The great popular writers of the 18th and early 19th century enjoyed a status that even today's most prize-garlanded novelist or biographer cannot imagine. The likes of Kipling, G K Chesterton and H G Wells were figures of huge social as well as literary influence; sages and oracles to whom their countless readers instinctively turned for a moral view of the world, a perspective on the past or prophecies of the future. Among these prime ministers of prose, none was more universally venerated than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle has won immortality as creator of Sherlock Holmes, "the world's most famous man who never was", in Orson Welles's phrase. But the Holmes oeuvre represents only a fragment of an enormous output and a hugely varied, richly fulfilled life. He wrote numerous other novels and stories featuring serial heroes like the swaggering Napoleonic cavalryman Brigadier Gerard, the deceptively puny knight-at-arms Sir Nigel Loring, and the ferocious Professor Challenger, who discovered a lost world of dinosaurs and pterodactyls three generations ahead of Spielberg.
A qualified surgeon and eye specialist, he took a mobile hospital to the Boer war, wrote plays for Sir Henry Irving, stood twice, unsuccessfully, for parliament, was a historian, star lecturer and foreign correspondent, played cricket for the MCC, championed causes ranging from divorce-law reform to the Channel tunnel and, on occasion, became a consulting detective and righter of wrongs just like his greatest fictional creation. He devoted decades and a good part of his colossal earnings to the spiritualist movement, and was famously tricked by two mischievous young girls into believing in fairies.
The personal papers and memorabilia of Conan Doyle's great contemporaries have long since been laid out under glass at the British Museum or filed in the air-conditioned vaults of American universities. Yet, ironically, the writer who brings millions of pilgrims to London each year in search of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and Professor Moriarty — and who has outsold J K Rowling and J R R Tolkien put together — can be studied in only the most fragmentary detail. Since Conan Doyle's death in 1930, aged 70, the whereabouts of his private archive has been a mystery as tantalising as any ever unfolded at 221B Baker Street.
The entire cache has now come to light and is to be auctioned on May 19 at Christie's for an estimated £2m. It is essentially the contents of Conan Doyle's study at his home near Crowborough, Sussex, on the day he wrote his last, immaculate pen-and-ink page. Its treasures range from diaries, research notes and correspondence with world figures, such as the US president Theodore Roosevelt, British leaders such as Lloyd George and Churchill, and the cricketer W G Grace, to intimate possessions such as his cash-book, wallet, and driving licence. Jane Flower, Christie's manuscripts consultant, calls it the most exciting find she has seen in 25 years.
The story behind its final emergence into the saleroom is a highly involved one, saying much about the shadow that even the most benign great men can cast on their descendants. By his second wife, Jean Leckie, Conan Doyle had two sons, Adrian and Denis, and a daughter, Jean. Adrian, the only one to try literature, later produced some Sherlock Holmes stories in passable imitation of his father. Denis married a spendthrift Georgian aristocrat named Princess Mdivani, who ended her days a resident in luxury hotels like the Savoy. Jean became an air commandant in the Women's Royal Air Force, and a dame. I met her once, and she told how, when she was small, her father would let her sit in his study while he wrote, so long as she never made a noise. She recalled the sound of his pen nib racing across the page with scarcely a pause for thought or correction.
Despite the royalties flooding in from Sherlock Holmes reprints, dramatisations and films, the family sold most of the story manuscripts to private collectors in the US. The archive stayed with Lady Conan Doyle, who devoted herself to the old-fashioned widowly task of putting her husband's papers "in order". After her death in the 1940s it passed to Adrian, who later moved to Switzerland. In 1949 he authorised a biography of his father by the mystery writer John Dickson Carr, the first outsider to gain access to the archive. Although bland and hagiographic, the book sparked a public row between Adrian and Mary, Conan Doyle's daughter by his first wife, who bitterly objected to its portrayal of her mother. More intriguing to Conan Doyle addicts was its appendix of archive papers that Dickson Carr had access to but barely made use of.
After the death of Adrian's widow, Anna, in 1992, and of his sister, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, in 1997, a dispute within the surviving family maintained the veil of secrecy about the archive, by now stored in the strongroom of a London solicitor's. Only with the settlement of this dispute could its existence be made public.
The papers were mostly kept in large manila envelopes annotated by Lady Conan Doyle, who invariably referred to her husband as "My Darling". In later years, Adrian added notes in a similarly reverential vein. There is a palpable effort by mother and son to present Conan Doyle as a paragon of all virtues, though, as Flower agrees, this hardly seems necessary. The big Scots medic with his walrus moustache, wherever one looks, seems to have been a lovely man. He was devoted to his first wife, Louise — "Touie" — who bore him two children and spent years stricken with tuberculosis. Though he fell for the beautiful Jean Leckie in Touie's declining years, he refused to go beyond friendship with her until he became a widower. The dominant female influence in his life was his mother, Mary Doyle, always referred to, half-adoringly, half-warily, as "the Ma'am".
From one contemporary source at least, we learn that he spoke in much the same highly charged dialogue he wrote for Sherlock Holmes.
P G Wodehouse recalled Conan Doyle talking about an American "writers' school" he'd found to be using his name without authorisation to recruit customers. "What most people at this point would have said would have been 'Hullo, this looks fishy,'" Wodehouse wrote. "The way [Conan Doyle] put it when telling the story was, 'I said to myself, Ha! There is villainy afoot!'"
The archive contains mementoes from every era of his unstoppably vigorous threescore years and ten. A leather folder preserves fragments of the first story Conan Doyle ever wrote, aged six — a characteristically all-action tale of hunters and tigers. Here are the illustrated logs he kept as a surgeon on the whaling ship Mayumba. (The nephew of the Punch artist "Dicky" Doyle, he was an accomplished draughtsman.) Here is the brass plate that hung outside his medical practice in Southsea, when he first began writing between consultations, and the Red Cross armband he wore as a volunteer in the Boer war. Here are his notes and drawings on heraldry for the medieval novels Sir Nigel and The White Company, which he himself thought — with good reason — were his greatest achievement as a storyteller. Here is his correspondence with his agent, A P Watt, in years when queues would form at bookstalls to devour the latest Holmes story in The Strand Magazine. As Flower has noted, sifting through the meticulously kept account books and royalty records, he could be "rather beady" about money.
The autograph letters from fellow literary giants are enough to make any collector salivate. Here is one from Kipling, saying he read Rodney Stone "in one gulp" and still wants more. Here is one from H G Wells, commiserating over hostile reviews of A Duet, an atypical Conan Doyle novel about young married love that some denounced as "immoral". Here is an adulatory note from Oscar Wilde, who is almost wistful in praising the "simplicity and strength" of Conan Doyle's prose and regretting the "mist of words" in his own work that makes him always "throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase".
