign of Four; Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, the model for the detective’s method and hawk-like features was famously Dr Joseph Bell, under whom Doyle studied at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and who could tell a man’s profession from calluses on his hands. But Holmes’s decadent habits, notably his cocaine dependence, and his emergence as a fully formed character, were only established in The Sign of Four. What—or who—provided the inspiration for these?

Aside from subsequent similarities in tricks of style (Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray and Holmes both have an incredible capacity for flinging themselves into large wicker armchairs), we should notice the detective’s languorous physique, his precise and epigrammatic manner of speaking, and his Bohemian accoutrements. It was clearly Doyle’s intention to present detective work as an art form, and, perhaps, a form of “art for art’s sake”, after the style of the voguish Aesthetic Movement. Hence Holmes’s status as an amateur: financial reward is always a secondary consideration for him.

In this biography, however, Daniel Stashower does not make the most of this connection, as he guides us through the writer’s varied and vigorous life. In person, Doyle was big, bluff and clumsy, with a taste for manly adventure. When only 20 and still in the middle of his studies, he put down his scalpel and stethoscope to embark on a seven-month Arctic whaling expedition (where he earned the nickname of “The Great Northern Diver”, on account of his tendency to fall off ice-floes into the freezing Arctic waters).

Later in life, he became one of the foremost popularisers of ski-running (or “skiing”, as we now call it), sending back hilarious sketches detailing the indignities of the beginner in the snow, as a result of which, he wrote, “your friends [get] more entertainment than they had ever thought you capable of giving”.

A literary biography can so often boil down to an account of a life spent seated at a desk. Not with Doyle. Whether in his early struggles to set up a medical practice in Portsmouth, or in his work as a surgeon during the Boer War, or in his public campaigns on behalf of those falsely accused of crimes, he took to all obstacles an immense energy and generosity of spirit which make him impossible to dislike, impossible not to admire. In The Lost World, he wrote about dinosaurs. He was something of a dinosaur himself: “the one fixed point in a changing age”, as Holmes once described Watson. The only time we hear of him having lost his temper is after his young son had made an unchivalrous remark about a lady. “No woman is ugly!” thundered Doyle.

It was this already old-fashioned sense of gallantry which may have contributed to his later belief in the existence of spirits and the great beyond. It seems that, in the case of the Cottingley fairies, for example, it simply did not occur to him that the two girls in question might be lying. When his own wife acquired a talent for automatic writing (whereby the medium sits with her hand poised over a sheet of paper, waiting for a message from the other side), his conviction was confirmed. This meant he occasionally cut a ludicrous figure and—worst of all—let his beliefs influence his writing. The Land of Mist misuses characters from The Lost World in a blatant piece of spiritualist propaganda. Yet he never becomes tiresome for the reader, mainly because throughout what he saw as the most important work of his life—the mission to spread the word of spiritualism, Doyle maintained a tolerant and avuncular geniality towards sceptics.

As a writer he is remembered as a first-rate storyteller (as opposed to a serious novelist)—hence the title of this biography. John Fowles isolated Doyle’s achievement as the reconciliation of dialogue with plot. What is often forgotten (except by anyone who has read the Brigadier Gerard stories) is his sense of humour. More than eight years after Holmes’s death at the Reichenbach Falls (after apparently plunging to his death, locked in a death-grip with the evil Moriarty), Doyle turned a potentially embarrassing resurrection into a masterly piece of comic invention.

Reappearing in The Empty House, the detective explains to Watson how he escaped, thanks to his handy knowledge of baritsu, a Japanese system of wrestling, and goes on to recount his movements since that day. “I had left for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head Lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that we were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”

This is why we should read Stashower’s hugely satisfying biography, and then return to Arthur Conan Doyle’s best works.