At the end of our book Death at Dartmoor, we have written this "Authors' Note," which explains something of the fascinating mysteries that surround the writing of Doyle's best-loved Sherlock Holmes tale, and its place in his life.-Bill and Susan Albert
"I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded," Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography, and it is quite true. In 1886, this not-very-successful provincial doctor and aspiring writer needed a little extra money, so he sat down to put his hand to a detective story. The result was "A Study in Scarlet," the birth of the immortal Holmes and Watson, and the launch of a writing career that Doyle himself could scarcely have dreamed of. During his most productive years, he regularly turned out a daily three thousand words (and once claimed to have produced an incredible ten thousand words in a day). A complete catalog of his works comprises nearly a hundred pages, and millions of people have enjoyed his writing over the past century.
But Doyle's career did not entirely satisfy him, and there were periods of time when he seemed to be torn by a number of internal conflicts. 1901, the year in which we have set Death at Dartmoor, was one of those periods. Doyle had recently returned from a short stint as a field doctor in the Boer War, which he had chronicled in a controversial book that set him at odds with the military establishment he admired. He had been narrowly defeated in his bid for a seat in Parliament and had decided against making another run for political office. He was facing the fact that since the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes, he had enjoyed no comparable literary successes, and he was experiencing some financial difficulties. A married man with an invalid wife, he was also involved with the young, beautiful Jean Leckie in an intense but sexually unconsummated relationship. Their deep attachment was an oddity in this Edwardian time of easy liaisons, but consistent with what one biographer has called the "chivalrous mysticism" that kept Doyle from violating his dying wife's dignity or Jean Leckie's reputation.
The writing of The Hound of the Baskervilles may have given Doyle a temporary respite, but it did not set him free from any of these conflicts. Much of what troubled him was beyond his ability to remedy: his wife's prolonged ill health (she did not die until 1906), the literary climate of the day, the resistance to his military proposals, the decay of the Empire, and above all, the fact that he lived in the twentieth century, not the fourteenth, and that the chivalric mode of life for which he longed had faded into the distant past.
But "The Hound" did two important things for him: it reminded him that he had once written Sherlock tales for the fun of it and because his readers loved them; and it brought him back into the literary spotlight. The book was a huge bestseller, resulting in an offer of over $4,000 a story for the American rights to more Holmes-and-Watson tales. In addition, The Strand agreed to pay a hundred pounds per thousand words for the English rights to the same material. The time that Conan Doyle spent on Dartmoor was a good investment, and, truth be told, he owed an enormous debt to the man who took him there, Bertram Fletcher Robinson.
Robinson, a journalist whom Doyle had met as the two returned from South Africa, was the man who came up with the central plot idea and the setting for The Hound. In early March, 1901, Doyle wrote to the editor of The Strand, offering the magazine a "real creeper" of a story, with one stipulation: "I must do it with my friend Fletcher Robinson [who] gave me the central idea and the local colour." Doyle wanted fifty pounds per thousand words for this joint effort, and when The Strand said yes, he and Robinson went off to Dartmoor together to tour the moors, soak up some of that "local color," and write the story.
But at some point during these few days, the collaboration was apparently broken off, Robinson dropped out of the picture, and Doyle wrote the book himself, receiving twice as much money for the work because he had decided to use Sherlock Holmes. Robinson's byline in later years occasionally identified him as the "joint author" of the story and he is quoted as claiming authorship of the first two chapters. But all he received was a footnote in the serial publication, a brief thank-you in the book publication, and (or so he told a friend) one-quarter of the initial profits. Scholars debate the reasons for the failure of the collaboration; we've come to our own conclusions, as you can see in Death at Dartmoor.
There is yet another interesting facet to Doyle's life, and that is his persistent interest in spiritualism, an interest that began in the late '80s and grew into what amounted to an obsession around 1915. At that time, he and his wife Jean (they married in 1907) had been experimenting with automatic writing. She went on to become a trance medium, channeling the entity Pheneas, who announced himself as a "very, very high soul," a "leader of men" who had died centuries before in the East, near Arabia. (We have cheated a bit by anticipating Pheneas's appearance in our story.) Doyle, whose Sherlock had insisted so strongly on "scientific" detection, seemed to take a great deal on faith when it came to psychic phenomena, and he was badly fooled by a set of phony fairy photographs taken by a pair of schoolgirls in Cottingley--"altogether beyond the possibility of fake," he wrote. In defense of the photos, he even published a book entitled The Coming of the Fairies. Fans of Sherlock Holmes were not amused, and even Doyle's spiritualist allies deserted him. But he and Jean continued their psychic work until his death on July 7, 1930. "I have had many adventures," he wrote a few days before he died. "The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now."
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