Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: crossed destinies

On July 7, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on his property in Crowborough, Sussex. In this new episode of "At the heart of history", produced by Europe 1 Studio, Jean des Cars tells you the story of a doctor who became a successful author: the father of the adventures of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. 

In 1893 appeared the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of eleven short stories. Countless readers rush to this new opus telling the investigations of their favorite detective. Horror! From the very first lines of the eleventh and final story, entitled The Last Problem, Doctor Watson, the alter ego and the historiographer of Sherlock Holmes, teaches them that their hero has been dead for two years already! Apparently, the news was published in Le Journal de Genève on May 6, 1891 and then in the British press on May 7, thanks to a dispatch from the Reuters Agency. What? Sherlock Holmes had been dead for two years and didn't we know? Doctor Watson will give us all the details of this horrible story ... 

First of all, he reminds us that since his marriage and the installation of his medical office, his links with Sherlock Holmes had been somewhat relaxed. During the year 1890, they had only clarified three cases together. In the winter of 1891, he learned from the press that Sherlock Holmes had been entrusted by the French government with a capital mission ...

Suddenly, on April 24, 1891, Sherlock Holmes burst into Watson's home. He is pale, emaciated, one of his hands is covered with blood. He seems terrorized. It doesn't sound like him at all, he embodies British phlegm. He admits: "I'm afraid!" Then he says that he is on the point of having arrested his worst enemy, Professor Moriarty, the "Napoleon of crime". The network of his main accomplices will be judged the following week. If he testifies, Moriarty is lost. The latter therefore has only one idea: get rid of the detective! Victim of several accidents, Sherlock Holmes suffered an attack which crushed his hand: it shows Moriarty's determination. Sherlock Holmes must take shelter during the week before the trial.

He offers Watson to leave with him the next day for the continent. If they escape Moriarty, it will be a pleasure trip. Holmes develops a very complicated strategy so that Watson, who is undoubtedly also watched, join him without trouble at Victoria station. He tells him the train and the number of the car where he has reserved a compartment. 

After giving his instructions, Holmes disappears into the night climbing the garden wall. The next morning, Watson found himself a few minutes before the train left in the compartment indicated. But no Sherlock Holmes! It was then that an old hunchbacked Italian abbot, speaking in abominable English, broke into the compartment. Watson is trying to get rid of it. The abbot then metamorphoses in a few seconds: it was a disguise of Sherlock Holmes! 

Moriarty is necessarily on their trail. They will change trains in Canterbury before boarding Newhaven. Direction Brussels to cover the tracks! Then, in Switzerland, they will go up the Rhône valley, visit Interlaken and settle, on May 3, in the small village of Meiringen. The director of the Hôtel des Anglais, where they have stayed, advises them to admire the Reichenbach Falls, not far from there. It is spectacular: the torrent, which descends from the Bernese Alps, falls by five waterfalls, the most impressive of which is 100 meters high! Watson describes them very well: "In truth, the place is terrifying. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, rushes into a chasm where the foam spurts swirling like the smoke of a burning house ... You feel dizzy takes to consider for a long time this mass of green water which hovers in an uninterrupted whistling! "

Watson and Holmes are about to embark on the path that provides the most impressive view of the falls. At this moment, a bellboy comes to seek Doctor Watson and asks him to return urgently to the hotel to rescue an Englishwoman at the very worst. The doctor rushes. At the hotel, he learns that there is no sick Englishwoman. Another Moriarty trap! 

While running, Watson returns to the waterfall. He discovers with horror, at the end of the path, the footprints of two men leading to the fall. At the edge of the precipice, the ground is muddy, trampled, ravaged. As there is no sign of a step back, Watson concludes that Holmes and Moriarty fought and both fell into the abyss. 

Watson finds the detective's cane and his silver cigarette case. It contains a final message from Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty allowed him to write these few words before their last fight. He hopes to get out of it but he's ready to die with him to rid the world of the abominable Moriarty!

The case is heard: Holmes and Moriarty disappeared in the abyss of Reichenbach. When the book appears, the publisher is overwhelmed with letters of protest from readers: they are furious! But who is this author who owes his fortune and his notoriety to the unusual hero he had invented eight years ago and who is capable of destroying him without remorse? Who is Conan Doyle?

A doctor who became a successful author

Conan Doyle is not English, he is Scottish. He was born on May 22, 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, in Edinburgh, into a Catholic family. He is the second of ten children of the painter Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley who is Irish. 

The studies of the young Conan will be done in religious establishments: a preparatory school in Lancashire, then the College of Stonyhurst. The student is not enthusiastic about his Catholic education. In 1875, at the age of 17, he began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is already passionate about writing. He published news in the Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, for example: The mystery of the Sasassa Valley in September 1879. Passionate about poetry, he was also a great sportsman, a fan of cricket and football. 

He obtained his medical degree in 1881 and opened a practice the following year, in a suburb of Portsmouth. In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkings. Two years later, he wrote A Study in Red, the first novel in which Sherlock Holmes appeared. It was a huge success, like The Sign of the Four in 1889. Its success was such that he abandoned medicine to settle in London in 1891 and live there with his pen. 

In 1892, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, still enthused the public. But the following year, in 1893, he killed the detective in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, as I told you at the beginning of this episode. What happened to Conan Doyle? Why can he no longer support his hero? He is probably afraid of being locked in a genre. Or perhaps he is giving too much of himself through his two protagonists, Doctor Watson and the detective ... It's time to look into their cases.

Sherlock Holmes and his columnist, Doctor Watson 

The first character to enter the scene is Doctor Watson. It is normal, it is he who tells the story in the first person. He presents himself as a military doctor, sent at the end of his studies in a regiment garrisoned in India. As soon as he landed in Bombay, he learned that his unit was engaged in the second Afghan war. He joined her in Kandahar, participated in very violent fighting. During an engagement, he was injured in the shoulder. He owes his salvation only to the courage of his order which threw him across a horse and who was able to bring him back behind the British lines. The wound is painful. He is treated at the hospital in Peshawar. There, he was overtaken by the plague of the Indian colonies, enteritis fever. He is hospitalized for two months, feels himself dying and then comes back to life. He is so weak and emaciated that he is sent back to England with a pension to support himself and to recover.

He first moved to a hotel in the Strand, a major London thoroughfare, but realized that it was too expensive for the amount of his pension. By chance, meeting a nurse with whom he had worked, he asked him if he would know how to find cheap accommodation in London. This one answers to him that it is strange, because the same morning he met a man who works in the chemistry laboratory of the hospital. The latter feared that he could not find with whom to share a beautiful apartment, too expensive for him alone. He's looking for a roommate. "I am his man", replies Watson!

The meeting with Sherlock Holmes, since he is the man in the laboratory, takes place in the afternoon at the hospital laboratory. The nurse introduced him to Watson, to whom he said: "You have been to Afghanistan as far as you can see". Watson is taken aback. He will quickly understand: the gifts of observation of his future roommate are exceptional. Holmes explains that he smokes very strong tobacco in his pipe. Watson also smokes. Holmes is experimenting, surrounded by chemicals. It doesn't bother the doctor. It happens to have the cockroach and to remain several days without speaking. No downside. In turn, Watson admits that he gets up at impossible hours, that he is very lazy that he does not like noise because his nerves have been very tested. Is the violin an unbearable noise for him? No, if we play it well. "Then it will be fine," said Sherlock Holmes.

A very special detective

The duo is formed. He moved to 221 B Baker Street, an address that is still today a place of curiosity, even a pilgrimage, for London tourists. At first, Watson wonders about his roommate's activities. He sees strange individuals passing by: a certain Lestrade, a small man with a black eye with a rat face. Then an elegant girl, a woman dragging the shoe and all kinds of people. Each time he receives, he begs his roommate not to disturb him.

One memorable day, Watson gets up earlier than usual and has breakfast with Sherlock Holmes for the first time. The latter will finally explain his job to him. He is not a doctor, but he is very knowledgeable in chemistry, anatomy, geology, distinguishing at first glance the different kinds of terrain. A stain of mud on shoes and pants: Sherlock knows immediately where it comes from! He is a good violinist, he is adept at boxing and fencing. But above all he has a keen sense of observation: this allows him, at a glance, to guess the most secret thoughts of his interlocutor.

In fact, he is a detective, that's how he makes a living. But not just any detective! Let us explain it to you: "We have a bunch of government detectives and a bunch of private detectives in London. When they're embarrassed, they come to find me. I manage to put them on the track. "They tell me all of their observations, and thanks to my knowledge of the history of the crime, I am able to get them out of the way. All mischief has a family resemblance. If you know on your fingertips the story of a thousand crimes, it would be astonishing if you could not unearth the thousand and first. By the way, Lestrade is an excellent inspector of Scotland Yard. "

"Elementary my dear Watson !" 

Sherlock Holmes also reveals to Watson how, when they first met him, he quickly identified him as a military doctor returning from Afghanistan. He looked like a doctor and a soldier. He was both. His face was very brown, his wrists were white: he was therefore returning from the Tropics. He looked bad, so he was sick and deprived. He had a stiff left arm, so he was injured. The only place in the Tropics where a British army doctor could be injured was Afghanistan. "Elementary my dear Watson !"

From now on, the detective and the doctor will live together these criminal adventures which must solve Sherlock Holmes. The first will be Study in red, the story of a man murdered in an empty house with the word "Rache", written in blood letters on a wall, as the only clue. In German, "Rache" means "Vengeance". Sherlock Holmes calls it "Study in Red", "because the thread of murder blends with the colorless skein of life".

Watson still has to discover another, more disturbing aspect of his roommate. For several months, he has seen, periodically, sometimes three times a day, Sherlock Holmes grab a bottle on the corner of the fireplace, take a hypodermic syringe from its case, raise the left sleeve of his shirt, inject the liquid and then wedge into an armchair with a sigh of satisfaction. Watson ends up asking him: "Today, morphine or cocaine? Cocaine, he answers, a 7% solution"

He offers to try it. Watson emphatically refuses. A doctor cannot inject drugs and it is very unhealthy ... Sherlock Holmes explains to him that even if it has a harmful influence on his body, it stimulates the clarification of his mind. Sherlock Holmes is therefore not perfect. Not only does he smoke a pipe all day long, he is also a fan of hard drugs.

This is surprising because this aspect of the character arrives from the first book telling his adventures. Readers seem to like the character so much that they don't hold it against him.

His other passion, the violin, is more rewarding. He loves music. To Watson, he explains what Darwin claims: "In men, the faculty of producing and appreciating music has preceded speech a great deal. Perhaps that is why the influence it exerts on us is so deep. The first centuries of Prehistory left vague memories in our souls " 

If Sherlock Holmes can be identified today at first glance, it is almost more thanks to the covers of the books than to the text by Conan Doyle: a peaked cap tied on the top of the head, a pipe screwed to the mouth, a Mac Farlane, this sleeveless Scottish travel coat, whose cape protects the shoulders and sometimes, of course, a magnifying glass to search for clues. Definitely, hard to believe that Conan Doyle let die a hero so charismatic, and can deprive the reader of his duet with Watson and their adventures so exciting ...

Conan Doyle resurrects Sherlock 

Suddenly, in 1898, Conan Doyle went back to medicine but this time in the service of the Armies. He campaigned in Sudan and then the Boer War, in southern Africa, from 1899 to 1902. Back in London, he published what would be one of his greatest successes Le chien des Baskerville. Watson recounts a new and exciting investigation by Sherlock Holmes. The detective therefore still exists! 

Conan Doyle was forced, in 1905, in a collection of short stories entitled The Return of Sherlock Holmes, to explain to us that he had not died in Reichenbach Falls. 

In the first story, The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes arrives at Watson's house, amazed. He explains that during his fight with Moriarty, his knowledge of Japanese wrestling had allowed him to send his opponent to the bottom of the abyss. He had left the scene of the drama discreetly, without leaving a trace, to better track down Moriarty's stooges who had escaped justice. During his hiding, it was Mycroft, his brother, who had supported him. It resurfaces when the assassination of Sir Ronald Ader puts London in turmoil. He will, of course, solve the riddle with Doctor Watson.

After that, Conan Doyle invents a new character, Professor Challenger, the anti-Sherlock Holmes: an angry scholar, even sometimes rude. He will dedicate five novels to him. The best known is The Lost World, published in 1912. A rediscovery of prehistoric animals in the center of the Earth which will once again enchant its readers.

After having participated in the war of 14-18, he turns to spiritualism and gives several conferences on this subject which fascinates him. Conan Doyle died in 1930 on his property in Crowborough, Sussex. He had been knighted and knighted of the British Empire by King Edward VII in 1902, to reward his literary career.

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"At the heart of history" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast

Author and presentation: Jean des Cars 

Project manager: Adèle Ponticelli

Realization: Laurent Sirguy and Guillaume Vasseau

Diffusion and edition: Clémence Olivier

Graphics: Europe 1 Studio

Bibliography: "Les Aventures de Sherlock Holmes" (French edition, Robert Laffont, 1957)